Of course, in the past twenty four hours I've created an app and potential side-business from a technology stack I had absolutely no experience in any of it just to prove to a potential employer I can do 'front-end' stuff for them.
The average developer can't even CSS, don't even play with that 'degrees are the ultimate arbiter' mess.
What do you mean by that? How sophisticated is it to "do CSS"? When I've dealt with it, you basically look at the inspector and at your CSS libraries of preexisting classes, and basically do a combination of attaching classes and writing new ones with custom styles until you get it all to look right.
What should I be looking to learn?
There's an art-form to doing amazing pixel perfect web designs, and I really respect the people who are good at it. That's not me though, and it's never going to be me.
I've had to do similar things to find work: (started young out of interest and put it aside for a few years, then), spend time volunteering (UNOV), freelanced, voluntary freelanced for small businesses/local orgs, build pet projects, just build things in general and study.
Maybe it prepares one better as an engineer than a scientist in the field — the application of a science vs the theoretical and experimental work in developing the science.
--- To expand on the parent subject...
I've had interviews since where I've been able to lay out some of the things I've designed and built both independently and while working for a major media company and still had interviews last hours upon hours to receive no call to even notify me that they've decided to go another route all for some odd questions with no definite answer like:
Implement a poly-fill for bind by extending the Function object
Explain what this css does "if you don't know that's okay,
but don't get it wrong – that's 'bad'.":
.box {
display: flex;
min-width: 1024px;
min-width: 52em;
margin: 0;
padding: 10px 15px 10px 15px;
}
.box--item {
flex-shrink: 2
}
.button {
appearance: none;
border-radius: 3px;
background-color: blue;
}
.button--green {
background-color: green;
}
Only to have every answer given either go unremarked-upon or just told "no", even though the answer could not have been a definite wrong. It was just not the preferred answer.
I was also informed you would be paid more just for having a Masters or PhD, regardless of your contribution. They had graphs and were happy to show me.
I'm talking smaller, trendier companies here though. Buzz words and egos seem to abound. It never made me bitter, but it just seemed so bizarre-o. Not really for me.
This tells me you're wasting your time and potential. There are other ways to get a job.
Thanks for your reply though, I agree with you but then I run into reality and the need to pay bills.
Beyond that, software development is plagued by this mindset that college degrees are useless and that only self taught people are worth looking into. I've worked with many college educated people who can't write good code, and I've worked with many self-taught people who really don't understand what they're doing. The best has always been a person who went to school and then continued on learning after the fact.
Ugh, yes. I've worked for a leading SIM and smart card manufacturer and they required a 4-year degree to even get in the door. I interviewed countless people, including some who were able to answer some quite technical questions that others couldn't. And many of those had to get disqualified since we found out during the interview process that they didn't have a degree. There were so many degree holders there that didn't know what the hell they were doing, and it was obvious.
I've also been in the field for many years and held several interviews. My takeaway, to put it a bit clumsy: "knowledge is easy to fix, mindset and experience not as easy."
But yeah. I was reinforcing your point, not being counter.
"...expect to get turned down without a degree" and "...software development is plagued by this mindset that college degrees are useless ..."
My point is that there's a middle way. Only looking at degress is stupid because it doesn't guarantee anything other than that they got a degree. With that in mind it doesn't make sense to instantly disqualify people without a degree either.
> If you're not willing to put in the work
Why should anyone who already knows everything for a degree have to waste 4-6 years of their life?
Having two kids getting their CS degrees right now at top 50 colleges.
I am not impressed.
A friend of my son goes to UNFS (North Carolina State Film School). For four years he makes films. After the first year he has to choose between photography, directing, writing, etc. Then he spends 3 year fine tuning his craft. Great program!
CS Programs seem to be a little of this and a little of that, none of it coordinated. Quality is teaching is varied, occasional a great teacher or TA, much more frequently poor teachers or TAs.
On the other hand, I didn't start my adult life a few dozen grand into the red with student loan debt, which, from what I gather through long acquaintance with many who did, has very considerable advantages of its own. So I'd have to call it a tradeoff - but, then, that's my whole point: it's not accurate to say that either option is strictly preferable to the other.
It forced me to study a wide variety of things I probably wouldn't have spent much time on if on my own (i.e. OS programming, making my own compiler, prolog, finite automata, assembly programming, etc).
Also did A.I., 3d graphics, network programming, and various other things, but I probably would have learned that on my own to a certain point (I developed video games for awhile).
Pretty much. Managed to work on about eight games in a row that didn't make back their investment for three separate companies while I was in the game industry. They failed for various reasons, and a few of them really should have been successful, in my opinion, but oh well. Bad timing (releasing at the same time as heavy hitters), bad marketing, bad luck with reviewers, getting screwed by platform holders, aiming at the wrong audience, bad choice of difficulty, bad choice of which idea to pursue, technical issues that weren't in the testing environment and not discovered until release, overly restrictive and expensive update patching policies with platform holders, all sorts of fun reasons.
I probably agree that for each student at least one of those 4 years is usually wasted; but this is different than whole program being a waste for a person.
I guess "community taught" would be better than "self taught" since I learned from so many people online. But I had been programming for 10 years before school, and while I was in the military (over 6 years) I took advantage of many MOOCs from MIT, Stanford, UNSW, etc. and many books from Knuth to most of the No Starch Press library which I understand is not the case for traditional students. It is frustrating though, especially not being just out of high school.
You were just overprepared for an undergraduate degree by the time you got around to trying for it. For anyone else taking a similar path, specifically the military part, you can often knock out an associates degree with that amount of military experience. Do it, you can skip most of the core curriculum and focus on the CS part and be done in 2-3 years (less if summer courses are available) and be in grad school in your 3rd or 4th your of full-time college education.
That has nothing to do with my CS studies, of which I have learned nothing from college and could have CLEPed a BS degree on day one if it was possible and moved on to a masters where I should have been initially placed.
> I'm sure you don't know everything.
I never claimed I knew everything.
...on the previous version of the system.
...the month before the training was updated to the most recently fielded version.
...taught by a retired Army guy.
...from Texas.
...who won't stop telling stories about his Army days.
But the hombre from Texas is not one of those people. He will drive for 30 minutes, past dozens of ordinary, mundane restaurants, to reach the nearest Texas-style barbecue restaurant, run by a fellow expatriate Texan, who shoulders the burden of living outside of Texas for the sake of fellow Texans who tragically cannot be in the best state all the time, yet need to regularly consume bits of Texas in order to survive.
Ironically, Texas has so many people in it, all constantly surrounded on all sides by Texas, that you cannot easily identify that guy until he actually leaves the state.
Also, the thing that's wrong with Texas is football. That is easily 120% of my problem with Texas.
Oxford’s distance Master’s will take experience in place of a degree.
I did take some 400 level electives completely outside what I am interested in and had not studied which were great though. One professor for those asked in the beginning what each person expected from and I mentioned what I am actually specializing in and he consistently gave examples of applying it to what I do which was excellent.
And I still learned things my first year (especially in ancillary classes, I only took three computer classes my freshman year), I just didn't get much out of CS classes until sophomore year. One of those classes was a gimme class I really should have tested out of ahead of time in hindsight, though (basically computers 101, I had quizzes on identifying what was the desktop, mouse and monitor).