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Comment by wakawaka28 | Hacker News Reader

It's safe to say that everyone you meet knows something you don't, regardless of background. But in the context of this discussion, it is pretty obvious that self-taught people on average have nowhere near the hundreds of hours of experience solving theoretical problems. Not having that background will actually set people back when it comes to solving hard problems that occasionally (or often) arise. Watching self-taught programmers talk smack about degreed professionals is like watching a couch potato make sweeping generalizations about how sedentary people who don't go to the gym are more physically capable than people who do, because the people who don't are not limited to performing certain exercises.

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I gotta say still pretty regrettable take, if you will humor I am happy to explain why I say that.

First let me say I definitely value the hundreds of hours you would have spent on hard theoretical problems and while I wasn’t exposed to your curriculum, I regret I don’t have that.

However, I myself have definitely spent a substantial number of hours on distributed algorithms that were only available as published research (didn’t have a choice and that understanding I gained has been proven out), and my extended family is filled with PhDs, so I’ve been casually reading research papers since I was in my teens, this didn’t seem weird. A lot of my peers with and without degrees didn’t engage in this practice.

To explain further, I’ve also spent I can’t even tell you how much time on benchmarking and establishing performance bottlenecks and near as I can tell, no one has in university, or at least they’re not teaching it well enough, because it is shocking how badly this part of performance is understood. Let’s call it applied practical performance enhancement of software deployments.

In the end, I just can’t fully be in board with what you’re saying. Yes I wish I had that degree nowadays and I wish I could take 4 years out and go back and do it again. But I seriously did gain a lot of valuable experience that was hard won with that extra time and near as I can tell is super duper rare, especially because people keep hiring me for it.

It does sound like you spent your time well and learned a lot, one of the rare cases. I wonder how much of the research papers you actually understand deeply given that you lack common background knowledge. It may surprise you how many research papers are actually ill-conceived, and it is hard to see how bad they are if you don't know enough about the state of the art. You are on the right track if you want to catch up on what you would have learned in school. Just about anything in CS can be self-taught given enough time and effort, though you may need to seek feedback from others if you can't figure some things out on your own.

>> it is pretty obvious that self-taught people on average have nowhere near the hundreds of hours of experience solving theoretical problems

What makes you think that? Simple example: I'm self-taught. Failed pre-Calculus in high school, twice. Ten years in as a freelance programmer, I decided to build the first Bitcoin poker room, and therefore had to write my own poker hand evaluator. I had no example to work from. No logic flow-chart. I had to come up with the logic to parse, rank and show winning odds on anything from 5- to 7-card stud, hold'em and omaha hands. I had to dive deep into Monte Carlo methods, statistics, etc. Meanwhile, I'm writing a HUD for Star Citizen. I'm reading and learning about avionics, working out my own procedural generators in mixed 2D/3D. And this was just one year of my life as a developer. Working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Couch potato? Forget about the fact that I was getting paid, not paying tuition to sit in a classroom. These were problems I had to solve, and the work output was immediately in production, and the results were immediately visible.

Talk about sweeping generalizations...

The more apt comparison seems to be somewhere closer to an athlete that played sports with his friends all day instead of weight training for that same sport and getting instruction.

Most people excell with guidance and instruction but there are plenty of people who excel on their own and occasionally, because they don't know any better, end up doing something nobody ever thought to do or were taught was impossible.

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