Talking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer
thecodist.com
thecodist.com
Up until the current hiring lull, it was very possible to get a programming position with just a self taught background.
When the need for juniors comes back around, I’m sure we’ll start to see it again.
You can definitely build a nice portfolio of open source software (and even hardware) on github. I would hope that is enough to get a job, but it might not be, especially in the current era of AI-fueled employment pressure.
Man, I'm skeptical, at least in the US. Since the pandemic, I've seen an absolute explosion in offshoring, which makes perfect sense when so many people are working remotely anyway. I've worked with lots of excellent engineers from Argentina to Poland and many places in between. It's tough for me to see how an American "tinkerer" will be able to find a job in that world if he wants an American-level salary.
Also, I know the adage about "this time it's different" being the most dangerous phrase in language, but, at least in one example, something really is different. In the early 00s, after the dot com bust, there was a ton of fear about outsourcing the bulk of software work to India. That turned out not to happen, of course, because (a) remote meeting software was nowhere close to where it is today, (b) remote work in general wasn't common, and (c) the timezones issues between US and India were an absolute productivity killer. These days, though, everyone is used to remote work, and US companies have realized there are enough lower cost locales with plenty of timezone overlap to make offshoring the norm these days.
Running into a self-taught person at all was rare, but when I did their story rarely involved not transferring from another career and leveraging some SME knowledge to get started. They already had training or a degree just not in this.
I'm not sure screwing around at home will actually land you a job. Not anymore.
There are definitely places that won’t talk to you without a degree, but many, many places will take a degree or equivalent.
> screwing around at home will actually land you a job. Not anymore
I don’t think “screwing around” will land you a job whether it’s at home or at college/uni. But a degree tells me that you can stick by something for longer than a few months even when you don’t always feel like it by our own volition.
Someone who has spent a year on and off learning to code hasn’t shown they can code or that they have any sort of consistency- both of which are (equally) as important as each other in a workplace. Someone with a degree in marine biology and a handful of GitHub projects and can pass a programming test? They’re probably my first choice. Someone with 3 years experience of writing code on their own? Absolutely. Show me those candidates and I’ll interview every one of them for a junior role.
Not speaking for where you work but they might not even pass the automated resume filters anymore unfortunately.
I go back to school for the remaining 2 years, and when I graduated I had 5 competing offers with salaries starting at double what I would have accepted when I had not finished school. This huge reversal in outcomes was purely the college degree as far as I can tell- I had less time to send out applications, no internships, and no new personal projects of any substance.
My experience is that there are too many college grads and boot campers with github profiles to get into the industry off of some basic home tinkering.
If you're going to do it, I imagine you've got to go one step up and stand out.
Like Minecraft? Factorio? Modern tools allow for very small team to quickly generate very AAA games. Eye candy is still an issue, but AI is quickly creeping into that space. I would not be surprised if within the next decade we have the tools for a single person to generate what we would today call a AAA game.
Minecraft and Factorio are both simpler productions in terms of visual fidelity and lean on gameplay that is captivating. AAA is not a label for the quality of game, more of a style/level of execution.
Both Minecraft and Factorio started indie to my knowledge which is a separate path and approach from AAA games. Unrelated to good/bad.
Also, Factorio was crowdfunded via a kickstarter-like platform.
Also both are around 15 years old. They are both closer in age to 1995 than today.
So by definition, they did not use modern tools.
To be clear, there are plenty of games that do that, I just think those 2 are terrible examples.
AAA requires not just using but creating the latest visual and audio innovations, creating a huge surface area prone to bugs which all need to be polished out and creating tools to manage your version of that complexity, optimize everything so it runs smoothly and doesn't take an unreasonable amount of disk space.
Even with AI, anything an individual could do, hundreds to thousands of people are also doing at AAA studios. An individual might innovate in a few aspect, but never clear the AAA bar as AAA is a constantly moving goalpost, and most tools the individual can use are likely contributed back by AAA studios to popular AAA game engines like Unreal.
It's like racing in a hamster wheel against the person making the wheels...
I got my first Apple programming job, because I had a Mac Plus at home, and learned to program it in ASM and Pascal.
I've only taken some non-matriculated math courses. All the rest was pretty much OJT and home study (and a lot of seminars and short classes). My original education was High School Dropout/GED.
Still waiting for my breakthrough.
And then later that was used against me to accuse me of lying about not knowing how to check the voicemail on my landline.
a lot of employers actually like engineers who come from a personal hacking background more than traditional paths, because we're truly passionate and care deeply. we're not in for 8-5 and a paycheck.
In my country, the Netherlands, it was almost impossible in the late 1980s to land a tech job other than a low-level service technician (read: roadie or cable guy) if you did not have at least a bachelor's degree or higher in a tech subject or a degree from a technical community college. College dropouts were turned away before even getting an interview, and bankers would rather commit suicide than finance tech startups founded by anyone without an appropriate college degree.
Times sure have changed.
I used to work for another very large company doing the same thing, but as a contractor. A FTE position opened on our team but I was told by HR that I wasn't qualified for the role (even though I had been doing it for a few years on the same team...) because I didn't have a degree (not a requirement for a contractor)
My brother had to get a degree with evening classes for the same reason but since he was already doing the work, it was fairly easy - assuming the cost of studying isn't prohibitive where you live.
That said it is such BS. The whole contractor vs. FTE thing is.
Where I work, FTEs get laid off before contingency staff is fired. What is the point of having contingency staff if they're more permanent than FTEs?
Contractors who do the work for years can't get interviews because they're overqualified for the FTE position they apply for but the same hiring managers are happy to string them along doing the same work they're overqualified for, on the same team but as a contractor with less pay and none of the benefits.
I understand contractors applying to a junior role to even get a foot in the door when it is the only FTE role that opened for over a year... But you'd have better odds landing an FTE role straight out of graduating from college than with a track record of doing the work well for years as a contractor.
And they're "cool" so they let contractors attend a bunch of FTE meetings which has the primary effect of rubbing in all the great diversity and inclusion initiatives they are excluded from due to their second class citizen status.
At some point those companies don't deserve to have you. But even if you get paid half what the FTEs make, it's still a guilded cage with a 6 figures salary so it's hard to just give it the finger and move on.
"About 15 years later I ran into that manager again, and he was close to dying from a kidney ailment. I spent a day with him, driving him around so he could take some photographs, and having lunch. We didn't talk much about work, mostly he wanted to get out of being in bed and see the world a bit."
Just deLurking to say that was an excellent thing to do. This small paragraph tucked away at the end of the anecdote shifted the whole experience for me.
Is generative art just AI, or is there something else out there that was called that before the emergence of AI? Genuinely curious.
https://artasartist.com/what-is-generative-art/?ref=thecodis...
I do love the ways random events can change folks’ lives. Would the author have ended up doing art at all without this happening?
They had an apple II and some equipment they figured might be able to interface with it. Like the article author, I basically got a few manuals and just figured out how to make it work. I was able to do some simple control of one of the new instruments via the RS-232 serial connection, plus print out some it’s internal state.
I was very proud that all the other volunteers were basically candy stripers, and I was doing software development in a lab environment.
I would have gone bonkers with everything available today. But then again, in the 80s the sorting function was very strong - you were either one of those who could figure this stuff out, or you weren’t. Then of course, there were further delineations. Case in point, my apple ii basic and 6502 assembly hacks in the lab sound like child’s play compared to what this dude did!
I then discovered a small room that had two unsupervised computers hooked up to some mysterious world-spaning network, and made friends there, ended up leaving Physics for Computer Science.
My first job and every job in my 20s came from people I met in that room getting jobs themselves and calling me to see if I would go work with them, or someone from the previous jobs calling me back. I've never done a real job interview or sent a CV.
But then I formed a family and my social life plummeted. I'm also bad at really nurturing relationships that don't self sustain, so in retrospect I can see how my career ossified since then.
I don't totally regret it because even if I'm now underpaid and underemployed, I earn more than enough for my lifestyle and have loads of free time, so it balances the pang for greater things.
But yeah, networking is very important.
Often networking is seen as this robot-like bleep bloop hello, here’s my business card thing and at the dedicated events it very well could be but networking in the most basic sense is just making friends and shooting the shit, only difference is that you can leverage those friends for opportunities in the workplace and vice versa.
Pre comedy. I can just imagine the initial indifference when raising his hand only to look around and start lowering his hand slowly when one of the bosses just looks at him and says, "You. No, not him. YOU. You stay, everyone else can leave."
I guess some things never change.
No-one ever called a real program an "app" before that, did they?
Yes. Apple called them apps in the 80s, at least on the Mac - this is Apple II but it's plausible they were also referred to as apps there?
For my part I read the title as "Taking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer" which had me really confused for a while. I'd like to read that article, I think.
Then some "genius" started calling their desktop offerings "apps" (perhaps because lazy multiplatform-via- webap development eventually extended to marketing copy"), and now everything is an "app".
As I remember it, the term "app" came from smartphones, where it referred specifically to smartphone applications. Connotations were rather negative - inferior facsimile of the real thing (not even a full application - just an "app"), also came from "app marketplace"[0][1]. And to this days, apps are inferior to their desktop counterparts (at least surviving ones), except marketing won this one - people got used to this term, then some vendors started calling desktop software "apps", and now suddenly everything is an app.
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[0] - To this day I roll my eyes at the mental model here. It feels unnatural and wrong, but that's maybe because I'm not used to think in terms of trying to find markets and money-making opportunities everywhere.
[1] - Or maybe it was just a huge letdown to me, and I'm soured ever since. Back when first iPhones and then Android came out, I was hoping a full-blown computer with a Linux on board would mean it'll be much easier to just write your own stuff for it. That it would feel more like a desktop in terms of functionality, capabilities, opportunities. I did not expect them to come up with "app stores" and lock the thing down, and made you accept the mark of the beast, entangle yourself with the commercial universe, just to be able to add your own joke app or such.
Since then, it only got worse.