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Re:Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees by dagw on Thursday March 31, 2016 @08:51AM (#11396738)
Self-taught people know how to teach themselves anything they need to know. If a problem takes them in a direction that they don't understand, they know they can understand it with some effort.

This is an extremely optimistic view of self taught programmers. While these type of self taught people certainly exist and I have worked with a few, they're definitely not universal or even, I would say, the norm. Most self taught programmers I've dealt with will brute force any problem they have into the one thing they know and are just barely scraping by on frantic googling and copy-and-pasting in random code from stack overflow.

Re:Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees by neffy on Thursday March 31, 2016 @11:07AM (#11397703)
First I would suggest that being able to teach oneself and having a university degree are not mutually exclusive - and indeed a lot of courses are so bad you need to be able to teach yourself in order to successfully escape them

That said, a lot of people in both categories aren't that great in the workplace. Either through lack of discipline, lack of experience, emotional problems that prevent them acknowledging negative feedback and using it to improve themselves, or a general desire to overthrow capitalism whilst reading Facebook. But none of that has anything to do with going to university which is a privilege that may or may not be available to somebody given their class, background, and general life experiences.

As long as programming remains an uncredentialed occupation - compare and contrast with medicine and the law for example - people without degrees deserve the right to be assessed on the quality of their actual work, and not a general prejudice on how they acquired the ability to do it. After all, the people who laid the foundations for computer science, necessarily didn't have a computer science degree.

Re:Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees by marcus_holmes on Thursday March 31, 2016 @10:20AM (#11397334)
That's bad project or team management, not down to quality of coder.

You could easily say the same of university-educated coders who only learned Python and C and are up against a real commercial deadline for the first time. I've seen those folks do some crazy shit.

Dumping anyone into a project outside their area of experience with no guidance will cause poor practices.