jaabe

Well I do interview self-taught people when their CVs are stellar, but I’ve yet to find one that was the better option.

I’m sure you can potentially get a CS degree and never learn anything but I don’t get the point that makes. I wouldn’t hire those people either. I don’t think it’s true though. I’ve never met anyone who went through 5 years of university without picking up anything useful.

I think everyone can learn to write an app by following a few YouTube videos. This is how we’ve got our project managers and lean-operators to write RPA projects in python after all.

On the flip side, I’ve never personally met anyone who went through 5 years of university and came out knowing nothing.

The thing with CS is that it’s not the programming itself that’s actually valuable. It’s being able to create efficient, safe and maintainable code. If you can’t tell me the bigO of your program, if you don’t know how to remove the top node of a binary search tree or if you think using NPM packages to do simple computation is a good idea, then I just can’t use you, because it’ll be way too expensive to teach you.

If you suck at our specific tooling, but have already proven you can obtain a university degree, then I know that I can re-school you relatively cheap by sending you on a few courses.

I’m sorry this is rubbing non-educated programmers wrong, but an education is actually valuable, and it will be increasingly so as the younger generations are all getting them.

You can certainly have a degree in CS and suck, but the odds of that happening are much lower than with people who don’t have a CS degree. Why should I waste the resources if I have enough decent candidates?

The rockstar developer is kind of a myth. If you compile 100 applicants into the 5-8 best ones, then the truth is that you could probably hire any of them and get good results.

That doesn’t mean self-educated people should give up. Especially because very few countries have as easy access to education as we do.

I’ve hired a lot of people, I do a lot of networking and I work as an examiner for CS students, I’ve never seen someone who was self-educated remotely compare to someone with a degree. It just doesn’t happen in a country where anyone who wants to put in the work can get a degree.

Which was kind of my point. The people who failed to get a degree are typically the people who won’t become great when they are self-taught either.

I can see why you would chose not to get an education in a country like America, where it would be a huge financial burden to do so, but we literally pay people to attend their free education.

I’ve never hired someone who was self-taught, not because self-taught people can’t be equal or better, but because you’re trying to buy security and stability. The most expensive mistake you can make as a manager is hiring the wrong person, and self-educated people just aren’t worth the risk when you have a dozen other candidates who are great. I’m Danish though and things are a little different here because education is free. In face the government will even pay you a small amount of monthly money while you study. So we don’t have that many self-educated people, and those who are, are typically self-educated for a range of reasons that put them at a disadvantage from the get go.

So my point isn’t to discourage you, but to make you aware that managers might see your lack of formal education as a risk that you need to mitigate.

Everyone can learn to program, but learning how to program, correctly, efficiently and safe comes with formal education and you probably need to show that you know at least something about how to make CS based decisions. Maybe you do, if so great. If you don’t, spend a little time researching best practices, read up on design patterns and maybe complete the MITX intro course(s) to CS on edx.org.

I’m not sure knowing a specific framework is really all that valuable. If your can build something with LAMP/JS that makes money then you’ve already demonstrated your ability to write software. On the other hand it wouldn’t hurt you either.

No.

But I probably should have been more clear. I mean, first of all, there are more cities than Copenhagen. I have a 3 room 92m^2 apartment that is 15 minute walking distance from Aarhus H that cost us 2.2 million. Secondly, I’d personally call a place like Valby “downtown” Copenhagen even though it would probably be more correct to label it surburbia like you do.

But does medium have readers? I mean, I read medium articles when they appear here on HN, but I’m not really a medium reader, and unlike personal blogs, where I will bookmark you if I find you interesting I’ll never come back to a medium author unless it’s by chance.

I mean, that’s as anecdotal as it gets, but I’ve never been very unique in my media consumption, so I’m fairly certain I’m not alone in this.

In Denmark where I live you can loan 1 million Danish kroner at around 5k each month. A decent downtown apartment in a bigger city or a house in the suburbs is 2-4 million. Renting the equivalent is 10-15k, and with renting you obviously skip a lot of the maintenance cost and taxes. On the flip side loans are tax-deductible, meaning you actually don’t pay 20k to borrow 4 million, you pay 12k.

It can still be cheaper to rent, at least if you look at the small scale. Because in 30 years, those 4 million will be yours while people who rent will still have nothing. It’s also risky, because maybe those 4 million will really be 1 million.

Over all, owning real estate in a safe location is always going to be much better than renting. At least in Denmark. Hell, if you can manage to buy around 15-30 lower-cost apartments in a university city and rent them out, you’ll be able to pay your loans and have enough spare in passive income that you never have to work again.

Do you have a medium account? Because I don’t, and I don’t think anyone in my network does either.

I can see why you would use YouTube, videos aren’t easy to self host, but I’m really not sure why anyone would chose medium above self-hosting or even using github pages.

But maybe I’m just special, and maybe everyone else has a medium account?

I think there is a lot of tinkering available still. Raspberry pis and IOT are areas where you can really go nuts.

I do hope we’ll see hardware open up again, and maybe we will with the increasing focus on sustainability.

In Denmark we have a fairly recent political party called Liberal Alliance. They were funded by billionaire, bank owner and businessman Lars Seier Christensen for almost 10 years and at their height achieved 7% of the votes and a spot in our government. At some point Lars Seiers brother founded a political party and Liberal Alliance fell out of favour with the billionaire.

In our very recent election Liberal Alliance was decimated and Lars Seiers brothers party was voted in and is now bigger than Liberal Alliance.

Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for. There are a lot of reasons things went the way they did for these two political parties, and most of them could have happened without the easy access to money. I do, however, think it’s a worrying show of how just much influence, a single billionaire can have in a small democracy, compared to the average citizen.

My wife is using my old mbp late 2015 and it does everything she needs a laptop to do. If I hadn’t gotten myself a usb-c setup both in the office and at work it would also be doing everything I need a laptop to do. We’ve gotten to a point where laptops are powerful enough that their performance isn’t actually that important to a lot of us. longevity, battery life and weight were always important, but now other key features are power consumption and sustainability.

I really hope that by the time I need to replace my mbp 2018 someone will have cooked up a solar powered laptop made by environmentally friendly components that’s easy to repair. 20 years ago I would have primarily looked at performance, now I don’t even give it a glance.

That’s just me of course, but I suspect I may not be alone with those hopes.