I'm 37 and live in one of those lesser-known countries whose diplomas likely don’t hold much weight elsewhere—but that’s not the point. I’ve decided to change my profession. After many trials and errors, I studied Python. I wrote some scripts and bots, but I kept feeling like something was missing—I didn’t really understand programming.
Then I discovered OSSU and, after reviewing their curriculum, I realized just how little I actually knew about computer science. I started over from scratch, even relearning math. Because of the language barrier (yes, I learned English by forcing myself to study in English), my conversational skills are still shaky, and this text was polished with the help of GPT.
I’m not thinking about a job just yet. My current goal is to get a solid academic education, and I believe OSSU is one of the best initiatives ever created—accessible to the entire world. It's not just about being free. Maybe the best universities are in the U.S., but compared to what's available in my country, the OSSU curriculum is several levels higher in both quality and structure.
As for work, I plan to contribute to the open-source world, hoping to make the world a better place, just like the creators of OSSU did.
Education should be accessible to everyone—not just a privileged few.
For undergraduate I don't think it matters that much as you're far enough removed from the state of the art at that point anyway- you'll probably get about the same level of bachelor-level CS education at any decent university in the developed world as you would in the top US institutions like Stanford and MIT (and most Americans don't go to these elite institutions anyway)?
For graduate/research it's of course a different case altogether, these elite institution seem to mostly be elite in research, not pedagogy. What probably does matter is that the base level of tertiary education is good enough (which seems like it's the case in western Europe, but maybe not in a lot of the developing world).
Honestly, I'm not aiming to participate in cutting-edge research or be involved in elite academic projects. My goal is much simpler — I just want to become a good, competent developer who understands the fundamentals of computer science and writes code thoughtfully. I love computers and problem-solving, and I enjoy building things for the fun of it, not for money or prestige. If I manage to live long enough and find work — that’s more than enough for me.
For me, a platform like OSSU (Open Source Society University) is the only truly accessible and supportive environment where I can learn, get help, and grow. I can't afford an expensive formal education, but thanks to the community and open materials, I'm making steady progress.
As for the claim that "at the undergraduate level it doesn't really matter" and "you'll likely get about the same education in any decent university as in places like Stanford or MIT" — I have to disagree. In many so-called "decent" universities, the baseline can often mean:
• outdated curricula and technologies (e.g., focusing on C without exposure to modern languages and practices),
• a purely theoretical approach with little connection to real-world applications,
• instructors with little or no industry or research experience,
• and unfortunately, sometimes a lack of academic integrity.
In such environments, students may graduate with a diploma but without real practical skills or understanding — making their education nominal rather than competitive.
That’s why it’s not just about where you study, but what and how you study. If someone is learning CS with curiosity, consistency, and a focus on real-world practice — even without a prestigious degree, they can still go far. I hope to become that kind of developer, even if I'm not from MIT.
Although I've not used it, I've heard good things about Khan Academy... Which is aimed at kids/teenagers but would cover any core principles you might be missing:
Yeah, I studied with Khan Academy too, and my kids are learning with Khan as well. But unfortunately, it doesn't go deep into core principles. There are better resources for Algebra, Geometry and Precalculus, like Professor Leonard, OpenStax, and The College Preparatory School, which is listed in the OSSU prerequisites for Computer Science.
If you're an experienced engineer that wants to give back to learners, OSSU is a great place to do so. This can look like:
- Setting a regular time that you'll pair (or mob!) program on a side project of your own with OSSU learners.
- Developing familiarity with one or more courses in the curriculum and responding to students who have questions or are stuck.
- Attending weekly check-in meetings, sharing what you are working on and listening to what learners are working on.
I'm one of the leaders of OSSU and we agree that community, networking, and projects are part of a complete education. That's why we celebrate not only the professors and universities creating free courses, but also the many engineers and practitioners that have volunteered with OSSU learners over the years. I hope some of you will join that group!
It does make me sad that in 2025 we still don't have an open real-time chat service.
IRC was too janky for widespread use... Everything else that has come after it hasn't been able to reach the "network effect". Too many options, too many half finished projects. Lots of missed opportunities.
But network effect doesn't have an impact here, does it? Matrix exists and would be a great fit for this initiative.
If someone is committed enough to help out but using Matrix (either directly from the web browser or installing the Element client) is too big a burden I'd question that original commitment.
I like Matrix but unfortunately it has major stability issues. The GrapheneOS project moved most of their chat over to Discord after their Matrix community got nuked twice. They still maintain a Matrix community which is bridged to their Discord instance, but most users are on the Discord side of the fence.
IMHO, Revolt is a better FOSS Discord alternative: https://revolt.chat/. Relatively young project, but they are unashamedly cloning the Discord user experience (even with the name). By default it uses infrastructure in Europe run by the project maintainers but can also be self hosted.
This is just me, but aside from being complete proprietary spyware, I've got problems with the culture it's designed to cultivate.
On a normal text-based chat like IRC or XMPP, you chat with people, maybe share files and that's about it, the way it should be.
On Discord, everything is grabbing your attention in this pavlovian game where the actual substance of what you're talking about is secondary, on the other hand it's more about cultivating attention towards yourself with reactions and memes. It also promotes segregating everyone into a caste system with "roles" and whatnot. If you've ever been around you'll notice how quickly people sardonically accept Discord as being the name-brand platform for predators and sex perverts.
I think a lot of the problem with kids on the net these days has to do with the way they chat with people like this. When you're on IRC you've got a place to "post into the void", where what you say is ultimately ethereal and even if two people are flaming one day they can go back to being buddies the next day cause it doesn't really matter. When you're on Discord everything you say is logged, and the air hangs thick around you cause what you're supposed to say is meant to matter to someone, even though most people are just cultivating this emotional persona detached from their real selves. So you get this really toxic cesspool as a cultural penchant built-in.
I've never really connected with that many people I've met through Discord the on the same level as IRC-adjacent people, FWIW.
It's a chat program designed to be anti-user inherently.
And it's spyware.
Discord being full of sex perverts and pedophiles are just reasons to avoid it after the fact that it is a terrible, terrible replacement for IRC channels.
If you are afraid of IRC, playing Matrix should be no problem. But please don't play discord.
I understand, too, and "Like the EFF organising their next meet in a facebook event." is a really good way to put it, but then again, were it not for Discord, it might not have a thriving community (assuming it currently has).
I run a comp sci education program to help students self direct their education[1]. We sometimes reference the OSSU curriculum.
Althought there are lots of benefits to the self-taught route, there are some caveats which students should be aware of. You will have to work harder on the "signaling" and networking. There are definitely social benefits in being associated with a university. And a lack of degree will mean you're "marked"[2], which you'll have to overcome. A setback or mistake will be attributed to your lack of degree, whether justified or not. And some hiring managers can't take the political risk of hiring a non-degreed candidate. Not insurmountable, but this means we work on it from day one. If you do decide to self-direct your education, the benefits are that you learn faster and don't waste time spining the hamster wheel, so to speak, to grind out courses. Everything you learn is in context and relevant. If you realize you miss some fundamentals, you'll just go back and learn those concepts/topics. It's a different way of learning, which imo, is inevitable for technical professions. But it's not for everyone, and some students just vibe with it more.
What's sad is that many students are sort of forced into the self-taught route, because they don't have the financial resources to go to college/university. And if they're not aware of the trade-offs, they could really struggle.
I’ve followed and part-time mentored several people through their self-taught education. There are a lot of pitfalls and traps that can send people down the wrong path if they’re not careful.
One that I did not expect but that seems obvious in retrospect: It’s really easy to start reading Reddit or watching Twitch streams of developers ranting about the industry and think that actual skills don’t matter any more. There’s a temptation to think that you’re a fool to study and practice the job skills because what you really need to do is optimize for interview skills. So they drop everything and starting grinding LeetCode, putting unfinished “side projects” on their GitHub that have all the right things in the README.md (just hope nobody actually looks at the code) and memorizing S.T.A.R. format responses for the common behavioral interview questions.
This strategy actually worked reasonable well for a few years, but the game has changed and most companies are better at catching professional interviewers who don’t know how to do much else.
I should note that this mindset isn’t unique to self-taught people: There’s a parallel epidemic of cheating in college among students who see it as “just a piece of paper” and think they’d be foolish to actually learn the subject material. This also hits hard when they reach graduation and are faced with the current style of interviews which are not as easy as they expected to bluff your way through.
This is something I had to deal with as well. It also surprized me in terms of how limited their information sources are, esp with younger students. One thing I found helpful is to actually introduce them to engineers in person (like a take your kid to work day), which I think grounds them a bit. But this box-checking influence is everywhere, including in the K-12 curriculum. In some ways I understand their perspective. Most schools/teachers do have a box-checking mentality, and I think students intuitively understand that what these "educators" are after is a metric. They don't actually care about real skills. But to your point, the rest of the world actually values competency and it's something students should strive towards for the long-term.
> putting unfinished “side projects” on their GitHub that have all the right things in the README.md (just hope nobody actually looks at the code) and memorizing S.T.A.R. format responses for the common behavioral interview questions.
This perfectly describes my experience when reviewing resumes of grads from certain bootcamps.
The program held their hand as evidenced by every student have a similar setup: claiming the cookie cutter 3 month CRUD white labeled webapp as work experience. Everyone on the team is a “co-founder”. Apparently all 4 people "managed a remote team of 4 developers". When you dig into the code, it’s a toy project not intended for any real users. The bulk of their "webapp" is a "case study" page with sections including "the problem", "the solutions", "What is a build a process". It seems these sections were assigned as homework. Their resume includes what things they clicked on in the AWS UI.
In fact, it seems the whole group were instructed to post on HackerNews "who is hiring" with the exact same template. That is the extent of handholding occuring in these bootcamps.
- Some people assume you lack theoretical/foundational knowledge.
- Guidance/mentorship is harder to come by.
- You’re likely learning on your free time while working. Quality time is hard to carve out.
- It’s harder to get a sense of where you’re at.
- External validation is much more difficult to get. But you need it when you’re searching for a job.
- You inevitably make a lot of decisions that university students don’t have to make. This can be taxing.
- It requires more discipline, because there isn’t anyone checking in or forcing you to demonstrate your learning.
On the other hand, overcoming these challenges is beneficial, especially if you never really stop learning/studying. You pause from time to time, but you pick up again, because there’s always more to learn.
A big advantage that might not be obvious: You pick up niche subjects, simply because they interest you.
You’re not just learning things that seem useful in your context. It’s actually often the other way around: you learn things that you’re curious about and perhaps a year later you encounter a situation that you can solve a problem because of that.
Curiosity is an interesting mechanism. It’s often a better guide at driving your learning than an analytical approach.
I agree. Self-directed education definitely front loads a lot of the problems/decision making early on. I think one of the goals of a good advisor, if you can find one, is to smooth out these issues so they don't become overwhelming.
And to your point about curiosity-driven learning, I'm often shocked at how deep some students get with their learning, if/when they are interested. In some ways, I think we really underestimate how capable young people are. And it's very satisfying, as an educator, to see a student start to embrace continuous learning, as their default mode, and don't interpret learning as a chore or box to check.
I was immature right out of high school and fumbled a really good opportunity to finish a degree in computer science. After getting married and having kids I later went back and quickly finished a degree in IT, but CS was always my first love.
A couple years ago I found myself in a place where I would really benefit from finishing my CS education. I put a lot of thought into getting a true second BS degree, a post-bacc, bootcamps, etc but eventually settled on OSSU.
It’s taken me longer to get through it than I wanted (life happens) but I have nothing but positive things to say about the curriculum so far and about how it’s affected my career and honestly my own happiness.
I blog about it occasionally. This is the first one and explains why I chose OSSU over the other options available to me: https://dustinbriles.com/ossu-blog-1/
I looked into this when I was trying to figure out how to round out my CS education. The lack of community is the primary reason I went with OSSU instead.
Genuine question: why do you believe Teach Yourself CS is superior to OSSU especially in light of the community aspect?
Full disclosure: I’m a “social organizer” for one of the cohorts in OSSU and blog OSSU sometimes
I think https://csprimer.com/courses/ is a good fit if you also want community. I think Oz Nova who is behind csprimer was one of the authors of teach yourselfcs
You can definitely make the self-taught path work. I'm proof of that and have been working in industry for over 20 years. However, what I will say is the following: there are certain companies and roles which you will never be able to access. These are often times the best roles, best companies, have the most money, etc. A degree isn't just the time spent studying and knowledge -- you can do that part yourself. What's more valuable is the network and access to the alumni network of others who will hire you into their company just because you went to the same school as them. It's a big club and you won't be in it if you decide to self-study. That's the cold, hard truth.
So what's left for someone self-taught with no degree? You are left with all the jobs the others don't want. You'll be flipping through the crazies, outright scams, poorly capitalized companies, or places that are already in a state of distress. VERY rarely you will find a real job that you can plan to stay at for any length of time. You WILL be paid less, and you're more likely to get taken advantage of. You will have a harder time getting multiple offers at once, because your overall demand is lower. So that erodes your position in the market and over time it will feel like you're on a completely different tract financially. You will need to work twice as hard, because finding a new job is much harder, even if you're good. You will constantly be doubted, by first yourself and imposter syndrome and next by those around you who have degrees. Make one mistake and the consequences are that much more dire.
It's better than nothing, but if you have the opportunity to go to school (I didn't), do it over the self-taught route.
I don’t mean to discount your personal experience, but I’m 100% self taught, and I’ve worked at some bougie megacorps, unicorns and startups of varying degrees of maturity.
I’ve never felt like doors have been closed or that others doubt me because of my lack of education. I’ve interviewed at Google and Citadel, had an offer from Meta, etc. It doesn’t feel like anyone has denied me opportunities outright.
I make north of $200k/year cash plus the equity and perks at an early stage startup. I’ve been through two exits so far. Nothing outrageous but I’m rich by most peoples standards. It doesn’t feel like lack of schooling has impacted me financially.
I did start programming and doing the startup thing at 19, so maybe the early start was an advantage. I could just be mind numbing lucky. But, from my point of view, warning the up and coming youngin’s off the self taught path is a disservice.
> from my point of view, warning the up and coming youngin’s off the self taught path is a disservice.
Hard disagree on this. It’s true there are a lot of successful people in the industry with no degree, or (like myself) with a non-CS degree. And I agree with you that the OP’s claim that there’s a ceiling for those people is overstated. But just because it was possible to have a successful start in the industry 10 or 20 years ago that way doesn’t mean it’s good advice now to tell 18 year olds that skipping the degree and self studying is a good idea. The job market is exceptionally tough currently for entry level engineers and not likely to get better, due to the end of ZIRP and AI productivity gains. Companies who have that rare entry-level position open can take their pick from a large pool of candidates. They will naturally prioritize people with a CS degree from a top school because without previous work experience that is the best signal they have to sort the deluge of resumes.
I still think software engineering is a good career choice for a smart kid, but it’s not the magic ride to prosperity it was 10 years ago. I would hesitate now to recommend any path into it except the top-school CS degree route. Sure, there will be exceptions, but you will have a vastly easier time if you follow that path.
> I would hesitate now to recommend any path into it except the top-school CS degree route. Sure, there will be exceptions, but you will have a vastly easier time if you follow that path.
And how is this useful to someone who can't get into these top schools because life is happening? Also, your outlook seems very unrealistic to me.
This is software development we're talking about, not medicine, not mechanical engineering. To be a top tier software developer, you need access to a decent computer and good resources to learn. The two boxes have never been easier to check. Add to that the excellent guidance of curricula like OSSU, TeachYourselfCS, and others like them, if you have the mind for it and a bit of discipline, your skills will be as sharp as any top school graduate's. "Self-taught" today isn't the same game as what it was 20 years ago. You can make yourself incredibly valuable on your own.
Now, getting a degree in CS and teaching yourself CS are different goals. The first is a pursuit of recognition for a skill that you may or may not have, and along the way, perhaps you've obtained a truly valuable education for which you're also grateful. The latter is a self-directed pure pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and skill. Regardless of your path, these are the real gems companies are after, and if you truly have them, you will NOT be invisible in this domain. They're rare commodities in the real world, regardless of how you get there.
Getting hired in software has always been about showing that you can build software. There's no danger of this changing. Sure, it may mean different things to different companies, but that's always what it's been about. Some want people that can crack algo problems, some want hackers, some want makers with a portfolio, some want tech wizards that understand the stack up and down. No matter, you can opt in to any of the above outside of academia and make a space for yourself.
> And how is this useful to someone who can't get into these top schools because life is happening? Also, your outlook seems very unrealistic to me.
If you can't go to school because of life, chances are you can't self-study because of life as self-studying is harder.
> This is software development we're talking about, not medicine, not mechanical engineering.
Software development in many ways has more competition than those fields that have entry level positions in more rural areas.
> To be a top tier software developer, you need access to a decent computer and good resources to learn.
No, not to be a top tier software developer.
> Add to that the excellent guidance of curricula like OSSU, TeachYourselfCS, and others like them,
Someone who want to become a software developer shouldn't prioritize studying CS.
> if you have the mind for it and a bit of discipline, your skills will be as sharp as any top school graduate's
It will be many times as hard reaching that level yourself.
> Regardless of your path, these are the real gems companies are after, and if you truly have them, you will NOT be invisible in this domain.
Little to no indication that this is true. More like companies might still hire someone they need if they pass all the recruiters and tests favouring the traditional path.
> Getting hired in software has always been about showing that you can build software.
Always has been a academic, military and business field. That is why hackers happened in the first place.
Almost every partner and the founders have an elite or close to elite education. Something only around 1% of the population have, yet they make up all of the people. That is in an untraditional firm which literally runs Hacker News.
> due to the end of ZIRP and AI productivity gains.
I think you're missing the mark with this analysis.
If you go back to the original dot com bubble it was as much of a hardware bubble as a software one. Same thing with the mobile bubble. The AI bubble we are in has NOTHING to do with productivity and everything to do with hardware. I, as a software engineer am not going to come up with a product that can compete with any of the major players without a massive capital investment.
Meanwhile, the price to play as a software engineer is also driven by high costs. AWS, for better or worse is the model and the go to, and it is NOT cheap by any measure. Its pricing model looks more like the iPhone and less like an efficient market. AWS is MOST of amazons profit margins. It makes tech companies more like franchisee renting the location for their fast food joint and less like independent entities.
The thing is there are TONS of gaps in the software marketplace that need filled. These are companies that are going to be in the 2-3 million a year range and capable of being run by a small team (think ~5 people). Nothing that would appeal to the ycombinator set. You don't need Kubernetes, Kafka, or high performance bleeding edge Rust or massive Autoscaling to run these services. They are never going to get huge, and in fact they offer enough room to start another company of the same scale if one is ambitious and wants to diversify.
Does your average 18 year old know this? No, because most people who write code for a living don't seem to know where these gaps are. Do the math on what it takes to make 100k a year at 10 bucks a month... add a zero for a million, multiply by 3 for "small team"... The number is shockingly small.
Does your average 19 year old have the chops to figure this out? No, because 20 and 30 something laid off software engineers can't seem to figure it out either, even ones with "top degrees".
That doesn't mean that there isn't a path for the sharp young kid to "skip school" and go directly into industry. That path is open source. A history of strong contributions and being smart is going to build a better network than any CS degree ever would/will... However if you can do both, open source and a degree (from anyplace) you're even better off! The same could be said for working at Fedex, Walmart or Costco while you get a cs degree from anyplace and seeking a job in a corporate office after. You have a set of experiences that make you invaluable as a contributor.
Lastly, no one talks about the bad guys. There are plenty of scammers and thieves abusing technical skills who lack formal education and do well for themselves. If we're going to remove all the options and only have a narrow path, will we end up with more criminals and fewer contributors? This is sort of why "Russian hackers" is one of the givens in the industry (crime did/does pay well).
I still think software engineering is a good career choice for a smart kid, but you have to bring more to the table than just code if you want to prosper!
>It makes tech companies more like franchisee renting the location for their fast food joint and less like independent entities.
AWS, the strip mall of the internet. I’ve been saying this for a while. AWS is nice and all but don’t bet your innovation on a service they provide, rather provide a service on their infrastructure that solves your business needs and if AWS retires the service you were using, you can still continue operating.
Unfortunately this means all roads lead to kubernetes - sorry.
As a somewhat accomplished self taught outlier as well, my perspective is slightly different.
While it's absolutely possible to no have a degree and succeed in megacorp, don't discount the randomness (luck) involved in getting the right experience and meeting the right people at the right time of your career (and aligning with market demands).
Please don't hear this as "you didn't work hard to get to where you are". I certainly believe that folks like us, self taught, are able to work hard and teach ourselves what's needed to get to the next level because we cannot rely on credentials to carry us. A lot of things still need to go right for us to be successful, more so than folks with formal education, especially in the early stages of our careers.
Ultimately you can get very far if you are naturally talented technically and socially.
But if you are normal like most of us, you are lacking in one or more areas and going to school (or attending conferences or maintaining a popular resource) can be one of those ways to shore up one of your “less natural” skills, but no step is strictly required and not everything works for everyone.
Indeed, going to school for a degree in a programming related field (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Development; whatever) is also much more likely to leave you with a broad knowledge about topics in the field (different algorithms, things worth considering when developing code/architecture, etc). Yes, you can achieve that same level of knowledge with self-study, but a lot of (most) people won't; because it requires going above and beyond for most self-study "curriculum".
"But if you are normal like most of us", you'll wind up a more well rounded developer with a college education.
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released data on unemployment rates for recent college graduates (ages 22 to 27).
The bank found that philosophy had an unemployment rate of 3.2%, less than computer science’s 6.1%, though computer science was more highly compensated.”
CS has a 6.1% unemployment rate and a 16.5% underemployment rate.
Philosophy has is at 3.2% unemployment and a 41.2% underemployment rate.
The philosophy major doesn't have their sights set on a $150k new grad salary at a big tech company out of college. They're flipping burgers or working as a business person somewhere.
This can be seen on various reddit computer science related career advice spots where people are holding out for the perfect software development job for years rather than getting a job somewhere. They're sending out (poorly crafted) resumes by the hundreds to jobs that their resume gives no indication that they're qualified for (or even read the posting) and ignoring the "we want to hire someone with some work ethic - bagging groceries and having a supervisor who can say that 'yes, Pat shows up on time each day sober'" is something is useful.
They're refusing to consider help desk roles - and when they do apply for those roles, its with a resume that points out how they're skilled at JavaScript and have published a module to npm.
They're refusing to apply to the job at state government that lists $650,000 - $80,000 for entry level position because that's not the job they saw themselves getting.
The CS majors are holding out and not getting jobs that are "beneath" them. The philosophy majors are getting any job that pays the bills.
I generally agree with your comment though I'm not sure what underemployment in philosophy even looks like. (And I could probably say the same of a lot of liberal arts.) Yes, it's not working at McDonald's But it could mean not making a whole lot more working at a publishing house.
> The definition of underemployment is based on the kinds of jobs held by college graduates. A college graduate working in a job that typically does not require a college degree is considered underemployed. This analysis uses survey data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) Education and Training Questionnaire to help determine whether a bachelor’s degree is required to perform a job. The articles cited above describe the approach in detail.
> Some additional research that utilizes these data include “Working as a Barista After College Is Not as Common as You Might Think” (Liberty Street Economics).
>A college graduate working in a job that typically does not require a college degree is considered underemployed.
So, it's not just about philosophy majors working in a job that doesn't require a philosophy degree but about any college grad working in a job that doesn't require a degree--which according to this thread presumably includes developer jobs but that's a bit of a stretch :-) given that it often requires a degree.
My read on it is that it doesn't require that degree.
Working in a job that requires a college degree (but doesn't care what it is) would be underemployed for anyone with a degree... even though it requires a degree.
The "does it require a degree" is likely based on the BLS definition for the job... even if people say that you can get it without.
I expect there's some selection bias at play. If you're taking a philosophy major in college it's likely you already feel confident in your post-graduation career, so can study things that you like. Whereas if you're in a CS track it's because whether you get a job depends on getting a degree. The student studying philosophy is in school as an alternative to work. The STEM major is in school as a prerequisite to work.
Or Philosophy is usually a path to Law School on the professional path or a PhD on the research/academia path. In both cases, many/most of those 22-27 year olds are still in school and thus not counted as unemployed.
I don't know how true it still is with law being, to a fair degree, perhaps primarily a good career path for those who can land at white-shoe firms and federal court clerkships. But I've known a lot of people who drifted into law school from liberal arts and related because they just didn't have great job prospects. And quite a few didn't even end up practicing law.
Perhaps in the US 20 years ago it was more attainable. Self taught in the UK is pretty tough, I lucked out getting a real engineering job at 19 in London, then I went into contracting which was great money. Now I’m working at a startup which I think has a solid team, but even with a decade+ of experience I’ve never even gotten a call back for roles at Google, Meta or the like.
Did interview with apple once for a low rate contracting role, pretty sure I gave them a superior architecture for their solution in the interview and they took it and ran with it, didn’t hear back.
I’ve had a heavy interest in finance since a young teenager but haven’t really be able to land an interview there either.
I’m genuinely considering getting a degree, I guess at 28 it’s not too late, though I feel I’ve wasted a lot of time.
I have been told by many interviewers of the companies that I have worked for, they would never hire someone without a degree. When I was assigned interview slots, I was instructed to filter out no CS degree people as their fundamentals cant possibly be strong. What they didnt know was I am self-taught and I lied on my resume about CS degree.
In what year did you get your first job as a programmer? I think it was not all that rare in the 80s and 90s for self taught programmers to get decent roles. And once you had more than, say five years, paid experience you were considered equivalent. But I haven’t heard of anyone getting an entry level job as a programmer without a degree recently.
Your story is an argument that it’s possible (as is the parent comment btw), but it doesn’t demonstrate that it’s likely. We have pretty hard evidence that it’s more difficult to get good jobs without the degree. Not impossible, just more difficult. The number of people without formal degrees occupying good jobs is a minority. Companies often screen for degrees, before you can ever get an interview; credentialism is real. And to parent’s point, some of the best jobs require advanced degrees. Do a little searching for the average pay with and without a degree (the answer shocked me!). Do a little searching for the number of patents filed by people with varying levels of formal education. Poke around for how many senior engineers, managers, and executives get there without formal higher education. There are some, it is possible! But not that likely.
While it might be true that warning someone away from college might be a disservice, it’s also a disservice to not talk about reality and avoid looking at who’s getting the jobs, right? If 90% of the 200k/yr jobs are people with degrees, then what is the practical choice for someone young who wants that and is weighing their options? Instead of telling someone not to go the self-taught route, would you feel more comfortable with telling them you’re roughly ten times more likely to get to $200k/yr mark with a degree than without, but make your own choice?
Personally I suspect the people like you who do best without a degree are often the ones who are going to ignore our advice anyway, and it doesn’t matter if you warn them. People who are super motivated and figure out what to learn and know what they want in life when they’re 18 years old are going to go get it. Most kids aren’t like that, they don’t know what they want yet, and aren’t motivated enough to learn everything they’d get from a 4 years degree on their own. For that majority, it’d be a disservice to recommend anything other than education, no?
Well, the basic issue (in my experience) is that self-taught tends to be written off and ends at the individual contributor senior role level.
> I make north of $200k/year cash plus the equity and perks at an early stage startup. I’ve been through two exits so far. Nothing outrageous but I’m rich by most peoples standards. It doesn’t feel like lack of schooling has impacted me financially.
I know people who have 8 figures and a large part of the reason they went the route they did was their education. These things are just not a one size fits all prescription but I've literally gotten "You have no degree, why are you applying?" e-mails that clearly was them thinking they were chastizing me for wasting their time.
Keep in mind I've been employed this whole time but I don't make north of $200k/year but that is more of a health thing than anything else. I have to be careful and manage my interactions with people because in the US you are 100% unprotected and I learned that the hard way if its not blindingly obvious to everyone you are disabled but rather something you and your doctor discussed if its worth disclosing and the answer was "eh, probably not" despite the fact my European colleagues that I know on a personal level are amazed I have to work at all, let alone without any disability protections.
and working at startups. you're at the top of the bottom.
that's the beauty of the faith on meritocracy and not sharing salaries.
your privileged, ivy league clone, would have had lazy jobs and made that on the first couple years out of college, while learning the job core skills on company time. honestly can't understand why you chose to minimize your effort.
I worked for several years as a software dev before I went back to school for my CS degree.
I’m a much better developer after spending 3 years (already had 90 hours worth of a history degree) studying a prepared curriculum instead of bouncing around learning about whatever interested me.
I think it’s possible to do that on your own but the vast majority of people will never come close.
I’ve also definitely worked with self taught programmers who were better than me. But I’ve also noticed gaps they had and to a person I think they’d have been even better if they’d spent 4 years in a decent CS program.
Half of that is gen eds, another quarter is like math requirements. Then you have stuff like intro to python making up the CS part. Most of that time is wasted imo
What school are you thinking of? I’ve never met someone whose CS degree consisted of intro to Python, and I’ve been interviewing people with CS degrees for a couple of decades. Mine included a year of introductory CS (basic algorithms and data structures) in Lisp, a year of advanced algorithms & data structures in C/C++, a year of OS’s and compilers in C++, a year of computer graphics, a year of hardware and CPU design, a year of theoretical CS, a year of software engineering (with a senior project), classes on discrete math, databases, networking, computer vision, and scientific visualization. I think I’m missing a bunch there too. The math & physics requirements were super useful to this day both in my CS career and in life, and the credit hours overlapped and counted for some of the gen eds, btw, which were maybe 25% of my time. The gen eds were also very useful and help shaped my thinking, I wish more programmers were into learning for learning’s sake and understood and cared about economics, government, history, art, music, etc. Strictly vocational / apprentice / work-experience education for CS would make the field generally worse not better IMO. I value my time spent in university.
If none of that is convincing, just look up the average pay of people with and without degrees. Whether or not you enjoy learning and education or feel like the time is wasted, the sad fact is that the good jobs are being given to people with degrees, by and large. I honestly thought 4 year degrees probably gave, statistically, like maybe 15% pay advantage. That would be a pretty big boost, it’s already pushing 4 years of raises for most people. However, the reality published by The Fed is that people in the US with 4 year degrees earn twice what people without degrees earn. I was blown away when I learned that. It’s probably not fair, and it doesn’t mean people with degrees are smarter or harder working than people without, but that is the surprising reality of the job market.
Degrees are unfortunately a check mark to gate keep positions that's why the pay is higher. Not because your some how smarter with the degree or more capable.
In the last 10 years I have never used physics developing software, never needed calculus. Learned networking at a deeper level then my college network class by self studying for a ccna.
All this info is available online. Compilers, operating systems.
I disagree that studying humanities makes a difference for people. Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something? I have a liberal arts degree, from a little over 10 years ago. I can't remeber most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point? Saying things like that puts degrees on a pedestal. Life experience does way more thinking then any class.
Lessons from school are like anything else, use it or lose it.
Thanks, that MIT page really highlights how exaggerated your first comment was. Your job wasn’t to show that an intro to Python course exists, of course an intro to Python course exists, duh. Your job was to show that intro to Python made up the 25% of in-degree coursework, that the rest was math and gen eds, and you’ve shown that your own description doesn’t fit MIT at all.
Why does it matter if the reason having a degree pays more is because of credentialism? If that’s true, then the best advice to someone is to just get the degree, no? Unfortunately for your argument, both the comment you replied to and mine personally attested to the coursework being very helpful and your experience doesn’t counter ours. On top of that there’s a whole field of research trying to study whether the average salary premium of degree holders is due to credentialism or to actually learning useful things during four years of schooling, and they find it’s a mix of both. Your armchair claim that one doesn’t learn anything in four years of school won’t convince me or anyone else without a whole lot more effort, data, and serious analysis. What is plausible is that you didn’t learn much in your time at your school.
Is the lack of math & physics in your career due to not wanting to do those things? Of course people can have careers that don’t use some or even any of the subjects they learned in school. That doesn’t demonstrate that school is a waste of time. At worst it demonstrates that you didn’t use your time wisely. At best it demonstrates you wanted to learn more and other things. Either way, I didn’t (and still don’t) expect for every single thing learned in school to be relevant to life or my own jobs, but many things I learned have been useful for me, including math and physics, as well as some social studies and history. It was eye opening to learn a bit about how global class hierarchies and economies work. If you didn’t learn any of that or anything else interesting, maybe your school failed you, maybe you should have gone somewhere else.
> Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something?
Something. Around 25 years since graduation.
> I can’t remember most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point? Saying things like that puts degrees on a pedestal.
Obviously I have no idea how your degree is shaping your thinking, are you suggesting that it’s not? I mean it’s a bummer if you really got nothing out of it and it hasn’t helped shape your life at all, but I can’t speak to your experience.
I’m not exactly sure why suggesting that someone who spends four years of their life learning things actually learns something is putting a degree on a pedestal. From my perspective, saying that four years of learning yields nothing for anyone, aside from being demonstrably false, doesn’t make that much sense. If you spent four years learning and didn’t learn, isn’t that on you?
> Lessons from school are like anything else, use it or lose it.
This highlights a vocational style of thinking. What you say is true if you only care about the list of facts a professor said in class. The lessons that I took from school are more meta level, longer lasting, and less about practicing or remembering specific things. How to approach problem solving, how to do research, and what have been the high level outcomes of other people’s research. On top of that, yes, I am keeping some of my math and social studies and history and art skills around by practicing them. If what you say is true, then one way to make sure your degree was useless is to not use it.
I would just point you to my other comment, since it probably addressed like 90% of your reply and maybe suggest getting out of your academic bubble and see how most people are using their degrees.
Why do you think I’m in a bubble? What evidence do you have that it’s not you wallowing? I’ve read some of the research that tries to tease apart credentialism from skills, read maybe a dozen papers about it. And I’ve looked at the data on pay gap on average across the US for degree holders vs non degree holders. Have you?
BTW, your other reply does almost nothing to address either my comments nor @sarchertech’s. You’re arguing a straw man, asserting that it’s possible for people to learn on their own, which neither of us has disgreed with. The facts are that very few people actually do it without a guided curriculum, and conversely that people who choose the guided curriculum often do learn things they wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
>In the last 10 years I have never used physics developing software, never needed calculus.
If you never studied it in-depth, it's hard to recognize when it would be useful. It's not like your boss is going to tell you that you need to compute the differential of some function. But understanding physics and calculus are incredibly useful when you need to think about how things grow, or when you need to model some process.
But calculus isn't even remotely the most useful branch of math for CS. I use discrete math, statistics and probability constantly. Just last week I had to come up with a plan to validate that a data migration of several billion rows was working correctly and it's nice to be able to understand how to calculate sample size to give you an appropriate confidence level. You don't even need to remember exact formulas just remembering enough to look things up is a huge productivity benefit.
During the first part of the data migration project, we realized that we need to migrate accounts that shared users directly or indirectly at the same time. I looked at the problem and realized it was just a graph theory problem to find all of the connected components of the graph and was able to whip up a little visualization tool that showed us this was impossible, and then showed us a few superusers that we could eliminate to break the graph up in to much smaller components.
The graduate level networking class I took has been insanely useful. A month ago someone at my company had spent weeks working on a system to keep 2 systems in sync and he asked for help. I could recognize immediately that his solution could just never work and essentially he was trying to solve the 2 generals problem, and then help him find a solution that can solve a relaxed version with tradeoffs we can live with.
I use what I learned in Automata all the time as well. Computer Hardware and Assembly have been incredibly useful for understanding how to write high performance code.
I 100% could have learned everything I learned in college on my own. But I never would have. I never would have developed a holistic understanding of how the whole system works together.
> Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something? I have a liberal arts degree, from a little over 10 years ago. I can't remeber most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point?
I remember a ton from the first time I went to college 20+ years ago. I took a business law class that has been useful many times in my life. Biology was incredibly useful.
I know someone who went back to nursing school much later in life. She told me that before she went back to school and took anatomy, her model for the human body was that all your organs just floated around inside your torso and when you ate food it just mixed in with all of it. Everyone has gaps, but a general education does a lot to make sure that they are hopefully not so large. Even just looking at vaccine hesitancy by education level, college is probably worth it for that alone.
Micro and macro economics have been great for understanding the world. I'm fairly certain that Austrian economics is mostly just people that don't understand calculus.
I used what I learned in physics constantly in wood working, 3d printing, CNC machining and other hobbies.
Again you can 100% pick all of this stuff up on your own. But vast majority of people don't have the discipline to do it.
Lets go back to my original point, related to spending 3-4 years studying CS. You and the other guy that responded are getting way off topic and putting words in my mouth.
What I didn't say is that computer science knowledge is useless. So lets not get distracted by this imaginary point.
Most of the unrelated degree for CS work is useless. You already admitted that the three calculus classes required for a BS weren't useful. I pointed out the into python class isn't useful. We already knocked off a semester of classes.
We really aren't using physics developing most software by CS graduates.
> I never would have developed a holistic understanding of how the whole system works together.
Kids coming out of school don't have this. Most people working don't understand the entire system. I worked at decent companies. There are plenty of people who will just stop at "JVM does something with my code". I see this especially bad with the people coming out of AI specializations
The gen eds were all intro level classes, the only thing to take away is there are more to know. If your making decisions about the world based on an intro to law class or your if knowledge of economics is still at the level of supply and demand I think your being naive about your level of competence in those areas. In hindsight after living life after school and working these classes really weren't a great use of time.
I don't think college is the place to support your hobbies. Things like art workshops provide a better learning experience then art history or w/e. Even reading is more enjoyable post school for me.
Getting some pop sci level books and reading for a bit would have been better all around then sitting in intro lectures with 100 other students.
>Most of the unrelated degree for CS work is useless.
You're ignoring what I said about time being required for understanding. Your CS and directly relevant math prereqs are going to be spread out of 4 years anyway. Might as well get a well rounded education while your there.
If you want to save money you can CLEP out of at least a year of classes (assuming you have the discipline to teach yourself), or if you were motivated in high school take AP classes.
>You already admitted that the three calculus classes required for a BS weren't useful.
Nope I said they were just less useful than discrete math and stats. But there's overlap, it's hard to understand a big chunk of either of those without calculus.
> I pointed out the into python class isn't useful.
My intro programming class was pretty useful because it didn't focus on syntax, but on concepts. There were definitely a few gaps I had that were filled in there even though I had several years of experience before I took it.
>We really aren't using physics developing most software by CS graduates.
I have used physics directly a few times, but most software doesn't. However that's not why physics is useful, it reinforces your understanding of calculus. An intuitive understanding of growth is incredibly useful in CS.
>Kids coming out of school don't have this. Most people working don't understand the entire system. I worked at decent companies. There are plenty of people who will just stop at "JVM does something with my code".
If you went to a decent school and you paid attention at all you would. If you took the classes I did you'd honestly have to have worked at it to not have a pretty good understanding of the whole stack.
>The gen eds were all intro level classes, the only thing to take away is there are more to know.
I think the problem is that you either never learned all that much from your classes or you've just forgotten it all and you're applying your experience to everyone else.
>making decisions about the world based on an intro to law class
1 semester of business law was pretty useful when I was running a startup. Doesn't make me a lawyer, but I bet I know more than 90% of people in a similar position.
>knowledge of economics is still at the level of supply and demand
I took 2 semesters of micro and 2 of semesters because I found it interesting. I'd wager 2 years of Econ puts you somewhere near the 95th percentile or so among the general population. I've continue to learn certainly, but most people have nowhere near that level of understanding.
>Getting some pop sci level books and reading for a bit would have been better all around then sitting in intro lectures with 100 other students.
Again if that's the level of education you got, I can understand why you think it was a waste of time.
You could AP or CLEP your way out of the majority of your general education classes if you're motivated.
But ignoring that, a huge and often overlooked component of understanding is time. You need the entire 3 or 4 years even if technically you could cram all your CS classes into 2 (well you really couldn't because of dependencies). If you do it right, you'll have CS classes mixed in with your other classes, so that you'll pretty much always be studying CS over the entire 4 years. In a decent CS program, you'll also spend far more time on CS projects out of class than you will on homework in other classes.
The average person will probably spend 75% of their total active time on CS classes.
As far as intro classes go, there was maybe 1 class where I learned almost nothing and I had been programming professionally for a while before I went back. The whole point for me was to fill in the gaps of things I didn't know I didn't know.
I found there is some truth to this but it was almost all in the beginning and/or if you expect to be in ~the bottom half of your peer group. After those criteria pass it comes down to your overall ability to network throughout life (not just from a college) and general chance/luck (which remains a larger factor than most would like to admit).
What college can give you at the beginning of a career, beyond the premise of a guided education in the field of study, is a piece of paper that says "I really did learn some relevant stuff and have the ability to follow through" before you have a chance to prove these things in the field by already having had a job in it. It also gives you an initial chance to build a network but that's true of however you manage to spend your first 2-4 years getting into the field. After that initial in-field job or two the non-educational related value of a degree falls off a cliff (and the educational portion becomes an ever decreasing slice of job specific knowledge you acquire over decades).
My anecdote (that's all it is) comes from starting out without a degree and then getting a degree for the fun of it over a decade later. It's provided 0 value in any job, they've all come from references or recommendations from people I've worked with previously at this point. It was fun though, a chance to get involved with topics you wouldn't normally have a reason to touch.
I am most likely ADHD, probably in the spectrum to some degree.
Tried college three times and dropped out every time due to expense, boredom, and personal issues like my father passing away from cancer when I was 21.
I went into software development via tech support for a C compiler company, and worked up from there.
Worked for the NY stock exchange, two top tier brokerages, several prominent Fintechs and ultimately consulting into banks and payments companies.
It worked for me because I am largely an auto didact and do terribly in a school environment.
The lack of degree came up only a few times, and no one has cared.
At least in software development careers, degree matters very little to not at all.
Thank you for sharing, besides losing a family member at such a crucial age (which I'm sorry you had to go through), I feel like I'm in the same group here. I'm definitely on an upward trajectory, but have been a little worried that I'm approaching the glass ceiling.
There is something that I find very often gets lost, not in this comment but in the general conversations.
There are reasons to study CompSci that have nothing to do with trying to get a job, or make yourself a better worker. Namely, it's fun!
You can be a lifetime student of it and can be very rewarding. Both the practical side (programming) and delving into the mathematical underpinnings (theory) and history of computation.
News articles where people tell young people, "don't study computer science" don't get it.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this having been self taught myself. there was def a struggle in the beginning even getting low hanging jobs. It means you need to invest a lot of your off hours learning new stuff and getting ahead. a lot of university educated CS majors don't learn anything new after university and only put in just enough to do their job. being self taught means you need to be a lot more proactive about getting ahead of trends and being the guy on the frontlines where there isn't a whole lot of people that know a technology at all.
I myself was lucky enough to jump on the javascript train before javascript ate the world. 8 years in I switched over to elixir because i saw in it the potential to be the best stack to build MVPs in. These days, I'm maintaining one of those projects as CTO and we are interviewing candidates for a position. I can tell you personally, I value what you did at your last job and your side projects more than what you did in university 10 years ago. The one issue as someone from the interviewing side is that it takes a lot of effort to actually do an interview properly. I spent a lot of time putting together a coding test to test specifically for the tasks you'd be workin on as well as doing it with our applicants to make sure they aren't using vibe coding to do a half assed job. Its worth it though to make sure we make the right hire. when you're a startup, every hire can potentially make or break the company.
I've been personally involved in the hiring process of our startup and I give you my word the school you went to makes no difference. In fact one of my favorite coworkers that I had an honor to work with was self taught and had a philosophy degree. In fact I've seen big school degrees go straight to heads and egos and been actively an obstacle to those folks.
> What's more valuable is the network and access to the alumni network of others who will hire you into their company just because you went to the same school as them.
This seems completely untrue in my 20 year career experience. I have hired dozens of people for both large and small companies, and networks do matter… but I have never once seen the network be from school. It is always about people you have worked with before. Even my coworkers with degrees don’t have contact with their schoolmates anymore, it is always people they worked with.
It depends on the school and often aligns more closely with something like a fraternity. I have definitely known people who got their job through a frat brother’s recommendation or literally knowing the secret handshake.
> It's a big club and you won't be in it if you decide to self-study. That's the cold, hard truth.
But what about the self-taught club? If it’s not already big, it’s definitely growing. Honestly, I can’t see how a Columbia graduate is more likely to get hired than a self-taught kid who’s had a few pull requests merged into something like the Linux kernel.
> You are left with all the jobs the others don't want.
I don’t think this is quite right. You may be left out of the very first choice jobs at the junior level, but it doesn’t mean you’re getting the bottom portion of jobs.
I’m glad I went to school, I was on the fence. It improved my career, but i also know I could have found work my whole life without it.
There’s a whole economy out there full of opportunity.
I feel this take on it is a little over-dramatized. I empathize with the first part - connections are priceless when you're staring out - but in time you can and will build a reputation for your quality of work, interactions with (and then capability to manage) others, and achievement of results. All these can be developed at a no-name startup as well as at a FAANG.
I went to university but only apply maybe 5% of what I learned there in my day job. I founded and grew a company, also worked in senior roles at others. When I interview for engineering positions, I'm much more interested in other factors than what school you went to or who you've brushed shoulders with.
I recognize parent commenter's experience may be different, and give solid props for their self-taught journey. (In fact someone who can figure things out without having to be spoon fed is exactly the kind of person I want on the team).
I'd probably argue that most people don't have (personal) connections starting out. Maybe, if they didn't go to the right school or school at all, someone they know is the foot in the door.
>but in time you can and will build a reputation for your quality of work, interactions with (and then capability to manage) others, and achievement of results.
That IS their network for a lot of people. OK maybe there are smaller companies that are 50% $SCHOOL grads. And there are other companies that tend to bias towards a certain group of schools. But I actually think that going to, say, Harvard is a secret handshake is overstated in a lot of cases.
I sort of suspect that my undergrad may have had something to do with a job at one point but the fact that I got in through a senior person who liked my work played a lot bigger role.
I also wouldn’t disregard the experience of university itself. I went the self-taught route, left school at 16, built a career for myself to get to where I am now at 24, but I do have regrets. Going into working in an office basically terminated my youth right there and I haven’t had a social circle since.
Not having debt is nice but if you can afford university both in terms of time and money, and come from a family you can fall back on, I’d say just go. Once you start work there’s no going back. You’re in the cold hard world.
networking is important for sure, but i think software more than most other industries (say, finance) has a much lower barrier of entry for an individual with no/low resources.
a data point for your second paragraph: i play D&D weekly with a woman that got hired at google straight out of high school and worked there for 10 years.
Self taught, no degree, zero friction in the job market either early in my career (job offers on Wall Street and the startups I wanted to work with) or 25 years later; have done consulting work almost everywhere, and had offers from both big tech companies and unicorn startups. No investor has ever cared, either.
The "you'll be stuck with all the jobs other people don't want" thing is risible.
Yeah, I am very confused by this persons experience. I have never once seen anyone utilize their school network, either to get a job or to bring someone on; every time we get a referral, it is for someone who they have worked with before, not who they went to school with.
I have worked with people for YEARS before i even learned that they have or don’t have a CS degree. I have interviewed many dozens of people, both as a hiring manager and a peer, and we only look at schooling if they have zero professional experience.
In my experience, a degree can help you get your first job, but after that it is all about your work experience and the connections with the people you have worked with.
And when thinking about that first job you have to remember that you're burning 3-4 years of full-time work experience on the degree. That's a lot of time to fumble around and find your fit!
Commonly true, but in my five years of engineering school, in my summer after my freshman year, I was already employed in computer programming. The rest of my school had co-op periods during which I had summer stints in computer-programming-related jobs including at Bonneville Power Administration with a team working on computer monitoring of the system, with the idea that was to lead to control of that system; a stint as a co-op student at Wayerhauser Plup Bleach plant, working on a program to model the flow of pulp through a tower measuring the dose of chlorine-based bleach, working at a medical lab with odd jobs including generating a plot of a sensor measuring tremor in a patient's hand; working at an IBM sales office writing a program to measure the proper fill of a tanker truck based on the day's projected temperature, and finally as the first full-time employee of a company producing the first computer-based commercial electrocardiogram analysis service, all before graduation.
My first job, of course, was prior to all that, driving various vehicles on my Dad's dryland wheat farm in northern Montana.
So I feel that I was particularly lucky about finding good co-op positions, as many of my colleagues were at less interesting gigs at Motorolla, sorting resistors by color code.
> I have never once seen anyone utilize their school network
I've only seen it at one company in Los Angeles where the founders were from USC and several USC students ended up interning with us through their networking program, a few of which joined the company full time later on. It's been the exception so far.
In my experience over the past 5 years in EU and Asia: Increasingly many companies wont even talk to you unless you have ‘a’ PhD. You dont need this piece of paper, but it is one hell of a life hack getting one.
Are you trying to apply cold? The way it usually works is that someone you have worked with before vouches for you and that gets you past that screening.
I'm self-taught. My first job I got lucky (or the grace of God, depending on your perspective). After that, it never mattered. I had experience, references, a track record.
And the older you get, the longer the track record, and the more it outweighs the piece of paper.
I'm primarily an embedded guy, though. If you're doing web apps, or desktop, or games, or phones, or high performance, or finance programming, your mileage may vary.
I'm sorry that that has been your experience. (Or maybe I shouldn't be sorry - FAANGs pay pretty well.) But what you say surprises me, for two reasons.
First, FAANGs get far more resumes than they have openings. Demanding a degree seems like an easy, lazy way to eliminate some. I'm kind of surprised that they don't take it. (I mean, they shouldn't take it, but I'm still kind of surprised.)
Second, many engineering organizations that are not FAANGs are trying to model their hiring on FAANG approaches. So I'm surprised that, if FAANGs would hire you, others won't - especially after you have experience at a FAANG.
If you worked in the industry for over 20 years and your network is weaker than a recent graduate, I wouldn’t blame it on the college, your networking game is just weak.
As a college drop out, i have a few friends from university in the various big companies but none of my jobs came through them (even when i want to work in a faang: i just didn’t need it).
> What's more valuable is the network and access to the alumni network of others who will hire you into their company just because you went to the same school as them. It's a big club
The size and value of this club of alums depends _entirely_ on where you went to school. Not everyone gets into MIT.
Yeah what you said BUT there’s also big opportunities in networking
I know people hate to hear it cause it sounds like a magic bullet and it does and I don’t like having to market myself either but it does work.
You don’t even really need to have an alumni for networking, just a few relatively nice / ok projects, a website and some business cards and you’re off!
> It's a big club and you won't be in it if you decide to self-study. That's the cold, hard truth.
This almost reads like conspiracy. There’s barely anything like that in reality, and the kind of network people finds at school is usually extremely weak. Otherwise, job boards wouldn’t exist.
I highly dispute this. Networks in college are absolutely a thing and absolutely advantageous. In my experience, the network didn't come from just sitting in class, but from extracurricular competition engineering/cs teams. Competition teams certainly helped many people get their first jobs through friends referring each other or elevated exposure to employers. In fact, recruiters would often have separate hiring events for the competition teams and then have the standard college hiring event. There's also an intangible effect from being surrounded by other highly motivated and mission driven students that you gain in these environments. I am sure there is a way to get involved in similar teams outside of college, but a well situated college significantly lowers the barrier to joining these teams and almost creates a funnel for it should you choose to spend your spare time in such as team.
>There's also an intangible effect from being surrounded by other highly motivated and mission driven students that you gain in these environments.
I think that is absolutely true. But other than one thing (which was part of a class and was really great even if we didn't do well), didn't really do competition teams in any formal way other than some class groups. Certainly nothing involving separate hiring events.
Both your points do absolutely not mirror my experience. In traditional career paths (established company) a diploma helps a lot -- for some roles you won't even be considered otherwise.
And your take on networks being useless is also strange. I work closely with people who have large and well-maintained networks, and the value they produce because of that is insane.
> Both your points do absolutely not mirror my experience. In traditional career paths (established company) a diploma helps a lot -- for some roles you won't even be considered otherwise.
For a first job? Maybe.
I don’t have one and it’s barely been a talking point back when I interviewed, regardless of company size.
It depends on the school. I knew a few younger guys from Stanford and whatnot who were really into the idea of preferring hiring people from particular schools if not their own.
unless youre ivy league theres no more connecting. universities are completely irrelevant to tech in modern day. people are talking about their experiences 20 years ago. now, its just expensive adult daycare. remove federal student loans and grants and the market will finally correct.
Sounds like a good way to separate oneself from a disgusting, greed-driven, and fake environment. Not to mention that for-profit education institutions have zero interest in your skill set—it's your money they want, not your success. I would probably enjoy studying CS in Norway, though.
As someone who did go the self-taught route, I wouldn't say it's the route to take if you enjoy depth via academic, I dropped out of university. I'm a practical person and learn as I do, I disagree OP, it sucks you got that end of the straw. I have had it just as good as others but you just need to put the extra effort in. Yes, you do get jobs not so good as the grand but you cash in those later.
The route up is just more steep but in the end you end up more valuable experience and within 15 years time you then can cash it all in for a fortune 100 company. As that's where I am and I am only in my mid-thirties
You should go to college however if university isn't your thing, don't feel like your forever going to be an entry grade tech.
The route is more steep but it's all worth it; just keep seeking higher jobs with every departure.
I am a college student, about to begin my 3/4 year of the course. Most of the things about networking and all don't apply to me, because although my Uni is one of the best in the country, it is mostly focused on humanities and the CS school (or any engineering school) is quite new with only batch of graduates till now.
I am certainly no novice, easily one of the top 10 in my school and definitely top 2 in my year, though that does not mean much here.
So my question is should I focus more on projects now, or do OSSU instead, or try to do both?
So several people in this thread have talked about academia giving you a network, and getting jobs via that, but have also conflated that with companies only hiring from particular schools.
The network of contacts you make through university and your careers is a mechanism by which you hear about jobs you might otherwise never get the chance to apply for. That’s a very real thing, but will tend to be dominated by contacts you make after university as your career progresses.
The other thing of needed a degree from a particular university, or a PhD, isn’t so much about a network as that degree being a shibboleth. The person reading your job application sees that and knows there are questions they don’t need to ask.
These are both things you can, and may need to, work around if you go down the self taught route. Depending on the work you want to do you may need to make sure you do work which either you can point to or other people will see so that you hear about those jobs, or get a referral to avoid the normal job requirements.
> you might otherwise never get the chance to apply for
It kind of reminds me of the whole "luck is not a strategy, but increasing your number of attempts is". Having a network increases the number of chances you have to get lucky. I have a friend that joined a work softball league, and that network eventually led him to a role with another company participating in the league.
I wonder how much the 'free and open source' requirements of this curriculum hold it back. Someone serious about self learning shouldn't be hesitant to invest some money in good material
This is fair. One example is the discrete math course (called Math for CS). The MIT course is widely agreed (in the Discord server anyway) to be harder to follow than even just a good discrete math textbook, but there are no high quality discrete math textbooks that are free and open source (as least that I know of).
I’m doing OSSU, and I went for “Discrete Mathematics with Applications” by Susanna Epps. Cost $50 for a used textbook. Technically I’m deviating from the curriculum but I’d say I’m still “doing OSSU”
Maybe getting a degree counters any social shortcomings for most people, its a piece of paper that will get your foot in the door so to speak. It says "I've spent 3-4 years working on this area, have at least half a brain and am committed". So even if you can't speak very well to people (yet) you still have something going for you. If you're self taught, you don't have any of that so you've gotta be pretty good socially and at networking, or just really really lucky. I think being good socially breaks all the rules honestly and is like a superpower, you could probably talk your way into most things with little in the way of real skills.
This is very interesting. It is great also as a reference for those that already now some CS. Ideally none should reside on youtube, given it is named "Open Source", but I get that a lot of resources reside there.
As an avid designer of CS courses and curricula in the not-so-distant past, I would like for it turn into a success criterion that your course gets included in this listing.
Back when I was involved in designing the BSc education at the University of Copenhagen, I remember referring the committee to the ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI Computer Science Curricula. Great to see that there has been an update to these recently, complete with a Generative AI section and all :-)
Of course it is dense, after all it is the hardest type of education ever known to humans. A store of knowledge if you will. You can become a cyber hornet after investing into all that hardest knowledge!
Surely a community college level education is more conducive to getting a job. And if aim is to make money I'd probably attempt something closer to neal.fun or levels.io not this. If you're not getting the piece of paper then you maybe as well yolo it
What does that leave? Straight interest only learning for the sake of it?
Don't try to be entirely self-taught. Everyone needs guidance and feedback from experts in the domain; otherwise you are certain to misunderstand things, have large blind spots (truly blind; you'll be unaware of them), not understand how things apply in real situations, and have no exposure to the latest knowledge.
It doesn't have to be via college; there is apprenticeship, even if usually unofficial in IT, at many jobs. (College can be fantastic in many ways if you have the opportunity - don't let the reactionary politics ruin your life-changing opportunity - especially if you are intellectually curious.)
Also, be very choosy about who you learn from; I'd be much more choosy about that then about what you learn, or even where I work or the job I do - do anything to work with and learn from the best people. The range of knoweldge and skill in the real world is almost impossible to conceive of, and a lot of it is so much BS. If you learn from C-level people, you will have C-level knowledge and skills and never know better until you meet someone who is B-level or A-level - there are entire organization and towns of C-level people. One big advantage of going to someplace like the Bay Area is the community of highly-skilled people, many on a level you are unlikely to meet in most other places, and being exposed to the newest ideas. Just being there can raise your game, if you take advantage of it.
It’s worth making this very clear for learners: A Computer Science education is **not** the thing that will prepare you to work and make money in many real-world _jobs_.
Some? Yes. Many? No.
This blurb from one of the course pages (unintentionally) says it well:
> Because the point of computer science isn't to teach you a language. Or to teach you to code. Or to teach you to be a fullstack software engineer. Computer Science is a very narrowly-applied applied math with wide-ranging practical usage. But if you strip away all the qualifying language, it's math. Which means it has certain overarching rules that are completely, totally independent of your implementation language.
In short: the point of Computer Science courses is not to teach you to do the thing that you will be doing when employed at the company that pays you.
Another:
> if you want to read white papers you're going to want to read Lisp
Most jobs are not about reading or writing white papers. Almost all Computer Science courses are an _academic_ pursuit, not a practical one, and are taught as such.
If your goal is to _work_ in the industry, this is _a_ path, but it is a very inefficient one.
Depending on what work you are happy with, 80%+ of the content here will not contribute to your success.
Will learning the things taught in these courses exercise your problem-solving and other mental abilities? Yes. Will they teach you broadly-applicable principles that you could apply to your work? Hard _maybe_, depending on their teaching and on how well you learn and generalize. In any case, you may well end up doing work that utilizes little of this.
If you want to work in research, a math-or-fundamental-sciences-heavy field, or with teams of folks creating new programming languages or database engines for example, then certainly some of these courses (and more) are required.
But it’s worth warning potential learners that a full Computer Science education is _neither an efficient nor a necessary path to a job in the field_.
What is?
One example: There is much available and satisfying work in building user-facing applications like web and mobile apps.
If your goal is to do that kind of work, then it’s best to relentlessly focus on the things that you will actually be doing at your job: Building things.
Broadly speaking, employers pay you using the money that they are making (or hope to make) by solving problems and/or providing services using software/applications that you will help write. So practice writing it. Learn to build real things: Mobile, web, or desktop apps that do a thing that _you_ would want to pay for. Find courses that teach that. Practice it. Hit a wall, research and figure out how to overcome it. Repeat. Submit PR’s to open source projects, especially ones where experienced maintainers review your code. Learn from that feedback. Read their code and understand how it comes together to create the app you are using. Have LLM’s review your code, even, if no skilled human is available.
Practice working with other people. Learn how to write and communicate clearly and unambiguously.
Find and fix bugs in open-source codebases.
Embrace that working in the field means a commitment to non-stop, career-long learning.
Later, after you’ve freed up mental space by mastering the basic mechanics of programming, begin researching and applying the techniques and methods for writing code that other people find pleasant to read, interact with, and modify/extend.
Build something that you can show to prospective employers.
You will also learn many more things from the people you work with.
Many of the hard skills you will learn through doing _these_ things will directly transfer to the work you do, because _it is the work you will do._
Early DiffEQ is pretty cookbook. OCW or, without looking it up, various MOOCs out there (though full resources are often not free these days) would probably work. It is useful for some areas like system dynamics.
After completing the requirements of the curriculum above, you will have completed the equivalent of a full bachelor's degree in Computer Science. Congratulations!
Is not strictly true. I've been part of CS program accreditation, for example:
The program outcomes for a CS degree accredited by ABET is:
Graduates of the program will have an ability to:
1. Analyze a complex computing problem and apply principles of computing and other relevant disciplines to identify solutions.
2. Design, implement, and evaluate a computing-based solution to meet a given set of computing requirements in the context of the program’s discipline.
3. Communicate effectively in a variety of professional contexts.
4. Recognize professional responsibilities and make informed judgments in computing practice based on legal and ethical principles.
5. Function effectively as a member or leader of a team engaged in activities appropriate to the program’s discipline.
Really, this list of resources only speak to #1 and #2. A little bit of #4, but it seems to be an afterthought in the list of resources. However, self-study is not going to get you #3 and #5 at all. Typically in order to fulfill these requirements, the curriculum would include much more than just the technical topics listed.
Indeed, OSSU says that included courses must "Match the curricular standards of the CS 2013: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Computer Science"
I'm familiar with this document. It includes this:
The education that undergraduates in computer science receive must adequately prepare them for the workforce in a more holistic way than simply conveying technical facts. Indeed, soft skills (such as teamwork, verbal and written communication, time management, problem solving, and flexibility) and personal attributes (such as risk tolerance, collegiality, patience, work ethic, identification of opportunity, sense of social responsibility, and appreciation for diversity) play a critical role in the workplace. Successfully applying technical knowledge in practice often requires an ability to tolerate ambiguity and to negotiate and work well with others from different backgrounds and disciplines. These overarching considerations are important for promoting successful professional practice in a variety of career paths.
The reason I'm saying this is because often times, an undergraduate I'm advising will come into my office with a schedule of 12-15 credits of tech/math/science. They will explain to me "I only want to take technical courses, I don't see the purpose of taking courses in English or History, they are a waste of time." And I get that, I felt that way in school too. I thought those courses were preventing me from learning CS, but it was only after I left school when I realized all those "soft" courses I had taken actually prepared me to face the challenges I would in CS.
So I will continue to watch this resource, because I love a good compendium. But I would say they should not say what they provide is "equivalent of a full bachelor's degree in Computer Science" because even the standards they say they are trying to meet indicate they fall short.
To be fair #3 and #4 are abilities I believe can only be learnt through actual work experience. Not much colleges can do in that regard. Sure, group projects, presentations, hosting/participating in workshops etc. did help a bit, but they were all fairly rudimentary in terms of developing those skills. Internships are key.
Couldn't agree more regarding taking English/History courses. I find that understanding and dissecting good English literature isn't any less challenging than any computer science problem.
Shout out to Stanford that made it possible to start a CS education for free, for a Romanian kid who could not afford it (me). The free video course they have had up there since about 20 years was one of the foundations of my programming career now.
But... are there _any_ good resources for _networking_ / _integration_ for self-thought cs ppl? This is the missing elefant in the room imho. With AI automating lower-level upwork/fiver/freelancer jobs, good luck getting started in an actual career.
Let's focus on talking about the self-taught resources please, don't talk about other off topics, not everyone learning to find a good job on big companies, the reality is, when a man/woman want to self studying CS, he/she age is already not a fit for those companies.
We want to learn even after the right age, just because we love the computer.
I'm 37 and live in one of those lesser-known countries whose diplomas likely don’t hold much weight elsewhere—but that’s not the point. I’ve decided to change my profession. After many trials and errors, I studied Python. I wrote some scripts and bots, but I kept feeling like something was missing—I didn’t really understand programming.
Then I discovered OSSU and, after reviewing their curriculum, I realized just how little I actually knew about computer science. I started over from scratch, even relearning math. Because of the language barrier (yes, I learned English by forcing myself to study in English), my conversational skills are still shaky, and this text was polished with the help of GPT.
I’m not thinking about a job just yet. My current goal is to get a solid academic education, and I believe OSSU is one of the best initiatives ever created—accessible to the entire world. It's not just about being free. Maybe the best universities are in the U.S., but compared to what's available in my country, the OSSU curriculum is several levels higher in both quality and structure.
As for work, I plan to contribute to the open-source world, hoping to make the world a better place, just like the creators of OSSU did. Education should be accessible to everyone—not just a privileged few.
For graduate/research it's of course a different case altogether, these elite institution seem to mostly be elite in research, not pedagogy. What probably does matter is that the base level of tertiary education is good enough (which seems like it's the case in western Europe, but maybe not in a lot of the developing world).
Honestly, I'm not aiming to participate in cutting-edge research or be involved in elite academic projects. My goal is much simpler — I just want to become a good, competent developer who understands the fundamentals of computer science and writes code thoughtfully. I love computers and problem-solving, and I enjoy building things for the fun of it, not for money or prestige. If I manage to live long enough and find work — that’s more than enough for me. For me, a platform like OSSU (Open Source Society University) is the only truly accessible and supportive environment where I can learn, get help, and grow. I can't afford an expensive formal education, but thanks to the community and open materials, I'm making steady progress. As for the claim that "at the undergraduate level it doesn't really matter" and "you'll likely get about the same education in any decent university as in places like Stanford or MIT" — I have to disagree. In many so-called "decent" universities, the baseline can often mean: • outdated curricula and technologies (e.g., focusing on C without exposure to modern languages and practices), • a purely theoretical approach with little connection to real-world applications, • instructors with little or no industry or research experience, • and unfortunately, sometimes a lack of academic integrity. In such environments, students may graduate with a diploma but without real practical skills or understanding — making their education nominal rather than competitive. That’s why it’s not just about where you study, but what and how you study. If someone is learning CS with curiosity, consistency, and a focus on real-world practice — even without a prestigious degree, they can still go far. I hope to become that kind of developer, even if I'm not from MIT.
Really inspiring thankyou.
Although I've not used it, I've heard good things about Khan Academy... Which is aimed at kids/teenagers but would cover any core principles you might be missing:
https://www.khanacademy.org/computing
Yeah, I studied with Khan Academy too, and my kids are learning with Khan as well. But unfortunately, it doesn't go deep into core principles. There are better resources for Algebra, Geometry and Precalculus, like Professor Leonard, OpenStax, and The College Preparatory School, which is listed in the OSSU prerequisites for Computer Science.
Coursera and Udacity have been around for a long time. Not to mention countless youtube lecture courses on any imaginable subject.
There is same courses on youtube, + books etc. All is free and perfectly organized.
If you're an experienced engineer that wants to give back to learners, OSSU is a great place to do so. This can look like:
- Setting a regular time that you'll pair (or mob!) program on a side project of your own with OSSU learners. - Developing familiarity with one or more courses in the curriculum and responding to students who have questions or are stuck. - Attending weekly check-in meetings, sharing what you are working on and listening to what learners are working on.
To do so - Visit our Discord server: https://discord.gg/wuytwK5s9h - And ping me @waciuma or the @tutor role
I'm one of the leaders of OSSU and we agree that community, networking, and projects are part of a complete education. That's why we celebrate not only the professors and universities creating free courses, but also the many engineers and practitioners that have volunteered with OSSU learners over the years. I hope some of you will join that group!
No Discord, please.
Plenty of FOSS alternatives exist.
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It does make me sad that in 2025 we still don't have an open real-time chat service.
IRC was too janky for widespread use... Everything else that has come after it hasn't been able to reach the "network effect". Too many options, too many half finished projects. Lots of missed opportunities.
Zulip works pretty well for this, rust-lang.zulipchat.com is a good example.
Completely open to guests, open-source and self hostable.
But network effect doesn't have an impact here, does it? Matrix exists and would be a great fit for this initiative.
If someone is committed enough to help out but using Matrix (either directly from the web browser or installing the Element client) is too big a burden I'd question that original commitment.
PS: I'm not affiliated with Matrix in any way.
I like Matrix but unfortunately it has major stability issues. The GrapheneOS project moved most of their chat over to Discord after their Matrix community got nuked twice. They still maintain a Matrix community which is bridged to their Discord instance, but most users are on the Discord side of the fence.
IMHO, Revolt is a better FOSS Discord alternative: https://revolt.chat/. Relatively young project, but they are unashamedly cloning the Discord user experience (even with the name). By default it uses infrastructure in Europe run by the project maintainers but can also be self hosted.
You guys forget about XMPP or what? It's got tons of clients, lots with E2EE with OMEMO if you're into it. Matrix sucks shit by comparison.
I've been using IRC for almost 30 years. We communicate pretty easily
I love open protocols, IRC, etc but right now the reality is that discord is where people are.
I hated when Slack broke their IRC bridge but ultimately Slack was better for most people.
That was my reaction, but I have never used Discord...
What's the problem with it?
This is just me, but aside from being complete proprietary spyware, I've got problems with the culture it's designed to cultivate.
On a normal text-based chat like IRC or XMPP, you chat with people, maybe share files and that's about it, the way it should be.
On Discord, everything is grabbing your attention in this pavlovian game where the actual substance of what you're talking about is secondary, on the other hand it's more about cultivating attention towards yourself with reactions and memes. It also promotes segregating everyone into a caste system with "roles" and whatnot. If you've ever been around you'll notice how quickly people sardonically accept Discord as being the name-brand platform for predators and sex perverts.
I think a lot of the problem with kids on the net these days has to do with the way they chat with people like this. When you're on IRC you've got a place to "post into the void", where what you say is ultimately ethereal and even if two people are flaming one day they can go back to being buddies the next day cause it doesn't really matter. When you're on Discord everything you say is logged, and the air hangs thick around you cause what you're supposed to say is meant to matter to someone, even though most people are just cultivating this emotional persona detached from their real selves. So you get this really toxic cesspool as a cultural penchant built-in.
I've never really connected with that many people I've met through Discord the on the same level as IRC-adjacent people, FWIW.
It's a chat program designed to be anti-user inherently.
And it's spyware.
Discord being full of sex perverts and pedophiles are just reasons to avoid it after the fact that it is a terrible, terrible replacement for IRC channels.
If you are afraid of IRC, playing Matrix should be no problem. But please don't play discord.
Discord is very accessible and convenient for learners to just hop in and ask questions.
Sure, I suppose that is similar to how facebook is convenient for organising events.
It might be considered somewhat ironic though that a curriculum with “open source” in the name would use something that is considered very non-open.
Like the EFF organising their next meet in a facebook event.
I understand the parents incredulousness.
Did you just assume they don’t? EFF has a fairly active Facebook page. You meet people where they are, not where you decide you wish they were.
I think it's not on brand, but I can't confirm your statement because facebook is a walled garden.
https://i.imgur.com/SeL8NHH.jpeg
I understand, too, and "Like the EFF organising their next meet in a facebook event." is a really good way to put it, but then again, were it not for Discord, it might not have a thriving community (assuming it currently has).
I run a comp sci education program to help students self direct their education[1]. We sometimes reference the OSSU curriculum.
Althought there are lots of benefits to the self-taught route, there are some caveats which students should be aware of. You will have to work harder on the "signaling" and networking. There are definitely social benefits in being associated with a university. And a lack of degree will mean you're "marked"[2], which you'll have to overcome. A setback or mistake will be attributed to your lack of degree, whether justified or not. And some hiring managers can't take the political risk of hiring a non-degreed candidate. Not insurmountable, but this means we work on it from day one. If you do decide to self-direct your education, the benefits are that you learn faster and don't waste time spining the hamster wheel, so to speak, to grind out courses. Everything you learn is in context and relevant. If you realize you miss some fundamentals, you'll just go back and learn those concepts/topics. It's a different way of learning, which imo, is inevitable for technical professions. But it's not for everyone, and some students just vibe with it more.
What's sad is that many students are sort of forced into the self-taught route, because they don't have the financial resources to go to college/university. And if they're not aware of the trade-offs, they could really struggle.
[1] https://www.divepod.to [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness
I’ve followed and part-time mentored several people through their self-taught education. There are a lot of pitfalls and traps that can send people down the wrong path if they’re not careful.
One that I did not expect but that seems obvious in retrospect: It’s really easy to start reading Reddit or watching Twitch streams of developers ranting about the industry and think that actual skills don’t matter any more. There’s a temptation to think that you’re a fool to study and practice the job skills because what you really need to do is optimize for interview skills. So they drop everything and starting grinding LeetCode, putting unfinished “side projects” on their GitHub that have all the right things in the README.md (just hope nobody actually looks at the code) and memorizing S.T.A.R. format responses for the common behavioral interview questions.
This strategy actually worked reasonable well for a few years, but the game has changed and most companies are better at catching professional interviewers who don’t know how to do much else.
I should note that this mindset isn’t unique to self-taught people: There’s a parallel epidemic of cheating in college among students who see it as “just a piece of paper” and think they’d be foolish to actually learn the subject material. This also hits hard when they reach graduation and are faced with the current style of interviews which are not as easy as they expected to bluff your way through.
This is something I had to deal with as well. It also surprized me in terms of how limited their information sources are, esp with younger students. One thing I found helpful is to actually introduce them to engineers in person (like a take your kid to work day), which I think grounds them a bit. But this box-checking influence is everywhere, including in the K-12 curriculum. In some ways I understand their perspective. Most schools/teachers do have a box-checking mentality, and I think students intuitively understand that what these "educators" are after is a metric. They don't actually care about real skills. But to your point, the rest of the world actually values competency and it's something students should strive towards for the long-term.
> putting unfinished “side projects” on their GitHub that have all the right things in the README.md (just hope nobody actually looks at the code) and memorizing S.T.A.R. format responses for the common behavioral interview questions.
This perfectly describes my experience when reviewing resumes of grads from certain bootcamps. The program held their hand as evidenced by every student have a similar setup: claiming the cookie cutter 3 month CRUD white labeled webapp as work experience. Everyone on the team is a “co-founder”. Apparently all 4 people "managed a remote team of 4 developers". When you dig into the code, it’s a toy project not intended for any real users. The bulk of their "webapp" is a "case study" page with sections including "the problem", "the solutions", "What is a build a process". It seems these sections were assigned as homework. Their resume includes what things they clicked on in the AWS UI.
In fact, it seems the whole group were instructed to post on HackerNews "who is hiring" with the exact same template. That is the extent of handholding occuring in these bootcamps.
Some challenges as an autodidact:
- Some people assume you lack theoretical/foundational knowledge.
- Guidance/mentorship is harder to come by.
- You’re likely learning on your free time while working. Quality time is hard to carve out.
- It’s harder to get a sense of where you’re at.
- External validation is much more difficult to get. But you need it when you’re searching for a job.
- You inevitably make a lot of decisions that university students don’t have to make. This can be taxing.
- It requires more discipline, because there isn’t anyone checking in or forcing you to demonstrate your learning.
On the other hand, overcoming these challenges is beneficial, especially if you never really stop learning/studying. You pause from time to time, but you pick up again, because there’s always more to learn.
A big advantage that might not be obvious: You pick up niche subjects, simply because they interest you.
You’re not just learning things that seem useful in your context. It’s actually often the other way around: you learn things that you’re curious about and perhaps a year later you encounter a situation that you can solve a problem because of that.
Curiosity is an interesting mechanism. It’s often a better guide at driving your learning than an analytical approach.
I agree. Self-directed education definitely front loads a lot of the problems/decision making early on. I think one of the goals of a good advisor, if you can find one, is to smooth out these issues so they don't become overwhelming.
And to your point about curiosity-driven learning, I'm often shocked at how deep some students get with their learning, if/when they are interested. In some ways, I think we really underestimate how capable young people are. And it's very satisfying, as an educator, to see a student start to embrace continuous learning, as their default mode, and don't interpret learning as a chore or box to check.
I was immature right out of high school and fumbled a really good opportunity to finish a degree in computer science. After getting married and having kids I later went back and quickly finished a degree in IT, but CS was always my first love.
A couple years ago I found myself in a place where I would really benefit from finishing my CS education. I put a lot of thought into getting a true second BS degree, a post-bacc, bootcamps, etc but eventually settled on OSSU.
It’s taken me longer to get through it than I wanted (life happens) but I have nothing but positive things to say about the curriculum so far and about how it’s affected my career and honestly my own happiness.
I blog about it occasionally. This is the first one and explains why I chose OSSU over the other options available to me: https://dustinbriles.com/ossu-blog-1/
A better alternative imo https://teachyourselfcs.com
I looked into this when I was trying to figure out how to round out my CS education. The lack of community is the primary reason I went with OSSU instead.
Genuine question: why do you believe Teach Yourself CS is superior to OSSU especially in light of the community aspect?
Full disclosure: I’m a “social organizer” for one of the cohorts in OSSU and blog OSSU sometimes
I think https://csprimer.com/courses/ is a good fit if you also want community. I think Oz Nova who is behind csprimer was one of the authors of teach yourselfcs
I’ve been looking closely at this too. $75/month isn’t bad all things considered.
I’d love to hear more personal anecdotes from people who are active in CSPrimer. Downsides I could see (not having joined):
- Some parts of CSPrimer are not finished yet.
- How active is the community really? It’s hard to tell without joining and seeing for yourself.
- How much access to Oz do you really get (same as above)? - How much mentorship do you really get (again same as above).
He is pretty active and holds regular Q&A sessions.
Simple and to the point curriculum.
That is a list of textbooks and videos that might provide some value to people (or not, in a couple of cases), not a computer science curriculum.
This guide hasn't been updated since 2020, does it need or will there be updates in the future?
There will be updates. But imo it doesn't need any.
You can definitely make the self-taught path work. I'm proof of that and have been working in industry for over 20 years. However, what I will say is the following: there are certain companies and roles which you will never be able to access. These are often times the best roles, best companies, have the most money, etc. A degree isn't just the time spent studying and knowledge -- you can do that part yourself. What's more valuable is the network and access to the alumni network of others who will hire you into their company just because you went to the same school as them. It's a big club and you won't be in it if you decide to self-study. That's the cold, hard truth.
So what's left for someone self-taught with no degree? You are left with all the jobs the others don't want. You'll be flipping through the crazies, outright scams, poorly capitalized companies, or places that are already in a state of distress. VERY rarely you will find a real job that you can plan to stay at for any length of time. You WILL be paid less, and you're more likely to get taken advantage of. You will have a harder time getting multiple offers at once, because your overall demand is lower. So that erodes your position in the market and over time it will feel like you're on a completely different tract financially. You will need to work twice as hard, because finding a new job is much harder, even if you're good. You will constantly be doubted, by first yourself and imposter syndrome and next by those around you who have degrees. Make one mistake and the consequences are that much more dire.
It's better than nothing, but if you have the opportunity to go to school (I didn't), do it over the self-taught route.
I don’t mean to discount your personal experience, but I’m 100% self taught, and I’ve worked at some bougie megacorps, unicorns and startups of varying degrees of maturity.
I’ve never felt like doors have been closed or that others doubt me because of my lack of education. I’ve interviewed at Google and Citadel, had an offer from Meta, etc. It doesn’t feel like anyone has denied me opportunities outright.
I make north of $200k/year cash plus the equity and perks at an early stage startup. I’ve been through two exits so far. Nothing outrageous but I’m rich by most peoples standards. It doesn’t feel like lack of schooling has impacted me financially.
I did start programming and doing the startup thing at 19, so maybe the early start was an advantage. I could just be mind numbing lucky. But, from my point of view, warning the up and coming youngin’s off the self taught path is a disservice.
> from my point of view, warning the up and coming youngin’s off the self taught path is a disservice.
Hard disagree on this. It’s true there are a lot of successful people in the industry with no degree, or (like myself) with a non-CS degree. And I agree with you that the OP’s claim that there’s a ceiling for those people is overstated. But just because it was possible to have a successful start in the industry 10 or 20 years ago that way doesn’t mean it’s good advice now to tell 18 year olds that skipping the degree and self studying is a good idea. The job market is exceptionally tough currently for entry level engineers and not likely to get better, due to the end of ZIRP and AI productivity gains. Companies who have that rare entry-level position open can take their pick from a large pool of candidates. They will naturally prioritize people with a CS degree from a top school because without previous work experience that is the best signal they have to sort the deluge of resumes.
I still think software engineering is a good career choice for a smart kid, but it’s not the magic ride to prosperity it was 10 years ago. I would hesitate now to recommend any path into it except the top-school CS degree route. Sure, there will be exceptions, but you will have a vastly easier time if you follow that path.
> I would hesitate now to recommend any path into it except the top-school CS degree route. Sure, there will be exceptions, but you will have a vastly easier time if you follow that path.
And how is this useful to someone who can't get into these top schools because life is happening? Also, your outlook seems very unrealistic to me.
This is software development we're talking about, not medicine, not mechanical engineering. To be a top tier software developer, you need access to a decent computer and good resources to learn. The two boxes have never been easier to check. Add to that the excellent guidance of curricula like OSSU, TeachYourselfCS, and others like them, if you have the mind for it and a bit of discipline, your skills will be as sharp as any top school graduate's. "Self-taught" today isn't the same game as what it was 20 years ago. You can make yourself incredibly valuable on your own.
Now, getting a degree in CS and teaching yourself CS are different goals. The first is a pursuit of recognition for a skill that you may or may not have, and along the way, perhaps you've obtained a truly valuable education for which you're also grateful. The latter is a self-directed pure pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and skill. Regardless of your path, these are the real gems companies are after, and if you truly have them, you will NOT be invisible in this domain. They're rare commodities in the real world, regardless of how you get there.
Getting hired in software has always been about showing that you can build software. There's no danger of this changing. Sure, it may mean different things to different companies, but that's always what it's been about. Some want people that can crack algo problems, some want hackers, some want makers with a portfolio, some want tech wizards that understand the stack up and down. No matter, you can opt in to any of the above outside of academia and make a space for yourself.
> And how is this useful to someone who can't get into these top schools because life is happening? Also, your outlook seems very unrealistic to me.
If you can't go to school because of life, chances are you can't self-study because of life as self-studying is harder.
> This is software development we're talking about, not medicine, not mechanical engineering.
Software development in many ways has more competition than those fields that have entry level positions in more rural areas.
> To be a top tier software developer, you need access to a decent computer and good resources to learn.
No, not to be a top tier software developer.
> Add to that the excellent guidance of curricula like OSSU, TeachYourselfCS, and others like them,
Someone who want to become a software developer shouldn't prioritize studying CS.
> if you have the mind for it and a bit of discipline, your skills will be as sharp as any top school graduate's
It will be many times as hard reaching that level yourself.
> Regardless of your path, these are the real gems companies are after, and if you truly have them, you will NOT be invisible in this domain.
Little to no indication that this is true. More like companies might still hire someone they need if they pass all the recruiters and tests favouring the traditional path.
> Getting hired in software has always been about showing that you can build software.
Always has been a academic, military and business field. That is why hackers happened in the first place.
Since we are at HN, you can look at YC.
https://www.ycombinator.com/people
Almost every partner and the founders have an elite or close to elite education. Something only around 1% of the population have, yet they make up all of the people. That is in an untraditional firm which literally runs Hacker News.
But let's say I'm wrong. No harm, no foul. Just go self-study then. Should be easy with that $432 lifestyle. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074340
> due to the end of ZIRP and AI productivity gains.
I think you're missing the mark with this analysis.
If you go back to the original dot com bubble it was as much of a hardware bubble as a software one. Same thing with the mobile bubble. The AI bubble we are in has NOTHING to do with productivity and everything to do with hardware. I, as a software engineer am not going to come up with a product that can compete with any of the major players without a massive capital investment.
Meanwhile, the price to play as a software engineer is also driven by high costs. AWS, for better or worse is the model and the go to, and it is NOT cheap by any measure. Its pricing model looks more like the iPhone and less like an efficient market. AWS is MOST of amazons profit margins. It makes tech companies more like franchisee renting the location for their fast food joint and less like independent entities.
The thing is there are TONS of gaps in the software marketplace that need filled. These are companies that are going to be in the 2-3 million a year range and capable of being run by a small team (think ~5 people). Nothing that would appeal to the ycombinator set. You don't need Kubernetes, Kafka, or high performance bleeding edge Rust or massive Autoscaling to run these services. They are never going to get huge, and in fact they offer enough room to start another company of the same scale if one is ambitious and wants to diversify.
Does your average 18 year old know this? No, because most people who write code for a living don't seem to know where these gaps are. Do the math on what it takes to make 100k a year at 10 bucks a month... add a zero for a million, multiply by 3 for "small team"... The number is shockingly small.
Does your average 19 year old have the chops to figure this out? No, because 20 and 30 something laid off software engineers can't seem to figure it out either, even ones with "top degrees".
That doesn't mean that there isn't a path for the sharp young kid to "skip school" and go directly into industry. That path is open source. A history of strong contributions and being smart is going to build a better network than any CS degree ever would/will... However if you can do both, open source and a degree (from anyplace) you're even better off! The same could be said for working at Fedex, Walmart or Costco while you get a cs degree from anyplace and seeking a job in a corporate office after. You have a set of experiences that make you invaluable as a contributor.
Lastly, no one talks about the bad guys. There are plenty of scammers and thieves abusing technical skills who lack formal education and do well for themselves. If we're going to remove all the options and only have a narrow path, will we end up with more criminals and fewer contributors? This is sort of why "Russian hackers" is one of the givens in the industry (crime did/does pay well).
I still think software engineering is a good career choice for a smart kid, but you have to bring more to the table than just code if you want to prosper!
>It makes tech companies more like franchisee renting the location for their fast food joint and less like independent entities.
AWS, the strip mall of the internet. I’ve been saying this for a while. AWS is nice and all but don’t bet your innovation on a service they provide, rather provide a service on their infrastructure that solves your business needs and if AWS retires the service you were using, you can still continue operating.
Unfortunately this means all roads lead to kubernetes - sorry.
As a somewhat accomplished self taught outlier as well, my perspective is slightly different.
While it's absolutely possible to no have a degree and succeed in megacorp, don't discount the randomness (luck) involved in getting the right experience and meeting the right people at the right time of your career (and aligning with market demands).
Please don't hear this as "you didn't work hard to get to where you are". I certainly believe that folks like us, self taught, are able to work hard and teach ourselves what's needed to get to the next level because we cannot rely on credentials to carry us. A lot of things still need to go right for us to be successful, more so than folks with formal education, especially in the early stages of our careers.
I know friends in a similar boat.
Ultimately you can get very far if you are naturally talented technically and socially.
But if you are normal like most of us, you are lacking in one or more areas and going to school (or attending conferences or maintaining a popular resource) can be one of those ways to shore up one of your “less natural” skills, but no step is strictly required and not everything works for everyone.
Indeed, going to school for a degree in a programming related field (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Development; whatever) is also much more likely to leave you with a broad knowledge about topics in the field (different algorithms, things worth considering when developing code/architecture, etc). Yes, you can achieve that same level of knowledge with self-study, but a lot of (most) people won't; because it requires going above and beyond for most self-study "curriculum".
"But if you are normal like most of us", you'll wind up a more well rounded developer with a college education.
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released data on unemployment rates for recent college graduates (ages 22 to 27). The bank found that philosophy had an unemployment rate of 3.2%, less than computer science’s 6.1%, though computer science was more highly compensated.”
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/college-majors-wi...
Unemployment vs underemployment I believe is the missing item here.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... - this is the source, and has both unemployment and underemployment.
CS has a 6.1% unemployment rate and a 16.5% underemployment rate.
Philosophy has is at 3.2% unemployment and a 41.2% underemployment rate.
The philosophy major doesn't have their sights set on a $150k new grad salary at a big tech company out of college. They're flipping burgers or working as a business person somewhere.
This can be seen on various reddit computer science related career advice spots where people are holding out for the perfect software development job for years rather than getting a job somewhere. They're sending out (poorly crafted) resumes by the hundreds to jobs that their resume gives no indication that they're qualified for (or even read the posting) and ignoring the "we want to hire someone with some work ethic - bagging groceries and having a supervisor who can say that 'yes, Pat shows up on time each day sober'" is something is useful.
They're refusing to consider help desk roles - and when they do apply for those roles, its with a resume that points out how they're skilled at JavaScript and have published a module to npm.
They're refusing to apply to the job at state government that lists $650,000 - $80,000 for entry level position because that's not the job they saw themselves getting.
The CS majors are holding out and not getting jobs that are "beneath" them. The philosophy majors are getting any job that pays the bills.
I generally agree with your comment though I'm not sure what underemployment in philosophy even looks like. (And I could probably say the same of a lot of liberal arts.) Yes, it's not working at McDonald's But it could mean not making a whole lot more working at a publishing house.
Underemployment is working at a job that doesn't require that degree.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
> What is your definition of underemployment?
> The definition of underemployment is based on the kinds of jobs held by college graduates. A college graduate working in a job that typically does not require a college degree is considered underemployed. This analysis uses survey data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) Education and Training Questionnaire to help determine whether a bachelor’s degree is required to perform a job. The articles cited above describe the approach in detail.
> Some additional research that utilizes these data include “Working as a Barista After College Is Not as Common as You Might Think” (Liberty Street Economics).
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/01/workin...
I read it as a little more general than that.
>A college graduate working in a job that typically does not require a college degree is considered underemployed.
So, it's not just about philosophy majors working in a job that doesn't require a philosophy degree but about any college grad working in a job that doesn't require a degree--which according to this thread presumably includes developer jobs but that's a bit of a stretch :-) given that it often requires a degree.
My read on it is that it doesn't require that degree.
Working in a job that requires a college degree (but doesn't care what it is) would be underemployed for anyone with a degree... even though it requires a degree.
The "does it require a degree" is likely based on the BLS definition for the job... even if people say that you can get it without.
Developer - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Computer support - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Food server - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-serving/food-an...
I expect there's some selection bias at play. If you're taking a philosophy major in college it's likely you already feel confident in your post-graduation career, so can study things that you like. Whereas if you're in a CS track it's because whether you get a job depends on getting a degree. The student studying philosophy is in school as an alternative to work. The STEM major is in school as a prerequisite to work.
Or Philosophy is usually a path to Law School on the professional path or a PhD on the research/academia path. In both cases, many/most of those 22-27 year olds are still in school and thus not counted as unemployed.
I don't know how true it still is with law being, to a fair degree, perhaps primarily a good career path for those who can land at white-shoe firms and federal court clerkships. But I've known a lot of people who drifted into law school from liberal arts and related because they just didn't have great job prospects. And quite a few didn't even end up practicing law.
Perhaps in the US 20 years ago it was more attainable. Self taught in the UK is pretty tough, I lucked out getting a real engineering job at 19 in London, then I went into contracting which was great money. Now I’m working at a startup which I think has a solid team, but even with a decade+ of experience I’ve never even gotten a call back for roles at Google, Meta or the like.
Did interview with apple once for a low rate contracting role, pretty sure I gave them a superior architecture for their solution in the interview and they took it and ran with it, didn’t hear back.
I’ve had a heavy interest in finance since a young teenager but haven’t really be able to land an interview there either.
I’m genuinely considering getting a degree, I guess at 28 it’s not too late, though I feel I’ve wasted a lot of time.
I have been told by many interviewers of the companies that I have worked for, they would never hire someone without a degree. When I was assigned interview slots, I was instructed to filter out no CS degree people as their fundamentals cant possibly be strong. What they didnt know was I am self-taught and I lied on my resume about CS degree.
In what year did you get your first job as a programmer? I think it was not all that rare in the 80s and 90s for self taught programmers to get decent roles. And once you had more than, say five years, paid experience you were considered equivalent. But I haven’t heard of anyone getting an entry level job as a programmer without a degree recently.
Your story is an argument that it’s possible (as is the parent comment btw), but it doesn’t demonstrate that it’s likely. We have pretty hard evidence that it’s more difficult to get good jobs without the degree. Not impossible, just more difficult. The number of people without formal degrees occupying good jobs is a minority. Companies often screen for degrees, before you can ever get an interview; credentialism is real. And to parent’s point, some of the best jobs require advanced degrees. Do a little searching for the average pay with and without a degree (the answer shocked me!). Do a little searching for the number of patents filed by people with varying levels of formal education. Poke around for how many senior engineers, managers, and executives get there without formal higher education. There are some, it is possible! But not that likely.
While it might be true that warning someone away from college might be a disservice, it’s also a disservice to not talk about reality and avoid looking at who’s getting the jobs, right? If 90% of the 200k/yr jobs are people with degrees, then what is the practical choice for someone young who wants that and is weighing their options? Instead of telling someone not to go the self-taught route, would you feel more comfortable with telling them you’re roughly ten times more likely to get to $200k/yr mark with a degree than without, but make your own choice?
Personally I suspect the people like you who do best without a degree are often the ones who are going to ignore our advice anyway, and it doesn’t matter if you warn them. People who are super motivated and figure out what to learn and know what they want in life when they’re 18 years old are going to go get it. Most kids aren’t like that, they don’t know what they want yet, and aren’t motivated enough to learn everything they’d get from a 4 years degree on their own. For that majority, it’d be a disservice to recommend anything other than education, no?
Well, the basic issue (in my experience) is that self-taught tends to be written off and ends at the individual contributor senior role level.
> I make north of $200k/year cash plus the equity and perks at an early stage startup. I’ve been through two exits so far. Nothing outrageous but I’m rich by most peoples standards. It doesn’t feel like lack of schooling has impacted me financially.
I know people who have 8 figures and a large part of the reason they went the route they did was their education. These things are just not a one size fits all prescription but I've literally gotten "You have no degree, why are you applying?" e-mails that clearly was them thinking they were chastizing me for wasting their time.
Keep in mind I've been employed this whole time but I don't make north of $200k/year but that is more of a health thing than anything else. I have to be careful and manage my interactions with people because in the US you are 100% unprotected and I learned that the hard way if its not blindingly obvious to everyone you are disabled but rather something you and your doctor discussed if its worth disclosing and the answer was "eh, probably not" despite the fact my European colleagues that I know on a personal level are amazed I have to work at all, let alone without any disability protections.
It probably takes the smallest amount of interaction with you to tell you are absolutely brilliant.
I am self taught and wouldn't hire myself to write anything software wise.
For the average person, a degree is to signal a person is at least not me.
At least smart enough to get through 4 years of CS.
If someone is upper level brilliant it is hard to not come out on top no matter what path they take.
That doesn't scale though for the average person and many are self deluded in their abilities.
> north of $200k/year
and working at startups. you're at the top of the bottom.
that's the beauty of the faith on meritocracy and not sharing salaries.
your privileged, ivy league clone, would have had lazy jobs and made that on the first couple years out of college, while learning the job core skills on company time. honestly can't understand why you chose to minimize your effort.
I worked for several years as a software dev before I went back to school for my CS degree.
I’m a much better developer after spending 3 years (already had 90 hours worth of a history degree) studying a prepared curriculum instead of bouncing around learning about whatever interested me.
I think it’s possible to do that on your own but the vast majority of people will never come close.
I’ve also definitely worked with self taught programmers who were better than me. But I’ve also noticed gaps they had and to a person I think they’d have been even better if they’d spent 4 years in a decent CS program.
> 4 years in a decent CS program
Half of that is gen eds, another quarter is like math requirements. Then you have stuff like intro to python making up the CS part. Most of that time is wasted imo
What school are you thinking of? I’ve never met someone whose CS degree consisted of intro to Python, and I’ve been interviewing people with CS degrees for a couple of decades. Mine included a year of introductory CS (basic algorithms and data structures) in Lisp, a year of advanced algorithms & data structures in C/C++, a year of OS’s and compilers in C++, a year of computer graphics, a year of hardware and CPU design, a year of theoretical CS, a year of software engineering (with a senior project), classes on discrete math, databases, networking, computer vision, and scientific visualization. I think I’m missing a bunch there too. The math & physics requirements were super useful to this day both in my CS career and in life, and the credit hours overlapped and counted for some of the gen eds, btw, which were maybe 25% of my time. The gen eds were also very useful and help shaped my thinking, I wish more programmers were into learning for learning’s sake and understood and cared about economics, government, history, art, music, etc. Strictly vocational / apprentice / work-experience education for CS would make the field generally worse not better IMO. I value my time spent in university.
If none of that is convincing, just look up the average pay of people with and without degrees. Whether or not you enjoy learning and education or feel like the time is wasted, the sad fact is that the good jobs are being given to people with degrees, by and large. I honestly thought 4 year degrees probably gave, statistically, like maybe 15% pay advantage. That would be a pretty big boost, it’s already pushing 4 years of raises for most people. However, the reality published by The Fed is that people in the US with 4 year degrees earn twice what people without degrees earn. I was blown away when I learned that. It’s probably not fair, and it doesn’t mean people with degrees are smarter or harder working than people without, but that is the surprising reality of the job market.
https://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/computer-science-engin...
MIT has a intro to programming with python.
Degrees are unfortunately a check mark to gate keep positions that's why the pay is higher. Not because your some how smarter with the degree or more capable.
In the last 10 years I have never used physics developing software, never needed calculus. Learned networking at a deeper level then my college network class by self studying for a ccna.
All this info is available online. Compilers, operating systems.
I disagree that studying humanities makes a difference for people. Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something? I have a liberal arts degree, from a little over 10 years ago. I can't remeber most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point? Saying things like that puts degrees on a pedestal. Life experience does way more thinking then any class.
Lessons from school are like anything else, use it or lose it.
Thanks, that MIT page really highlights how exaggerated your first comment was. Your job wasn’t to show that an intro to Python course exists, of course an intro to Python course exists, duh. Your job was to show that intro to Python made up the 25% of in-degree coursework, that the rest was math and gen eds, and you’ve shown that your own description doesn’t fit MIT at all.
Why does it matter if the reason having a degree pays more is because of credentialism? If that’s true, then the best advice to someone is to just get the degree, no? Unfortunately for your argument, both the comment you replied to and mine personally attested to the coursework being very helpful and your experience doesn’t counter ours. On top of that there’s a whole field of research trying to study whether the average salary premium of degree holders is due to credentialism or to actually learning useful things during four years of schooling, and they find it’s a mix of both. Your armchair claim that one doesn’t learn anything in four years of school won’t convince me or anyone else without a whole lot more effort, data, and serious analysis. What is plausible is that you didn’t learn much in your time at your school.
Is the lack of math & physics in your career due to not wanting to do those things? Of course people can have careers that don’t use some or even any of the subjects they learned in school. That doesn’t demonstrate that school is a waste of time. At worst it demonstrates that you didn’t use your time wisely. At best it demonstrates you wanted to learn more and other things. Either way, I didn’t (and still don’t) expect for every single thing learned in school to be relevant to life or my own jobs, but many things I learned have been useful for me, including math and physics, as well as some social studies and history. It was eye opening to learn a bit about how global class hierarchies and economies work. If you didn’t learn any of that or anything else interesting, maybe your school failed you, maybe you should have gone somewhere else.
> Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something?
Something. Around 25 years since graduation.
> I can’t remember most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point? Saying things like that puts degrees on a pedestal.
Obviously I have no idea how your degree is shaping your thinking, are you suggesting that it’s not? I mean it’s a bummer if you really got nothing out of it and it hasn’t helped shape your life at all, but I can’t speak to your experience.
I’m not exactly sure why suggesting that someone who spends four years of their life learning things actually learns something is putting a degree on a pedestal. From my perspective, saying that four years of learning yields nothing for anyone, aside from being demonstrably false, doesn’t make that much sense. If you spent four years learning and didn’t learn, isn’t that on you?
> Lessons from school are like anything else, use it or lose it.
This highlights a vocational style of thinking. What you say is true if you only care about the list of facts a professor said in class. The lessons that I took from school are more meta level, longer lasting, and less about practicing or remembering specific things. How to approach problem solving, how to do research, and what have been the high level outcomes of other people’s research. On top of that, yes, I am keeping some of my math and social studies and history and art skills around by practicing them. If what you say is true, then one way to make sure your degree was useless is to not use it.
Yes my comment was slightly exaggerated.
I would just point you to my other comment, since it probably addressed like 90% of your reply and maybe suggest getting out of your academic bubble and see how most people are using their degrees.
Most people are enjoying the 2x salary premium.
Why do you think I’m in a bubble? What evidence do you have that it’s not you wallowing? I’ve read some of the research that tries to tease apart credentialism from skills, read maybe a dozen papers about it. And I’ve looked at the data on pay gap on average across the US for degree holders vs non degree holders. Have you?
BTW, your other reply does almost nothing to address either my comments nor @sarchertech’s. You’re arguing a straw man, asserting that it’s possible for people to learn on their own, which neither of us has disgreed with. The facts are that very few people actually do it without a guided curriculum, and conversely that people who choose the guided curriculum often do learn things they wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
>In the last 10 years I have never used physics developing software, never needed calculus.
If you never studied it in-depth, it's hard to recognize when it would be useful. It's not like your boss is going to tell you that you need to compute the differential of some function. But understanding physics and calculus are incredibly useful when you need to think about how things grow, or when you need to model some process.
But calculus isn't even remotely the most useful branch of math for CS. I use discrete math, statistics and probability constantly. Just last week I had to come up with a plan to validate that a data migration of several billion rows was working correctly and it's nice to be able to understand how to calculate sample size to give you an appropriate confidence level. You don't even need to remember exact formulas just remembering enough to look things up is a huge productivity benefit.
During the first part of the data migration project, we realized that we need to migrate accounts that shared users directly or indirectly at the same time. I looked at the problem and realized it was just a graph theory problem to find all of the connected components of the graph and was able to whip up a little visualization tool that showed us this was impossible, and then showed us a few superusers that we could eliminate to break the graph up in to much smaller components.
The graduate level networking class I took has been insanely useful. A month ago someone at my company had spent weeks working on a system to keep 2 systems in sync and he asked for help. I could recognize immediately that his solution could just never work and essentially he was trying to solve the 2 generals problem, and then help him find a solution that can solve a relaxed version with tradeoffs we can live with.
I use what I learned in Automata all the time as well. Computer Hardware and Assembly have been incredibly useful for understanding how to write high performance code.
I 100% could have learned everything I learned in college on my own. But I never would have. I never would have developed a holistic understanding of how the whole system works together.
> Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something? I have a liberal arts degree, from a little over 10 years ago. I can't remeber most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point?
I remember a ton from the first time I went to college 20+ years ago. I took a business law class that has been useful many times in my life. Biology was incredibly useful.
I know someone who went back to nursing school much later in life. She told me that before she went back to school and took anatomy, her model for the human body was that all your organs just floated around inside your torso and when you ate food it just mixed in with all of it. Everyone has gaps, but a general education does a lot to make sure that they are hopefully not so large. Even just looking at vaccine hesitancy by education level, college is probably worth it for that alone.
Micro and macro economics have been great for understanding the world. I'm fairly certain that Austrian economics is mostly just people that don't understand calculus.
I used what I learned in physics constantly in wood working, 3d printing, CNC machining and other hobbies.
Again you can 100% pick all of this stuff up on your own. But vast majority of people don't have the discipline to do it.
Lets go back to my original point, related to spending 3-4 years studying CS. You and the other guy that responded are getting way off topic and putting words in my mouth.
What I didn't say is that computer science knowledge is useless. So lets not get distracted by this imaginary point.
Most of the unrelated degree for CS work is useless. You already admitted that the three calculus classes required for a BS weren't useful. I pointed out the into python class isn't useful. We already knocked off a semester of classes.
We really aren't using physics developing most software by CS graduates.
> I never would have developed a holistic understanding of how the whole system works together.
Kids coming out of school don't have this. Most people working don't understand the entire system. I worked at decent companies. There are plenty of people who will just stop at "JVM does something with my code". I see this especially bad with the people coming out of AI specializations
The gen eds were all intro level classes, the only thing to take away is there are more to know. If your making decisions about the world based on an intro to law class or your if knowledge of economics is still at the level of supply and demand I think your being naive about your level of competence in those areas. In hindsight after living life after school and working these classes really weren't a great use of time.
I don't think college is the place to support your hobbies. Things like art workshops provide a better learning experience then art history or w/e. Even reading is more enjoyable post school for me.
Getting some pop sci level books and reading for a bit would have been better all around then sitting in intro lectures with 100 other students.
>Most of the unrelated degree for CS work is useless.
You're ignoring what I said about time being required for understanding. Your CS and directly relevant math prereqs are going to be spread out of 4 years anyway. Might as well get a well rounded education while your there.
If you want to save money you can CLEP out of at least a year of classes (assuming you have the discipline to teach yourself), or if you were motivated in high school take AP classes.
>You already admitted that the three calculus classes required for a BS weren't useful.
Nope I said they were just less useful than discrete math and stats. But there's overlap, it's hard to understand a big chunk of either of those without calculus.
> I pointed out the into python class isn't useful.
My intro programming class was pretty useful because it didn't focus on syntax, but on concepts. There were definitely a few gaps I had that were filled in there even though I had several years of experience before I took it.
>We really aren't using physics developing most software by CS graduates.
I have used physics directly a few times, but most software doesn't. However that's not why physics is useful, it reinforces your understanding of calculus. An intuitive understanding of growth is incredibly useful in CS.
>Kids coming out of school don't have this. Most people working don't understand the entire system. I worked at decent companies. There are plenty of people who will just stop at "JVM does something with my code".
If you went to a decent school and you paid attention at all you would. If you took the classes I did you'd honestly have to have worked at it to not have a pretty good understanding of the whole stack.
>The gen eds were all intro level classes, the only thing to take away is there are more to know.
I think the problem is that you either never learned all that much from your classes or you've just forgotten it all and you're applying your experience to everyone else.
>making decisions about the world based on an intro to law class
1 semester of business law was pretty useful when I was running a startup. Doesn't make me a lawyer, but I bet I know more than 90% of people in a similar position.
>knowledge of economics is still at the level of supply and demand
I took 2 semesters of micro and 2 of semesters because I found it interesting. I'd wager 2 years of Econ puts you somewhere near the 95th percentile or so among the general population. I've continue to learn certainly, but most people have nowhere near that level of understanding.
>Getting some pop sci level books and reading for a bit would have been better all around then sitting in intro lectures with 100 other students.
Again if that's the level of education you got, I can understand why you think it was a waste of time.
You could AP or CLEP your way out of the majority of your general education classes if you're motivated.
But ignoring that, a huge and often overlooked component of understanding is time. You need the entire 3 or 4 years even if technically you could cram all your CS classes into 2 (well you really couldn't because of dependencies). If you do it right, you'll have CS classes mixed in with your other classes, so that you'll pretty much always be studying CS over the entire 4 years. In a decent CS program, you'll also spend far more time on CS projects out of class than you will on homework in other classes.
The average person will probably spend 75% of their total active time on CS classes.
As far as intro classes go, there was maybe 1 class where I learned almost nothing and I had been programming professionally for a while before I went back. The whole point for me was to fill in the gaps of things I didn't know I didn't know.
I found there is some truth to this but it was almost all in the beginning and/or if you expect to be in ~the bottom half of your peer group. After those criteria pass it comes down to your overall ability to network throughout life (not just from a college) and general chance/luck (which remains a larger factor than most would like to admit).
What college can give you at the beginning of a career, beyond the premise of a guided education in the field of study, is a piece of paper that says "I really did learn some relevant stuff and have the ability to follow through" before you have a chance to prove these things in the field by already having had a job in it. It also gives you an initial chance to build a network but that's true of however you manage to spend your first 2-4 years getting into the field. After that initial in-field job or two the non-educational related value of a degree falls off a cliff (and the educational portion becomes an ever decreasing slice of job specific knowledge you acquire over decades).
My anecdote (that's all it is) comes from starting out without a degree and then getting a degree for the fun of it over a decade later. It's provided 0 value in any job, they've all come from references or recommendations from people I've worked with previously at this point. It was fun though, a chance to get involved with topics you wouldn't normally have a reason to touch.
I am most likely ADHD, probably in the spectrum to some degree.
Tried college three times and dropped out every time due to expense, boredom, and personal issues like my father passing away from cancer when I was 21.
I went into software development via tech support for a C compiler company, and worked up from there.
Worked for the NY stock exchange, two top tier brokerages, several prominent Fintechs and ultimately consulting into banks and payments companies.
It worked for me because I am largely an auto didact and do terribly in a school environment.
The lack of degree came up only a few times, and no one has cared.
At least in software development careers, degree matters very little to not at all.
Thank you for sharing, besides losing a family member at such a crucial age (which I'm sorry you had to go through), I feel like I'm in the same group here. I'm definitely on an upward trajectory, but have been a little worried that I'm approaching the glass ceiling.
There is something that I find very often gets lost, not in this comment but in the general conversations.
There are reasons to study CompSci that have nothing to do with trying to get a job, or make yourself a better worker. Namely, it's fun!
You can be a lifetime student of it and can be very rewarding. Both the practical side (programming) and delving into the mathematical underpinnings (theory) and history of computation.
News articles where people tell young people, "don't study computer science" don't get it.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this having been self taught myself. there was def a struggle in the beginning even getting low hanging jobs. It means you need to invest a lot of your off hours learning new stuff and getting ahead. a lot of university educated CS majors don't learn anything new after university and only put in just enough to do their job. being self taught means you need to be a lot more proactive about getting ahead of trends and being the guy on the frontlines where there isn't a whole lot of people that know a technology at all.
I myself was lucky enough to jump on the javascript train before javascript ate the world. 8 years in I switched over to elixir because i saw in it the potential to be the best stack to build MVPs in. These days, I'm maintaining one of those projects as CTO and we are interviewing candidates for a position. I can tell you personally, I value what you did at your last job and your side projects more than what you did in university 10 years ago. The one issue as someone from the interviewing side is that it takes a lot of effort to actually do an interview properly. I spent a lot of time putting together a coding test to test specifically for the tasks you'd be workin on as well as doing it with our applicants to make sure they aren't using vibe coding to do a half assed job. Its worth it though to make sure we make the right hire. when you're a startup, every hire can potentially make or break the company.
I've been personally involved in the hiring process of our startup and I give you my word the school you went to makes no difference. In fact one of my favorite coworkers that I had an honor to work with was self taught and had a philosophy degree. In fact I've seen big school degrees go straight to heads and egos and been actively an obstacle to those folks.
> What's more valuable is the network and access to the alumni network of others who will hire you into their company just because you went to the same school as them.
This seems completely untrue in my 20 year career experience. I have hired dozens of people for both large and small companies, and networks do matter… but I have never once seen the network be from school. It is always about people you have worked with before. Even my coworkers with degrees don’t have contact with their schoolmates anymore, it is always people they worked with.
It depends on the school and often aligns more closely with something like a fraternity. I have definitely known people who got their job through a frat brother’s recommendation or literally knowing the secret handshake.
> It's a big club and you won't be in it if you decide to self-study. That's the cold, hard truth.
But what about the self-taught club? If it’s not already big, it’s definitely growing. Honestly, I can’t see how a Columbia graduate is more likely to get hired than a self-taught kid who’s had a few pull requests merged into something like the Linux kernel.
> You are left with all the jobs the others don't want.
I don’t think this is quite right. You may be left out of the very first choice jobs at the junior level, but it doesn’t mean you’re getting the bottom portion of jobs.
I’m glad I went to school, I was on the fence. It improved my career, but i also know I could have found work my whole life without it.
There’s a whole economy out there full of opportunity.
I feel this take on it is a little over-dramatized. I empathize with the first part - connections are priceless when you're staring out - but in time you can and will build a reputation for your quality of work, interactions with (and then capability to manage) others, and achievement of results. All these can be developed at a no-name startup as well as at a FAANG.
I went to university but only apply maybe 5% of what I learned there in my day job. I founded and grew a company, also worked in senior roles at others. When I interview for engineering positions, I'm much more interested in other factors than what school you went to or who you've brushed shoulders with.
I recognize parent commenter's experience may be different, and give solid props for their self-taught journey. (In fact someone who can figure things out without having to be spoon fed is exactly the kind of person I want on the team).
I'd probably argue that most people don't have (personal) connections starting out. Maybe, if they didn't go to the right school or school at all, someone they know is the foot in the door.
>but in time you can and will build a reputation for your quality of work, interactions with (and then capability to manage) others, and achievement of results.
That IS their network for a lot of people. OK maybe there are smaller companies that are 50% $SCHOOL grads. And there are other companies that tend to bias towards a certain group of schools. But I actually think that going to, say, Harvard is a secret handshake is overstated in a lot of cases.
I sort of suspect that my undergrad may have had something to do with a job at one point but the fact that I got in through a senior person who liked my work played a lot bigger role.
I also wouldn’t disregard the experience of university itself. I went the self-taught route, left school at 16, built a career for myself to get to where I am now at 24, but I do have regrets. Going into working in an office basically terminated my youth right there and I haven’t had a social circle since. Not having debt is nice but if you can afford university both in terms of time and money, and come from a family you can fall back on, I’d say just go. Once you start work there’s no going back. You’re in the cold hard world.
networking is important for sure, but i think software more than most other industries (say, finance) has a much lower barrier of entry for an individual with no/low resources.
a data point for your second paragraph: i play D&D weekly with a woman that got hired at google straight out of high school and worked there for 10 years.
Self taught, no degree, zero friction in the job market either early in my career (job offers on Wall Street and the startups I wanted to work with) or 25 years later; have done consulting work almost everywhere, and had offers from both big tech companies and unicorn startups. No investor has ever cared, either.
The "you'll be stuck with all the jobs other people don't want" thing is risible.
Yeah, I am very confused by this persons experience. I have never once seen anyone utilize their school network, either to get a job or to bring someone on; every time we get a referral, it is for someone who they have worked with before, not who they went to school with.
I have worked with people for YEARS before i even learned that they have or don’t have a CS degree. I have interviewed many dozens of people, both as a hiring manager and a peer, and we only look at schooling if they have zero professional experience.
In my experience, a degree can help you get your first job, but after that it is all about your work experience and the connections with the people you have worked with.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44093525. This was really all about school connections.
And when thinking about that first job you have to remember that you're burning 3-4 years of full-time work experience on the degree. That's a lot of time to fumble around and find your fit!
Commonly true, but in my five years of engineering school, in my summer after my freshman year, I was already employed in computer programming. The rest of my school had co-op periods during which I had summer stints in computer-programming-related jobs including at Bonneville Power Administration with a team working on computer monitoring of the system, with the idea that was to lead to control of that system; a stint as a co-op student at Wayerhauser Plup Bleach plant, working on a program to model the flow of pulp through a tower measuring the dose of chlorine-based bleach, working at a medical lab with odd jobs including generating a plot of a sensor measuring tremor in a patient's hand; working at an IBM sales office writing a program to measure the proper fill of a tanker truck based on the day's projected temperature, and finally as the first full-time employee of a company producing the first computer-based commercial electrocardiogram analysis service, all before graduation.
My first job, of course, was prior to all that, driving various vehicles on my Dad's dryland wheat farm in northern Montana.
So I feel that I was particularly lucky about finding good co-op positions, as many of my colleagues were at less interesting gigs at Motorolla, sorting resistors by color code.
(Some of these are documented at https://ciex-software.com/)
Coming from a very small town, University was a bigger uptick than likely for kids growing up in the Big City.
> I have never once seen anyone utilize their school network
I've only seen it at one company in Los Angeles where the founders were from USC and several USC students ended up interning with us through their networking program, a few of which joined the company full time later on. It's been the exception so far.
Which companies are you talking about?
In my experience over the past 5 years in EU and Asia: Increasingly many companies wont even talk to you unless you have ‘a’ PhD. You dont need this piece of paper, but it is one hell of a life hack getting one.
Are you trying to apply cold? The way it usually works is that someone you have worked with before vouches for you and that gets you past that screening.
Never cold.
American Express, Capital One, and Canonical to name a few.
Aside from Unicorn and FAANG orgs self-taught is still predominantly forbidden.
I'm self-taught. My first job I got lucky (or the grace of God, depending on your perspective). After that, it never mattered. I had experience, references, a track record.
And the older you get, the longer the track record, and the more it outweighs the piece of paper.
I'm primarily an embedded guy, though. If you're doing web apps, or desktop, or games, or phones, or high performance, or finance programming, your mileage may vary.
I'm happy to hear your success story but that has not been my experience. I am only able to get into FAANGs.
I'm sorry that that has been your experience. (Or maybe I shouldn't be sorry - FAANGs pay pretty well.) But what you say surprises me, for two reasons.
First, FAANGs get far more resumes than they have openings. Demanding a degree seems like an easy, lazy way to eliminate some. I'm kind of surprised that they don't take it. (I mean, they shouldn't take it, but I'm still kind of surprised.)
Second, many engineering organizations that are not FAANGs are trying to model their hiring on FAANG approaches. So I'm surprised that, if FAANGs would hire you, others won't - especially after you have experience at a FAANG.
Nobody cares about degrees much after you've started working.
Sure, there's very very big orgs where it matters for several positions, but it's not predominantly forbidden.
If this is true, we should keep these starred somewhere so self-taught devs don't have to waste time applying to orgs that care otherwise.
They won't pass the CV screening, so no big deal.
If you worked in the industry for over 20 years and your network is weaker than a recent graduate, I wouldn’t blame it on the college, your networking game is just weak.
As a college drop out, i have a few friends from university in the various big companies but none of my jobs came through them (even when i want to work in a faang: i just didn’t need it).
I don't have a degree and after the first few years no one cared at all from garage startups to the Fortune 100.
> What's more valuable is the network and access to the alumni network of others who will hire you into their company just because you went to the same school as them. It's a big club
The size and value of this club of alums depends _entirely_ on where you went to school. Not everyone gets into MIT.
Yeah what you said BUT there’s also big opportunities in networking
I know people hate to hear it cause it sounds like a magic bullet and it does and I don’t like having to market myself either but it does work.
You don’t even really need to have an alumni for networking, just a few relatively nice / ok projects, a website and some business cards and you’re off!
> It's a big club and you won't be in it if you decide to self-study. That's the cold, hard truth.
This almost reads like conspiracy. There’s barely anything like that in reality, and the kind of network people finds at school is usually extremely weak. Otherwise, job boards wouldn’t exist.
I highly dispute this. Networks in college are absolutely a thing and absolutely advantageous. In my experience, the network didn't come from just sitting in class, but from extracurricular competition engineering/cs teams. Competition teams certainly helped many people get their first jobs through friends referring each other or elevated exposure to employers. In fact, recruiters would often have separate hiring events for the competition teams and then have the standard college hiring event. There's also an intangible effect from being surrounded by other highly motivated and mission driven students that you gain in these environments. I am sure there is a way to get involved in similar teams outside of college, but a well situated college significantly lowers the barrier to joining these teams and almost creates a funnel for it should you choose to spend your spare time in such as team.
>There's also an intangible effect from being surrounded by other highly motivated and mission driven students that you gain in these environments.
I think that is absolutely true. But other than one thing (which was part of a class and was really great even if we didn't do well), didn't really do competition teams in any formal way other than some class groups. Certainly nothing involving separate hiring events.
I think ones school network is what they make. Over my career I've gotten three jobs due to my school network. (It was a regular state university.)
And I do think most people don't effectively leverage it.
Both your points do absolutely not mirror my experience. In traditional career paths (established company) a diploma helps a lot -- for some roles you won't even be considered otherwise.
And your take on networks being useless is also strange. I work closely with people who have large and well-maintained networks, and the value they produce because of that is insane.
> Both your points do absolutely not mirror my experience. In traditional career paths (established company) a diploma helps a lot -- for some roles you won't even be considered otherwise.
For a first job? Maybe.
I don’t have one and it’s barely been a talking point back when I interviewed, regardless of company size.
It depends on the school. I knew a few younger guys from Stanford and whatnot who were really into the idea of preferring hiring people from particular schools if not their own.
unless youre ivy league theres no more connecting. universities are completely irrelevant to tech in modern day. people are talking about their experiences 20 years ago. now, its just expensive adult daycare. remove federal student loans and grants and the market will finally correct.
Sounds like a good way to separate oneself from a disgusting, greed-driven, and fake environment. Not to mention that for-profit education institutions have zero interest in your skill set—it's your money they want, not your success. I would probably enjoy studying CS in Norway, though.
As someone who did go the self-taught route, I wouldn't say it's the route to take if you enjoy depth via academic, I dropped out of university. I'm a practical person and learn as I do, I disagree OP, it sucks you got that end of the straw. I have had it just as good as others but you just need to put the extra effort in. Yes, you do get jobs not so good as the grand but you cash in those later.
The route up is just more steep but in the end you end up more valuable experience and within 15 years time you then can cash it all in for a fortune 100 company. As that's where I am and I am only in my mid-thirties
You should go to college however if university isn't your thing, don't feel like your forever going to be an entry grade tech.
The route is more steep but it's all worth it; just keep seeking higher jobs with every departure.
the network is bs.
I've seen people add "list of top universities" retirement to positions just because they're from the list and like to justify it.
candidate came from the regular channels, no network of any sort involved.
it was more vetting good candidates because of some exec diploma buyers remorse.
but in the end, your comment is perfectly correct, but not for the reason you thought.
I am a college student, about to begin my 3/4 year of the course. Most of the things about networking and all don't apply to me, because although my Uni is one of the best in the country, it is mostly focused on humanities and the CS school (or any engineering school) is quite new with only batch of graduates till now.
I am certainly no novice, easily one of the top 10 in my school and definitely top 2 in my year, though that does not mean much here.
So my question is should I focus more on projects now, or do OSSU instead, or try to do both?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RoHHwBbZfRE-LdC7Ow3sQvX73c5...
So several people in this thread have talked about academia giving you a network, and getting jobs via that, but have also conflated that with companies only hiring from particular schools.
The network of contacts you make through university and your careers is a mechanism by which you hear about jobs you might otherwise never get the chance to apply for. That’s a very real thing, but will tend to be dominated by contacts you make after university as your career progresses.
The other thing of needed a degree from a particular university, or a PhD, isn’t so much about a network as that degree being a shibboleth. The person reading your job application sees that and knows there are questions they don’t need to ask.
These are both things you can, and may need to, work around if you go down the self taught route. Depending on the work you want to do you may need to make sure you do work which either you can point to or other people will see so that you hear about those jobs, or get a referral to avoid the normal job requirements.
> you might otherwise never get the chance to apply for
It kind of reminds me of the whole "luck is not a strategy, but increasing your number of attempts is". Having a network increases the number of chances you have to get lucky. I have a friend that joined a work softball league, and that network eventually led him to a role with another company participating in the league.
I wonder how much the 'free and open source' requirements of this curriculum hold it back. Someone serious about self learning shouldn't be hesitant to invest some money in good material
This is fair. One example is the discrete math course (called Math for CS). The MIT course is widely agreed (in the Discord server anyway) to be harder to follow than even just a good discrete math textbook, but there are no high quality discrete math textbooks that are free and open source (as least that I know of).
I’m doing OSSU, and I went for “Discrete Mathematics with Applications” by Susanna Epps. Cost $50 for a used textbook. Technically I’m deviating from the curriculum but I’d say I’m still “doing OSSU”
And you can even resell the textbook after using it :)
Maybe getting a degree counters any social shortcomings for most people, its a piece of paper that will get your foot in the door so to speak. It says "I've spent 3-4 years working on this area, have at least half a brain and am committed". So even if you can't speak very well to people (yet) you still have something going for you. If you're self taught, you don't have any of that so you've gotta be pretty good socially and at networking, or just really really lucky. I think being good socially breaks all the rules honestly and is like a superpower, you could probably talk your way into most things with little in the way of real skills.
This is very interesting. It is great also as a reference for those that already now some CS. Ideally none should reside on youtube, given it is named "Open Source", but I get that a lot of resources reside there.
As an avid designer of CS courses and curricula in the not-so-distant past, I would like for it turn into a success criterion that your course gets included in this listing.
Back when I was involved in designing the BSc education at the University of Copenhagen, I remember referring the committee to the ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI Computer Science Curricula. Great to see that there has been an update to these recently, complete with a Generative AI section and all :-)
Not gonna lie, the amount of defensiveness people have in these threads, both camps, is a bit sad.
Saylor (Michael saylor) has saylor academy. It’s a feee resource, and you can get academic credits if you do the exams.
The information is very dense, but goes into more detail dan your average CS degree. Quite low level and tricky questions
Not as accessible. Just a whole bunch of text. Kind of old school, but at least it’s out there
Of course it is dense, after all it is the hardest type of education ever known to humans. A store of knowledge if you will. You can become a cyber hornet after investing into all that hardest knowledge!
To what end?
Surely a community college level education is more conducive to getting a job. And if aim is to make money I'd probably attempt something closer to neal.fun or levels.io not this. If you're not getting the piece of paper then you maybe as well yolo it
What does that leave? Straight interest only learning for the sake of it?
Don't try to be entirely self-taught. Everyone needs guidance and feedback from experts in the domain; otherwise you are certain to misunderstand things, have large blind spots (truly blind; you'll be unaware of them), not understand how things apply in real situations, and have no exposure to the latest knowledge.
It doesn't have to be via college; there is apprenticeship, even if usually unofficial in IT, at many jobs. (College can be fantastic in many ways if you have the opportunity - don't let the reactionary politics ruin your life-changing opportunity - especially if you are intellectually curious.)
Also, be very choosy about who you learn from; I'd be much more choosy about that then about what you learn, or even where I work or the job I do - do anything to work with and learn from the best people. The range of knoweldge and skill in the real world is almost impossible to conceive of, and a lot of it is so much BS. If you learn from C-level people, you will have C-level knowledge and skills and never know better until you meet someone who is B-level or A-level - there are entire organization and towns of C-level people. One big advantage of going to someplace like the Bay Area is the community of highly-skilled people, many on a level you are unlikely to meet in most other places, and being exposed to the newest ideas. Just being there can raise your game, if you take advantage of it.
It’s worth making this very clear for learners: A Computer Science education is **not** the thing that will prepare you to work and make money in many real-world _jobs_.
Some? Yes. Many? No.
This blurb from one of the course pages (unintentionally) says it well:
> Because the point of computer science isn't to teach you a language. Or to teach you to code. Or to teach you to be a fullstack software engineer. Computer Science is a very narrowly-applied applied math with wide-ranging practical usage. But if you strip away all the qualifying language, it's math. Which means it has certain overarching rules that are completely, totally independent of your implementation language.
In short: the point of Computer Science courses is not to teach you to do the thing that you will be doing when employed at the company that pays you.
Another:
> if you want to read white papers you're going to want to read Lisp
Most jobs are not about reading or writing white papers. Almost all Computer Science courses are an _academic_ pursuit, not a practical one, and are taught as such.
If your goal is to _work_ in the industry, this is _a_ path, but it is a very inefficient one.
Depending on what work you are happy with, 80%+ of the content here will not contribute to your success.
Will learning the things taught in these courses exercise your problem-solving and other mental abilities? Yes. Will they teach you broadly-applicable principles that you could apply to your work? Hard _maybe_, depending on their teaching and on how well you learn and generalize. In any case, you may well end up doing work that utilizes little of this.
If you want to work in research, a math-or-fundamental-sciences-heavy field, or with teams of folks creating new programming languages or database engines for example, then certainly some of these courses (and more) are required.
But it’s worth warning potential learners that a full Computer Science education is _neither an efficient nor a necessary path to a job in the field_.
What is?
One example: There is much available and satisfying work in building user-facing applications like web and mobile apps.
If your goal is to do that kind of work, then it’s best to relentlessly focus on the things that you will actually be doing at your job: Building things.
Broadly speaking, employers pay you using the money that they are making (or hope to make) by solving problems and/or providing services using software/applications that you will help write. So practice writing it. Learn to build real things: Mobile, web, or desktop apps that do a thing that _you_ would want to pay for. Find courses that teach that. Practice it. Hit a wall, research and figure out how to overcome it. Repeat. Submit PR’s to open source projects, especially ones where experienced maintainers review your code. Learn from that feedback. Read their code and understand how it comes together to create the app you are using. Have LLM’s review your code, even, if no skilled human is available.
Practice working with other people. Learn how to write and communicate clearly and unambiguously.
Find and fix bugs in open-source codebases.
Embrace that working in the field means a commitment to non-stop, career-long learning.
Later, after you’ve freed up mental space by mastering the basic mechanics of programming, begin researching and applying the techniques and methods for writing code that other people find pleasant to read, interact with, and modify/extend.
Build something that you can show to prospective employers.
You will also learn many more things from the people you work with.
Many of the hard skills you will learn through doing _these_ things will directly transfer to the work you do, because _it is the work you will do._
What I’m missing is some math like differential equations (both ordinary and partial). Does anyone have a good (and free) resource on that?
MIT OCW Scholar.
Early DiffEQ is pretty cookbook. OCW or, without looking it up, various MOOCs out there (though full resources are often not free these days) would probably work. It is useful for some areas like system dynamics.
Would you settle for low cost instead of free? Western Governors University I believe has such courses.
Awesome collection of resources! Although:
Is not strictly true. I've been part of CS program accreditation, for example:https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...
The program outcomes for a CS degree accredited by ABET is:
Really, this list of resources only speak to #1 and #2. A little bit of #4, but it seems to be an afterthought in the list of resources. However, self-study is not going to get you #3 and #5 at all. Typically in order to fulfill these requirements, the curriculum would include much more than just the technical topics listed.Indeed, OSSU says that included courses must "Match the curricular standards of the CS 2013: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Computer Science"
I'm familiar with this document. It includes this:
The reason I'm saying this is because often times, an undergraduate I'm advising will come into my office with a schedule of 12-15 credits of tech/math/science. They will explain to me "I only want to take technical courses, I don't see the purpose of taking courses in English or History, they are a waste of time." And I get that, I felt that way in school too. I thought those courses were preventing me from learning CS, but it was only after I left school when I realized all those "soft" courses I had taken actually prepared me to face the challenges I would in CS.So I will continue to watch this resource, because I love a good compendium. But I would say they should not say what they provide is "equivalent of a full bachelor's degree in Computer Science" because even the standards they say they are trying to meet indicate they fall short.
To be fair #3 and #4 are abilities I believe can only be learnt through actual work experience. Not much colleges can do in that regard. Sure, group projects, presentations, hosting/participating in workshops etc. did help a bit, but they were all fairly rudimentary in terms of developing those skills. Internships are key.
Couldn't agree more regarding taking English/History courses. I find that understanding and dissecting good English literature isn't any less challenging than any computer science problem.
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_session_crypto.htm...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090183
If you do not have that much time, IMHO teachyourselfcs.com is better
Shout out to Stanford that made it possible to start a CS education for free, for a Romanian kid who could not afford it (me). The free video course they have had up there since about 20 years was one of the foundations of my programming career now.
But... are there _any_ good resources for _networking_ / _integration_ for self-thought cs ppl? This is the missing elefant in the room imho. With AI automating lower-level upwork/fiver/freelancer jobs, good luck getting started in an actual career.
It's an ultimate roadmap for self-taught CS students!
Let's focus on talking about the self-taught resources please, don't talk about other off topics, not everyone learning to find a good job on big companies, the reality is, when a man/woman want to self studying CS, he/she age is already not a fit for those companies.
We want to learn even after the right age, just because we love the computer.
Ah yes more people in CS are needed, let me check that chart with the most % of jobless people out of all fresh grad majors, cs is almost leading now.
is there a similar repo for machine learning/AI?
Not exactly but there is a data science version: https://github.com/ossu/data-science
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And within 24 months will have been a total waste of anyones time doing it
Interesting stuff