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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

not to be a dick to the true self taught gurus out there, but maybe IE wouldn't be such a pile of crap if the principle software developer wasn't someone who learned CS reading books on the bus. :p

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I think you make a big mistake with your comment.

There's nothing wrong with self-taught. Many great scientists and inventors have been self-taught (eg Michael Faraday).

Also, I'm the opposite of his guy. I went to Oxford. Studied mathematics and computer science and stayed and got a doctorate. I would suck at leading IE development.

As a hiring manager I look at what people can do, and then I look at their education. I do this becausesome of the best engineers I've worked with majored in non-CS/EE.

BTW I am hiring Java developers in London.

I knew I would catch shit for this comment because by and large CS can't be learned any way other than on your own. the field changes too fast for the schools to keep up. being a software developer is an exercise in being a lifelong student.

I couldn't resist though. after all the hundreds of hours I've spent dealing with IE related issues, the lead dev learned CS on the bus. It's just too poetic.

There's no doubt IE is a piece of junk, but I would imagine that has more to do with the business end more than anything else. It's not as if programming a browser is that difficult; choosing exactly which features to support can be.

The web development world is basically the Wild West. There aren't really any rules. The standards we do have can be vague or incomplete. At some point you find yourself making the decision to follow web developers' intent instead of a so-called standard.

Pile on top of that a desire on Microsoft's part to take every opportunity to keep people on the Windows platform and you've got a recipe for disaster for anyone who has to support multiple browsers. I don't think there's any group of developers that could produce something in that kind of environment that we would be happy with.

I don't think the problem is the talent of the IE team. I think the problem is they disbanded the IE team for several years. At least, that's what I remember reading in the Founders at Work chapter on Blake Ross. In other words, it was an explicit management decision to not make IE better. In that situation, there is literally nothing the developers can do.

Not literally nothing. I guess you haven't read "The Graphing Calculator Story":

    I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, 
    so I decided 
    to uncancel my small part of the project. 
    I had been paid to do a job, 
    and I wanted to finish it. 
    My electronic badge 
    still opened Apple's doors, 
    so I just kept showing up.

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

Out of interest, what are you working on?

We are still in stealth mode so I can't tell you that what. I can tell you that we are building a distributed application in Java that does very, very high-speed process of customer data to provide near real-time predictions of customer behaviour.

What kind of latencies are you aiming for?

Retrieve customer profiling information in < 10ms

IE is stagnant because Microsoft's only strategic incentive to make IE better is so that it isn't too much worse than any other browser. It really wouldn't matter if they had the best team of developers in the world.

Microsoft had a very strong interest in dominating the browser market, and then crippling the web, so as to maintain their comfortable, high margin, desktop software business for a few more years. IE performed admirably for those goals. They extended the life of the desktop model for about seven more years, and gave themselves more runway to figure out this whole Internet thing. I kinda suspect they forgot that that was the point of those shenanigans, as they seem to have just now started trying to grasp the web; or maybe that's just how long it takes to turn a ship the size of Microsoft around.

I was self-taught, and started working 20 hours a week after school writing C for Merrill Lynch when I was 16. I got bored in my mid-twenties and finally went to college full-time, but not for CS: I double-majored in philosophy and the history of math and science and double-minored in comparative literature and classics. I returned to my career four years later and I'd like to think I contribute just as much to my team as those with formal CS training.

I guess that's because I was learning CS by reading books in my parents' basement instead of on a bus, right?

It all depends what books you read -- say if you just read programming books and no theory, which tends to be drier and less interesting because the pseudo-code examples, if the book even has them, won't compile directly.

Which is what university does. Picks the books. Then tests to see if you really read and understood the material. Plus you can go to lectures if you like to have the prof explain what's in the textbook with notes and examples on the blackboard.

I have a degree but low tolerance for the academic environment (nothing wrong with it, just doesn't suit my personality).

That said, I think I've met a few self-taught programmers during my career that read the wrong books, or more correctly never read the right books (since wrong books are just an opportunity cost). Some are great technicians but will never be engineers. Some have massive blindspots in their knowledge.

Some of the textbooks I read in university I would have never read on my own. So university forced me to read them via degree requirements. Not knowing some of that stuff would have been a handicap at times.

So there's university education for you in a nutshell: forcing you to read books you didn't want to so you'll know a few things you otherwise wouldn't have. Totally worth the four years and big bucks.

Lots of people are self-taught programmers. But there is a difference between people who taught themselves out of interest and those who taught themselves as a career move.

"Lots of people are self-taught programmers."

Ultimately, everybody is a self-taught programmer. I can't teach you how to program any more than I can teach you how to walk. Programming is one of those things you have to do in order to learn.

That's true to some extent but there are those who really figured it out on their own and there are those who had people holding their hand. I think that is the distinction we're trying to make when referring to somebody as an autodidact.

How many people know any great programmers who started programming any other way?

...like guarding an Ural2 during the night, which could not be turned off anyway, due to the tubes. Though you have to have connections to get the guard job though...

You learn CS from books.

You learn programming from code.

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