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Comment by asmr | Hacker News Reader

Not a big fan of these survivorship bias blog posts. I've been fiddling with code since I was about 11 years old (ActionScript for Club Penguin cheat tools as well as some Visual Basic). I got pretty serious in High School and learned Java as well Python. I am now pretty comfortable in the web stack as well as C, but still do not have the confidence to become a developer. I don't get how people can spend roughly 3 months learning to code and make a career out of it. Surely they must be lacking in certain core areas of CS.

I get that these kinds of posts are meant to be motivational, "Anyone can do it! Hoorah!" type of thing, but it seems misleading.

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In my opinion, it's not about knowing all the core areas of CS — it's about being OK with the unfamiliar. It's about being confident that if someone hands you a problem outside your comfort zone, you'll be able to search for and find the answers necessary to solve the problem.

I'm a senior engineer, but have never taken a CS class, and have never been able to get past page 1 of any programming book. Possessing knowledge isn't what makes me successful at my job. There is simply far too much knowledge required in this job, and my memory is too sketchy, for me to learn and retain all of it. What makes me successful is that (a) I have a good grasp of how to break projects down into little manageable tasks, and (b) I'm really good at Googling.

For this reason, I do believe that anyone can do it, where the "it" that is being "done" is thinking things through and looking up information, not understanding the ins-and-outs of algorithms and data structures and electronics.

What you're describing is the reason impostor syndrome is so prevalent in the tech industry. Because programming is such a tremendously deep area of study, there will always be people who know things you don't, and this can make one feel inadequate. We're raised to think that being an expert is the same thing as knowing lots of things. In the development world, being an expert is more about being comfortable with what you don't know.

I'm a 35 year veteran programmer, so I might not remember clearly, but I totally disagree with this. You will NEVER cover all the core areas of CS, there are too many. So, most developers specialize, somewhere. You can get pretty good at some core thing in 6 months and I give you permission to call yourself a programmer as soon as you have successfully built, and regularly use, something you wanted for yourself.

I support this kind of encouragement.

Please, if you've built something that you or someone else has used, you're a programmer/developer.

This field is so broad that I also feel like I don't know what I'm doing with 10+ years of experience. You will never learn/know everything and that's OK.

OK, so if I wrote a UI that a call center used to more easily allow staff to access different customer categories, and I also wrote a text analysis script to analyze and categorize customer feedback, I'm officially a programmer/developer?

Sounds like it to me!

You are one of the few senior engineering leaders who think like this! And kudos to you! Wish I had talked to you in the earlier days of me struggling to learn

Hard agree. I can include myself in the group of survivors. I was a military officer commanding tank units until my early 30 and I originally planned to move into the Army's ORSA program, which requires a quantitative background, so went back to school for Applied Mathematics, ended up falling in love with programming, and did a Master's in CS after discharging from the service and here I am years later doing fine. And I don't think I'm lacking in core CS knowledge, either.

But I'm not going to sit here and say "oh, anyone can just go back to school full time while also working full time and complete a grad program at a top ten CS school with a 4.0 GPA and triple their salary within five years." The reality is this world has been set up for people like me to succeed. You see all these posts here about how terrible the Leet Code experience is but I've been working through all of the problem sets in math textbooks for fun since I was 5. I love this stuff and wish I'd have discovered it sooner. My family didn't even own a computer when I was a kid and I had no idea this even existed as a possible career field. But I won spelling bees when I was a kid. I won a television quiz show and got a perfect SAT score. I live for intellectual challenges and love being tested.

If that describes you as well, then great, the knowledge economy is your oyster. But no, that doesn't mean anyone can do it. Even at an elite engineering school and in industry since, I've seen very smart people struggle tremendously through something I figured out in minutes.

Doesn't mean I'm some kind of great or special person. Thanks to spine injuries I suffered in the service, I can hardly get out of bed some days, and for 99% of human history, I'd have been discarded as a worthless piece of trash holding back the rest of the tribe and been thrown to the wolves. I'm just really, really lucky I was born now and not during most of human history.

There is very little overlap between computer science and workaday software development. Some analogies might be that an auto mechanic doesn't need a mechanical engineering degree, and a chef doesn't need a chemistry degree. Most software engineering work is skilled craftsmanship. You don't have to know much about the inner workings of a computer, or have the ability to invent (or even understand) efficient algorithms, in order to use the tools of the trade to construct something. Having the theoretical and academic background is helpful, opens a lot of doors, and is required in some challenging environments, but the vast majority of professional software developers don't need CS fundamentals to produce software.

I've got an academic CS background. I didn't learn much beyond what I'd already learned on my own, and the more advanced topics didn't stick because I didn't use any of them for the first decade or so of my career. Only a few jobs in the ensuing decades used any CS theory or advanced fundamentals. My bread-and-butter is web app development and devops, and I do believe anyone can learn to do that without a CS background. Especially in the current market where there are so many unfilled openings. There are plenty of small companies where a self-taught developer can thrive; not everyone needs to be a FAANG-level engineer.

I am not sure if it's a survival bias blog post, but the blogger is a businessman. No matter how much luck is involved, it still takes certain type of skills and character to do it well.

I was an 'aspiring' businessman, but I never was able to execute the hustles and do all the things that a businessman do to make a living at it. I never learned how to do that nor do I possess mental fortitude to do such things. I hardly can deal with stress or perform my adult responsibilities well enough. What makes me think I could take on such a challenge as this?

Luck can't pay much if any role if you don't have any business skills.

I still love the idea of being a businessman, though.

Heh heh! I like the idea of being in love with the idea of being a businessman! :)

I wish I could tell you I have mental fortitude + hustle. I think I got lucky because I always had people around me who inspired me. I was a product owner / manager / CEO for quite some years who hung out with "techies" all the time.

PS I am the author of the article

Hi! I am the author of that article.

> I don't get how people can spend roughly 3 months learning to code and make a career out of it. Surely they must be lacking in certain core areas of CS.

I kinda agree with you. One usually does NOT make a career in 3 months. But who says you can't? I definitely will fail all coding interviews even now after 1.5 years of practice. But I built a real SaaS app that people are paying for. It's not the best architecture. I am sure it will fail at scale. But hi, fuck it, I built something of real value.

The title is a bit clickbaity - but still true. Anyone can learn coding, no matter the age.

I'm a trained mathematician, but old enough to elude anything serious regarding computers during my studies more than 25 years ago. I did some Turbo Pascal + Assembler for my own interests completely self-taught during that period, though. I had to change direction at 31. After five years with small gigs mixed 50/50 with employment (main result: Getting an in-depth grasp of C++), I became a full-time freelancer at the turn of the millenium. I never looked back and always learned along the way. Because people continue reaching out to me, I tend to think doing some things right.

That would be the whole premise of bootcamps - train someone for 4 months and get them a junior software engineer job.

Now, we can argue about how whether these junior engineers are better or worse than CS grads. And a lot of these programs require you to have spent enough time on your own to be able to like write a fibonacci function. But the large number of people getting hired out of these programs does seem to indicate that switching careers into CS with less than a year of training is not unreasonable and maybe even normalized at this point.

I completely empathize with this feeling but... you can do it.

As you work with more developers, you'll realize (or start to actually believe) that everyone has limitations and is out there figuring things out as they go.

There will always be those pro engineers who seem to understand everything but the average developer is probably less skilled than you've built them up to be.

> still do not have the confidence to become a developer.

You've identified your core problem, your obstacle to leveling up, and yet show no interest in solving it. What's up with that?

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