How One High School Grad Studied Computer Science Debt-Free and Nabbed a $90k Job
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
... and if he doesn't like it, he can go back and get another software developer job.
I went to a coding school (I also attended university) and I would say that when you are young, college is an amazing experience where you learn a lot about life.
I think someone will eventually crack the code by getting a school together for 2 years with >500 students and partner with a university so that students can get social activities in. This, in my opinion, would be the absolute best scenario.
A college experience, amazing education, and a long enough time horizon to learn and build interesting things.
Schools like these are producing mediocre coders, at best. Which is fine if you just want to write a few small apps. But you REALLY need that CS experience and education to effectively work on large scale engineered systems. There is no way around it.
On a side note, I also got a CS degree debt free. I served my country to get it. People want so much for nothing - there are no true shortcuts in life.
I'd argue that you paid a higher debt in some ways. Glad to see that it paid off though.
EDIT: Actually, the fact that you mention "large scale engineered systems" is interesting. Generally, I have found large, monolithic, tightly coupled systems to be very unmaintainable. "Building a small app" (or a bunch of them), along with in-house libraries tends to be the way to go if you want maintainability. "Building a large scale engineered system" might actually be a red flag when it comes to code reusability and quality.
You proved my point, though. Programming is only one small aspect of computer science. Engineering, mathematics and theory is the biggest part which you can't get at a 6 week school.
A CS degree is one way to learn about algorithms and core CS concepts. It is not the only way.
This is a dangerous idea to those who spent 4-6 years of their life in school before they started receiving real life experience.
Agreed. Sadly lots of people are getting sucked into the start up tech bubble. Sure you can get a really high paying tech job on limited knowledge as a web developer at some shitty start up, but it might be gone tomorrow and you'll find yourself SOL.
Having gone the no CS degree route myself I can say that I find myself in a constant loop where I have to prove my abilities even with the recommendation of former bosses and a nice resume.
You're confusing "engineered," as in orderly, organized and planned according to specifications with "legacy" systems. A little more time in industry will show the difference.
A CS graduate will know about a 50 ways to solve a problem and will have the ability to find the most optimal way to do it. He'd probably take twice as long as the hacker school graduate who'd solve the problem using the one canned method he was taught in hacker school.
"Getting away with it" == using another solution.
> A CS graduate will know about a 50 ways to solve a problem and will have the ability to find the most optimal way to do it. He'd probably take twice as long as the hacker school graduate who'd solve the problem using the one canned method he was taught in hacker school.
Disagree. I rarely find someone with a degree to be substantially better than someone self-taught on the job. I've even seen developers with degrees do far worse.
Not knowing recursion for 20 years is more "getting away with it" then just simply "using another solution"
>Disagree. I rarely find someone with a degree to be substantially better than someone self-taught on the job. I've even seen developers with degrees do far worse.
Sure in jobs where the most optimal solution doesn't matter there is no correlation with performance and degrees. This is probably the case for many jobs. However for a job where it does matter, say the programmers behind the V8 engine or people implementing Ruby and the python features, a degree or knowledge about theory makes a huge difference.
Its disingenuous to think everyone needs to obtain that level of knowledge, at substantial cost, when only a few are going to use that knowledge in the scenarios you described. Not everyone needs to know how to create programming language or write a complier.
We should not look down on those who are bootstrapping themselves in the industry without the exorbitant costs of a CS degree lest we retreat to the mindset of ancient guilds.
This knowledge is usually what separates someone with a degree and someone without one.
I don't look down on someone without a degree, but I have no doubt in my mind that such a person will have a higher chance of being less capable of implementing high concept applications like a ray tracer, a 3D engine, search algorithm, operating system, or a machine learning system, ... etc. These jobs are not so obscure that only a 'few' people need to know it, as you seem to indicate.
In fact there's a popular new buzz word in CS called "Big Data" where those involved need a huge amount of theoretical knowledge that cannot be gained from simply attending a hacker school.
Someone define recursion here... are we saying this guy didn't know what a recursive loop was for 20 years, or are you using "recursion" in some other way?
edit what i mean is this: did the guy have a hard time defining recursion in terms of CS, or could he flat out not demonstrate it with some pseudo code?
He was a python programmer. Typically in python, you shouldn't use recursion anyway.
Also, I don't know about you, but I went to college for an education. Which I received.
This squares with my experience as well. I have a CS degree from a good school, but switched into it in my last semester after self-teaching myself much of the content while avoiding my physics homework. My first job out of college had many coworkers who had graduated from MIT; none of us knew what we were doing, as far as creating robust maintainable systems, and we needed senior engineers who had actually built stuff (regardless of where they went to school) for that. I've since worked at Google, founded a couple startups, written about a dozen programs from scratch (some of which got used by millions of people)...and found that while I use my CS fundamentals occasionally, the bulk of the know-how on how to engineer a maintainable system comes from actually doing it, over and over again, and dealing with the consequences of my missteps.
I will add that the experience and education can be gained outside of a classroom. I managed to teach myself everything I know and have been a valuable employee at various large companies in a major US city and I never attended school (see previous comments).
In the end though what I really did was get lucky that I was born a fast learner.
And if there were, I'll bet people like you would feel pretty cheated.
Served the intersts of the military industrial complex maybe. Killing random people on the other side is not of any use to the rest of us.
Not everyone is going to work on large scale engineered systems. Even companies with those systems are gonna need cheaper mediocre coders to code the app that uses the engineered system as a backbone. So what if a few months at hacker school won't replace a four year degree in CS. Take as much or as little schooling as you want, as long as employers are willing to pay for your skills.
> In contrast, students at Make School pay tuition through their internship earnings and 25% of their earnings in the first two years on the job.
Coming out of a 6 month program owing $45k of future earnings sounds like debt to me.
Edit: It was actually ~6k for her. Class of '05.
This is coming from someone who has been in the industry for 12 years. I was homeschooled my entire life (until attending and dropping out of a community college). I thought that meant I was using correspondence courses but recently discovered from my mother that she just purchased text books and used those to educate me (save for 1 year during "grade school" and all of high school which was correspondence).
As I said, I've been in the industry for 12 years and to this day I feel like I'm judged harsher in interviews.
Also I'm not bragging about the homeschooling. I'm pretty ashamed of it.
What do you mean by weird? This seems perfectly cromulent to me.
endsarcasm
As a past junior high teacher, I'm really excited about the new ideas around practical education.
I had to work my butt off with a few part-time gigs, had to do some smart saving, and cost managemen. I was able to do it without locking myself into anyone who wanted a cut of my pie.
It's not impossible, but you have to be willing to commit to it.
I don't think that a CS degree is all that important. It's the self-drive that makes the difference IMHO. Then of course, having a background helps a lot, but in todays world there is little that you can't learn by yourself given the right amount of (free) time and effort.
I'm still young (24) so I'm not going to say "Everything worked out perfectly" because I can't know that yet but so far it has. After I had 2 companies under my belt I was able to go just about wherever I wanted (That is anywhere that my skill set lined up with what they were looking for) because I've found employers care a lot more about what you can do/what you have done than a piece of paper from a university. I'm not ready to write off college completely but in it's current state I don't see it lasting much longer. The college bubble will burst if they don't start making changes. The world has changed but colleges have not, they no longer prepare student for the real world (if they ever did in the first place) and they don't guarantee a job.
I love my job and what I do. I have no plans on finishing my college education, I might take community classes at some point but really I don't see the point. It doesn't affect me in my job searches and that money could be better used to pay off my college loans. I have older people tell me all the time that I should finish college but I think this is more because they grew up in a time when that worked not because they are actually right that I'll need it in the future. IMHO a degree only helps for your first-second job (if that) and after that no one cares.
I think another important point is a number of people I am friends with or have talked with seem to think the end of college marks the end of learning. That couldn't be further from the truth, I learn every day and spend a vast majority of my free time working to get better at what I know and/or pick up new languages/skills. I didn't drop out to stop learning, I dropped out to start learning things that mattered. If I ever went back to school I don't know if I would even go for my CS degree but instead take classes on subjects that are not as easy (for me) to learn online or that I might just like the classroom atmosphere for like writing or history maybe.
[0] http://joshstrange.com/why-i-canceled-my-college-subscriptio...