How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

Re:How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS ... by Jtsummers on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @11:57AM (#13876997)

Programming and electronics have clearer outcomes and feedback mechanisms than physics and math. Unless you have a lab setup, you can't test out your physics knowledge to the same degree you can electronics and programming. Math is similar. You can try to recreate proofs of various things to demonstrate a capacity for proving or an understanding of the underlying system in which you're constructing proofs, but ultimately you're not creating anything novel for quite a while.

With programming and electronics, self-study offers the opportunity to make things, both novel and derivative, and immediately (or near enough) see whether or not the function. Similar to setting up an experiment in a physics lab, but again, who has a home physics lab? Programming can be done on a cheap (< $200) laptop. A large portion of electronics can be accessible with a similar investment in (mostly reusable) parts.

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Re:How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS ... by analog31 on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @11:53PM (#13882355)

One other possible difference is that, at least for a time, the subject matter itself was getting easier to learn. For instance the inventors of programming languages have tried to figure out what makes a language good for teaching. (I studied Pascal, which originated as a teaching language).

For electronic components, "easy to learn" meant things like designing op amps and logic chips that behaved more like their textbook symbolic representations without weird tricks and pitfalls.

In contrast, you can't change electromagnetics just because you want something that's easier to learn. Nature won't approve. Progress has been made towards explaining it better, for instance, today's notation is simpler than what Maxwell had to grapple with. But such progress comes slowly.

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