The Fast Track to Start-Up Life
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> Groom attended Dev Bootcamp straight out of high school, skipping college to move to Silicon Valley.
On the other hand, college could be pretty useful if you aren't already selling startups in high school...
It's impossible to have everything in life. I optimized for my career, but those who optimize for other areas of their life are to be respected too. The hard part is figuring out what you want from life straight out of high school, with very little real-world experience.
Even the philosophy classes I took shape me as a programmer and help me to see and model things from a different and very useful perspective. I really do believe I'd be far less effective as a programmer if I had missed on all of that.
It's funny, in the end I never finished my major classes and I don't think I lost much for never doing it.
Many of the effective developers I know of didn't have math/cs backgrounds. Music, Art, Philosophy, Languages - they're all there. Do they understand the ins and outs of all data structures and algorithms? No. Do they have the ability to break down problems and create solutions for those problems? Absolutely.
Well, sure. It's not like my time not in school was void of personal growth. I see where my college-graduated friends are at and I wouldn't want to be in their shoes, career wise. The time I was able to maximize during those years has put me at a competitive advantage.
Not to knock what they have done. I'm sure their education comes with many non-career benefits.
Deep knowledge of general CS concepts -- the things emphasized by a good CS program -- are what allow an engineer to survive the fad-driven cycles that dominate this industry. Because ultimately, there's always a new generation of cheap, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 20-somethings who know the latest fad better than you do. Yet there are surprisingly few people who can create new recommendation algorithms or build massively parallel systems that scale to thousands of nodes without downtime.
Nearly everyone who complains about CS degrees being a waste of time is complaining that college isn't a vocational school. And, it's not -- but that's a feature, not a bug.
I don't believe so. I never studied CS at college, but have had no trouble learning new languages. I cannot write recommendation algorithms (though I'd wager that I could set up a massively parallel system using existing tools), but not every programmer needs to.
I don't doubt that a CS graduate is a better programmer than I am, but it's disingenuous to suggest that a non-CS grad will be unable to keep up with the industry. It just isn't true.
"Web developer" is today's equivalent of "Visual Basic programmer" in the early 90s. Those kinds of jobs will always exist, but they'll be increasingly marginalized -- just as they have been since the early 90s.
I expected someone to argue that university isn't necessary to learn CS. I didn't expect someone to argue that CS knowledge isn't necessary to have a career in software. Yikes. Whither hacker news?
I would also bet heavily that the number of programmming jobs needing low levels of CS knowledge but high levels of complexity management are growing at a great, great rate compared to jobs requiring high levels of CS knowledge.
Marginalized? I think not. That 20 people with a mere 8 weeks programming experience, people who will be relatively useless at programming for another year or so, are in such great demand says everything.
That isn't what Visual Basic was "about", either. But in practice, most professional VB developers made UIs that interacted with enterprise database systems. Otherwise known as: CRUD apps.
Actually, to the extent that the vast majority of today's "web developers" are building web interfaces to a database (which they are), the tools were probably more advanced in 1990 than they are today. Hypercard and VB were far easier platforms for "programmers" with shallow CS knowledge to build enterprise systems.
I'm not sure if you are directing this at me, but I've never been concerned about specific technologies. I spent my "college years" learning how to adapt to anything, which does include, but is not limited to programming. I've also worked professionally in several other industries.
Yet there are surprisingly few people who can create new recommendation algorithms or build massively parallel systems that scale to thousands of nodes without downtime.
There are very few that can do this period, CS degree or not. And even fewer companies willing to pay people to do that kind of research. Re-implementing someone else's algorithm to do recommendations, like, say, a Bayesian recommendation model, is no big challenge though.
Nearly everyone who complains about CS degrees being a waste of time is complaining that college isn't a vocational school.
Again, I'm not sure if this post is even directed at me, but I never made that claim. Formal CS comes with a lot of value. It just would have been a poor decision for my career. If you are willing to sacrifice business to be a better programmer, don't let me discourage you. It takes people who are willing to do that.
Hah. In the halls of the academe, we call that a "straw man fallacy". As the founders of Google will tell you, to have deep CS knowledge, it is obviously not necessary to sacrifice business knowledge.
That said, I obviously wasn't directing my comments at the specifics of your situation (since I don't know them), but rather, commenting on the general idea of someone skipping out of college to learn Rails and "get into the industry". My argument is that this is short-sighted. The sort of commodity software development enabled by knowledge of a web framework is the sort that is just as easily farmed out to the lowest bidder. Obviously, in-depth knowledge of a domain is much more valuable than knowing how to make a web app in Rails.
Fair, but I was trying to express that in the context of my career. I'm not going to be creating the next Google. If you're only reaching for a 9-5 job, as most outside of the HN crowd are, it is a sacrifice - at least from my point of view.
My argument is that this is short-sighted.
I really don't think it is true. Once you start in Rails, your thirst is going to become strong to learn everything else there is to possibly know about CS. I guess if you actually do stop at Rails, sure, but that indicates a lack of interest in the study, which means the chances of success in a CS program are low to begin with.
With that said, I've been in the industry for about 15 years now and I haven't really seen any change. The languages and frameworks may have, but the stuff most people are being hired for are, in concept, the same as it has always been. That is probably not going to change in the next 15, unless some radical technologies are discovered.
I would love the O-1, but I'm afraid I don't yet have enough press coverage, or letters of recommendation. Working on it.
88% of Groom's fellow students currently have job offers on the table, with approximately 60% of those headed to start-ups and the remaining 40% mostly employed at consultancies.
edit: formatting.
I'm Lachy Groom, btw.
20 People. 3 Not Looking, so removed. It mentions your fellow students, so minus 1 more and we're down to sample size of 16. 88% of 16 is 14.08 - 14.08 people is a weird number. Maybe the maths was done including yourself, so that'd be 17... which gives us 14.96 people - so that doesn't make sense either?!?
Surely something like "Out of his fellow students 16 were looking for, and have job offers on the table. 10 of whom are headed to startups, with the other 6 mostly employed at consultancies." My numbers aren't accurate, but I think the sentence is much clearer.
This is an aside though, congrats on being brave enough to go off to another country to do this - never an easy choice, though sometimes here on HN it comes across as not-a-big-deal.
Thanks for the compliment! It was a crazy ride.
If you use the absolute headcounts then you waste headline space and you admit the statistically insignificant sample size.
[1] I got those numbers by skimming the last six "Who's Hiring?" threads.