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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with everything you commented.

As a self-taught developer I absolutely promise you don't need to go to any school to learn the requisite skills to achieve a variety of complex things. You absolutely can learn from both trial and observation.

Yes, everyone actually is potentially a developer, because there are no baselines to the contrary. I have met many developers that should never have been there professionally. Not everybody is capable of actual engineering though, as engineers follow processes and measure things. So many people writing code for a living absolutely cannot measure things.

I think your fundamental problem is loss of empathy. Perhaps you understand your own limitations but do not seem to understand other people learn differently than you do or may have wildly different experiences than you have.

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I interact daily with people who did not have the chance to go past primary school or to go to school at all. And they did have to learn skills through alternate means. I myself had to learn computing and programming with little to no electricity at home, and only a few people that owned computers (which I had to borrow).

I do agree that you can learn with trial and observations, but it's way faster to have someone transmit the knowledge either in person or in books. And once learned, it is learned, unless you don't use that piece of knowledge for a long time and you forget about it. And it's exponential, learning things enable you to learn more things. You don't have to restart from scratch for similar situation. Like you don't have to learn letters again to learn a new Latin languages.

> Not everybody is capable of actual engineering though, as engineers follow processes and measure things

They are capable of it. It's just that most people don't care about that if there is another way to get what they need (including getting other people to do it)

> I do agree that you can learn with trial and observations, but it's way faster to have someone transmit the knowledge either in person or in books.

This entirely depends on the teacher or the book author.

The "do not try anything new, but repeat after me" is a popular method of teaching things when we talk about skills, but often the next step is not just pursued but entirely discouraged.

There is a particular point where a teacher says "some of you might fail, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make" & ask people to do something entirely new by themselves.

That is cross-over point where being self-taught has some advantages, because you have external guidance but not instruction.

If you're the kind of person who has failed a lot learning basics, then those new failures are less of a knock on your ego than if you had coasted through the early years without learning the parts which come after a failure.

Maybe if we all had a clear memory of "learning to walk", it would help - six+ months of falling down and not giving up, which most of us have done once.

> I absolutely promise you don't need to go to any school to learn the requisite skills to achieve a variety of complex things

> Not everybody is capable of actual engineering though, as engineers follow processes and measure things

So how is it that anyone can self learn anything but anyone can't follow processes and measure things? You just have different pet dogmas than the other guy. At least he didn't say you had lack of empathy to feel better.

> I absolutely promise you don't need to go to any school to learn the requisite skills

It will be borderline impossible for anyone to learn to read/write without either learning it at school or being taught by someone.

Likewise for skills for which the information isn't easily available e.g. how to build a fission reactor.

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