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Comment by UK-AL | Hacker News Reader

Considering a lot of start up founders are pretty much straight of college. And many people develop projects in their own time. I think junior developers are really underestimated. When you hire a junior you could be hiring someone crap, or someone who could be better than your seniors(I've met some bad senior developers), especially if they've been developing code since they 13 or something. Informally those types could have more experience than your experienced devs.

Self taught developers may also underestimate what a cs degree confers. They may not know specific frameworks, but they probably know more than you about compilers, formal grammars, machine learning and stuff like that.

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You can self teach CS so you end up with the same knowledge as someone who took a degree.

Good point. Especially given how easy it is to retrain junior developers through things like Treehouse and dev bootcamps, I think it's an investment more companies will start making.

Please find me these jobs because I'm having a hard time deciding what to eat tomorrow.

Will I go with the usual rationed slice of wonderbread or go gourmet with a can of tuna?

It's actually not as easy to find programming jobs as people make it seem. It can be hard, especially if you're starting out; it's just not as hellish as for non-technical jobs.

There's a terrifying rule-of-thumb called the $20,000 rule (it gets adjusted for inflation periodically; it used to be $10,000) that says that your job hunts will take 1 month per $20,000 in salary. That seems to be accurate for non-techs. In technology, it's about 1 month per $50,000-- if you're already in the game. It's still inconvenient, but not the nightmare it'd be if that number were 1 month per $20,000.

Getting your first dev job-- without connections or a CS degree-- is hard as hell. What seems to work for a lot of people is to take a job that involves programming and use that as a launchpad. If you know how to write Excel macros, automate all the office shit work. Then learn VBA. Then learn Python because VBA sucks. Now learn some front-end stuff (HTML, CSS, Javascript). This'll take over a year, but good things don't happen overnight. Soon, you'll be a fully-fledged programmer. If you work your ass off, you'll pass the people who started coasting at 24 and be running circles around them in 5 years.

Funny, this is more or less my trajectory over the last ~4 years after changing majors from CS 2 years in and graduating with an Econ degree.

Got an entry level job at a bank in ATM support in Pittsburgh and spent the time in-between calls writing excel macros and command line programs to make the job even simpler while also working on my own rails projects at night. This led to a junior dev job at a php shop after a year and a half, which after another year and a half and launching a startup of my own, I finally made it to New York City as the second engineering hire at a startup.

I'm skeptical of the Dev Bootcamp phenomenon, if only because it seems like many of them are very expensive. I've heard of five-digit tuitions for three-month programs.

Then again, I guess it's good for us that this is happening because it will drive up the value of high-end programming talent. I've heard that "teaching programming is the new teaching English abroad" and that could be good for us as a group; we'll get better pay and more autonomy in the long run.

Sure, but considering that an average salary in SF is 80-90k, seems like an investment worth making if they can deliver what they promise. Especially when compared against the cost of a 4 year CS education.

I don't like dev bootcamps. I think they produce people who know specific things like web dev with ruby or iOS development. They are like the java schools spolsky warned us about.

I think the best developers are generally educated in cs.

I agree. My worry is about the long term; what happens when they stop leading to $90k salaries because there are too many people coming out of them? Who does the accreditation?

The four-year university education may be a dinosaur, but that system had sound reasons (one can debate whether those are "good") for limiting admissions.

I think you'd be surprised by the wide variation in both the CS graduate and self-taught pools. Lots of overlap on that matter.

There are a lot programmers who understand CS quite well but studied other topics in school. There are also plenty of CS programs that don't seem to be turning out a lot of competent engineers. Hell, there are PhDs who can't even code.

Knowing the fundamentals is important-- often, it's extremely valuable, because you need that stuff to hit the high notes-- but if it doesn't come with practical abilities pertaining to how to write code, learn new libraries, and pick up technologies, then it's just book-learning that's already probably 10 years old.

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