Oh, no! Don't blame "self-taught" engineers; I'm self-taught. In my spare time, I learn assembly, and work with a bread board with an arduino. Fun stuff!
The problem is "bootcamps" and other such businesses promising so-called six-figure salaries. I think most people who find these bootcamps appealing aren't really interested in technology. They just want money. I'm sure they wouldn't learn any of this stuff in their spare time, as a hobby, having genuine fun.
What I have experienced is that engineers without a degree learn in their free time the “fun” stuff: Golang, K8s, assembly, hacking, frameworks, sql, etc. They usually don’t learn things like context-free grammars, logic, mutexes, the kind of stuff you learn at university.
People with degrees and who also learn in their free time (like me) get to learn both: the fun stuff (now) and the foundations of computer science and software engineering (back then).
I’m self taught and I’ve seen some of this baffling entitlement up close.
In my previous role, I had a direct report that was a talented designer who was also good and fast with React.
I put him on a project where we needed to use both Express and jQuery. He asked if there was some way to trigger when the browser has loaded everything. I got to mentor him a bit, and he’s a better engineer now, but boy howdy, we covered a lot of basics. He spent his free time living life away from screens.
He was pushing for six-figures in every other one-on-one during our last six months together.
This here is the fundamental issue right here. There is a difference between technicians and engineers. There's a heavy emphasis on technicians, not as much on engineers. The big way to spot the difference is a technician defines themselves by their tools.
I knew what I was getting into; practical programming skills and concepts to make a career change, both for money and for more interesting work.
Fortunately, most of us work on plumbing data through web applications, so you really don't miss much by not having taken classes on compilers and assembly language.
The best engineers will always be self-directed learners. Bootcamp is just a springboard.
In my experience, at least, self taught are typically better than title owners. Not 100% of the time, but at least a solid 80%. My explanation is that self taught really LOVE the topics.
This has been my experience as well, and I think the reason for it is what you state.
But I'll break it down even more: what makes someone highly skilled in an an area is a combination of learning everything they can about the field, and spending countless thousands of hours practicing.
If you're doing a thing because you love it, you'll naturally do both without even realizing that's what you're doing -- because to you, what you're doing is play. You're having fun.
If you're learning a thing because you want to earn a living doing it, but have no special love for it, you're less likely to spend nearly as much time learning about it expansively or actually practicing, because what you're doing isn't play, it's work.
Yeah, the self-taught concern is really missing the target in my experience too
Given how many tertiary courses are becoming increasingly vocationally focused - and feed into jobs which are extremely narrow in focus - the self-taught aspect is probably the most consistent distinguishing factor I see in exceptional engineers.
Doesn't matter if they're self-taught from zero, or self-taught on top of some technical degree - it seems to result in more breadth and depth of experience than a degree and a lack of passion does.
That said, perhaps "self-taught" is an overloaded term?
There's self-taught in traditional "autodidact" sense of: experimentation, reverse-engineering, and hundreds of small personal projects - potentially then exposed to informal expertise via usenet & BBS discussions
Then there's self-taught in the sense of: did a vocationally oriented bootcamp in 6 months and all experimentation was related to coursework
Perhaps we need to distinguish between "self-taught" and "self-guided"?
This is what I tell people that ask if it's possible to break into the field without a degree as well, which basically amounts to "what do you mean by self taught".
There are all different kinds of self taught. The highest performers in any discipline are naturally going to tend to be self taught (for a variety of reasons, and not exclusively, many have formal education or training as well, and without exception they will have had some form of mentorship). But so are the lowest.There is a huge range of skill level among the self taught, including a lot of people that are so far ahead academically that they would get nothing out of doing the typical university education thing.
I have 2 degrees, and I do consider myself - for the most part - self-taught. The degrees offered mostly guidance and support, but ultimately it was what you made of it.
Everything presents an opportunity, you just have to decide to unfold the fractal [1].
I'm not "blaming" self-taught engineers, I actually support self-taught (instead of blowing $100K on a traditional school).
But I'm wondering a few things:
a) is this universally known for all self taught engineers? Like, are bootcamps explicitly telling people: "Look, we're just giving the operational basics, there's a lot you have to cover on your own".
b) Is it easy for self-taught engineers to find the correct resources to bridge these gaps? In traditional software university, you have a career path and courses and books "pushed" onto you. So there's no way around that. I HAD to learn Prolog and the Logic paradigm cause otherwise I'd not pass. How do self-taught engineers manage to learn these things today?
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Also, I'm not implying this is only an issue with self-taught people. Maybe our field is becoming more complex and even universities are "ditching" the theoretical concepts in favor of more "practical skills".
Perhaps also an exception, but most of the best devs I met in my teens and early 20's were self-taught.
Most were working for large companies before college age
Some eventually went on to complete CS degrees after many years in industry, but seemingly only as a formality, out of curiosity, or for a break from the grind
I'm self-taught as well. Dunno if I'm the one to say, but I'd consider myself in the upper-quartile of programming breadth as a result. There are lots of talented programmers though from a host of different backgrounds.
I've mostly learned from books, man pages and a string of interesting problems[1]. I think in general you tend to learn in a different way if you learn through self-directed problem solving. Like you get much deeper understanding of the theory, because that's the only way to get anything done. It's a much harsher standard than having to pass a test.
Though I think there's a lot of survivorship bias involved in making self-taught programmers competent. The ones who didn't have a knack for it are doing something else now.
[1] e.g. 15 years ago I built a 6502 emulator with a weird fantasy base 3 architecture, which eventually included a C compiler for this weird architecture. (I guess I was Terry Davis before it was cool.) More recently I'm working on an internet search engine I've built from scratch in vanilla Java bespoke index, bespoke crawling, bespoke everything.
> Oh, no! Don't blame "self-taught" engineers; I'm self-taught. In my spare time, I learn assembly, and work with a bread board with an arduino. Fun stuff!
But did you learn proper software engineering? Don't get me wrong, they also don't teach that in school.
I'm self-taught, and I absolutely did learn proper software engineering. And relearned it a few times as what was considered "proper software engineering" has changed (and continues to change) over time.
It's a tricky problem: a lot of people who find bootcamps appealing are self-taught like you and me, but don't have the elusive "experience" to put on a resume.
There is no reasonable way to differentiate between the two, despite that being the entire point of accreditation.
Maybe instead of acting like there are 100 million open six-figure-salaried positions and nothing else, we can actually give inexperienced devs a mediocre place to start.
>who cares?
If you are hiring or working alongside programmers, you probably want those that "will" be "good" rather than those that "can" be "good enough"
Hire people who you can coach up a bit at a good value and get the job done. Hardly any job needs the best people available. They really just need to get enough out out people who are good enough.
If that's not the kind of place somebody who considers themselves a good programmer wants to work, that's fine, too.
The problem is "bootcamps" and other such businesses promising so-called six-figure salaries. I think most people who find these bootcamps appealing aren't really interested in technology. They just want money. I'm sure they wouldn't learn any of this stuff in their spare time, as a hobby, having genuine fun.