Self-learning is overrated (in programming)

Personally I think it's pretty easy to make the opposite argument. If you work on open source software in your spare time you have a chance to work with a wider pool of more talented engineers in a more collaborative environment and wider ecosystem of software than exists in any single company. Many programming jobs by comparison involve either menial CRUD-style work, or working for years on end on some specific component that does not convey much general-purpose knowledge.

Now, if you aren't the kind of guy that is motivated to work on your own then certainly a business environment will be invaluable, however I reject the idea that corporate programming somehow inherently teaches you more than you can learn on your own.

And I work at an investment bank. So I am not sure that this article has any basis in reality. When I interview people, the candidates that are self-taught seem to have the most experience and interest in the job. This almost always makes them an instant "yes".

But I don't really see people like this for very long; 90% of the people I interview are just "lifers" that move from job to job in the financial sector every 6 months. Their recruiters make them lie on their resume, and it comes out in the interviews and makes them look like horrible people. Instead of being self-taught, they simply don't know anything about programming. ("Your resume said you designed your own processor to process network traffic faster. What was your role on this project?" "Oh, uh, well, I uh, got some coffee for the dev team.")

To the contrary, banks are dealing with the established business models and are rarely tolerating even short-term decreases in the added value that every person brings to the company. They hire people to earn money for the bank, not to experiment, and they pay those people accordingly.

So untrue. I work at the biggest investment bank in the country, and this is just not true. Did I mention that this is not true? Not true. Oh so untrue.

Do banks want to decrease their added value? Nope. Do they have a desire to hire 300,000 employees? Yup. And guess what, there aren't that many good programmers in the world. Problem.

Prop shops might be more careful, but banks hire pretty much anyone and everyone and give them a lot of money. It's a big company thing. Do you have buzzwords on your resume? Congratulations, you're in. And you should see the code that this process produces! (My department doesn't do this, but it's clear that most of the other ones do.)

We just live with the connotations of the term, "hack."

Here I was expecting to refute the OP, but instead I am left disappointed. He is not some academic elitist guffawing at the plebeians attempting to build their own ivory towers. Instead he is a corporate lifer making some inane red-herring argument. What he's really suggesting is that you cannot teach yourself anything. I find that notion particularly banal.

This is the real problem then, isn't it.

External pressure is not the only thing that can exert the necessary motivation to learn new things. But the crux of his argument seems to be that you have to have these external motivators, otherwise you'll never be any good at what you are learning.

I suppose the argument could be made that if you don't have external pressures, you won't learn whatever you are studying well enough. This argument seems specious to me. I've heard plenty of stories which validates against my own more limited experience with people who are motivated to learning by extrinsic motivations; on the level, they just aren't as good, because the extrinsic motivation ends the instant you can convince someone else you are good enough. From there, you only have to convince yourself you are good enough, and the thresholds for this vary a lot. Having the intrinsic motivation to go beyond what others expect I could only see having an additive effect on one's ability.

Or perhaps I am just making an attempt to validate my own intrinsic motivation to learn stuff in spite of a relative absence of external pressure. I can't help but think this author is attempting to validate the converse of that.

Or maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe if I want a position at a bank being held to this sort of standard, then I don't really have to worry about teaching myself new things and I can survive without a motivation above and beyond getting paid. I don't know that I'd be so sycophantic toward that culture, though, if that is all that is expected of me. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to write an article claiming it is a waste of my time.

One other point:

First of all, banks are always a good indicator of the position’s value in business terms.

How true is this? He seems to take the stance that banks are pretty much infallible when it comes to assigning proper value to individuals; the folklore I am exposed to here and elsewhere suggests this isn't anywhere near true.

It seems rather odd, also, that he asserts that banks will fire people who have even short-term decreases in added value. This seems really foolish; value generation varies over time. I don't understand how organizations with such a intricate grasp of value production could miss this. That is, unless they don't have that grasp he claims they do.

This seems like over-the-top smuggery. While I don't agree with a lot of the author's remarks, I certainly feel his pain and empathize with the idea that noodling or other aimless, low-motivation and low-direction play does not lead to the kind of expertise that will get you hired by the kind of people who use Haskell/F# to make money.

But this kind of remark seems wildly baseless. Is he postulating that if we find a bank using J2EE or Rails that you can get hired based on a few chapters of reading and a web site? This is not consistent with the rest of the article.

What I take away from the article is that he believes banks are very demanding, not that Haskell/F# is very demanding. In which case, if he finds himself at a J2EE bank, he's going to be discussing the kinds of things I recall working with in one of the world's biggest banks: the behaviour of transaction queueing systems, type erasure and its effects on reflection in the presence of certain generics, subtle considerations when using JDBC and Oracle, or whatever is now the kind of thing J2EE people lose sleep over (my knowledge is out of date, the things I mentioned may now be passé).

The point is not that schooling sucks, but that it isn't guaranteed, either.

As others have noted, what made me successful wasn't that I avoided the classroom. It was that my way of teaching myself was to actually program things. It gives the experience you need to lock in the knowledge you're gaining.

So true!! It doesn't matter how much you read/experiment with distributed computing (or any advanced field). How many simulations you are running or papers you're reading on the subject.

The only reason I'd sacrifice personal freedom to work for a big company is not money but resources/environment. They have data, millions of users, hundreds of computers and the kind of challenge that will simply push you and make you better at what you do.

It kinda sucks in a way because unlike ECE or any "regular engineering", you don't need money/resources to do cool things in software. Unfortunately, I'm starting to realize that's not entirely true. As soon as you start playing with intense computing, you need $$$

That's really the only reason to work for a big company if you are _only_ passionate about software --> Data, resources, work environment.

Also, when people use the word "real" in a gratuitous way - such as "real" industry, "real" work, "real" programmer, etc - it always makes me suspicious that they don't know what they're talking about and are attempting to needlessly inject gravitas into their statements.

If you took a class, then you got a grade. If you were in a job, then you had the potential to get fired. If you're self-learning, there's no one way to get punished for not learning well. There's no way to measure what you've done.

I personally know some successful self-taught programmers. But I only know they're good because I know them well. If I had to pick a stranger I'd want a reference or a GPA.

Re-title it, "My Self-learning was overrated (by me.)"