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Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by mental1896 on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:06PM (#18240411)
I don't have a degree and I'm 10+ years deep into my career. What has started to stand out for me in recent years is that there are holes in my experience that my college-educated peers don't have to deal with. Granted I never had to deal with student loans so I guess there's a tradeoff. But the problem with these education "holes" is that they hit you right out of left field when you least expect it.
Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by neuromantik8086 on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:40PM (#18240812)
My mom is a music teacher, and she finds that she often will get new students who were previously self-taught with blind spots. Ideally, one of the main perks of school, which is difficult if not impossible to get with auto-didacticism, is that you get continuous feedback from someone who knows what common mistakes look like.

My technical background is largely from reading books and manuals on my own, but I'm under no delusion that I would benefit greatly from some more formal instruction for certain topics, if nothing else because then I would have someone challenge me immediately when I'm wrong.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by echelon on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:12PM (#18240491)
What do you feel are the gaps in your education? Do you think taking an online course would help with them?

I suggest learning a little about data structures and algorithms, each are typically one semester courses in undergrad. You might supplement it with operating systems and distributed computing, though data structures should be a primary focus.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by mental1896 on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:36PM (#18241418)
I've tried and failed going back school enough times to know it doesn't work for me. Certification courses & clinics have proven worthwhile in the past though.
Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by pc86 on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:11PM (#18240475)
Could you provide some examples?
Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by madeuptempacct on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:32PM (#18240723)
I can provide some examples for him as a self-educated dev:

* What is big O

* What is value type vs pointer/reference

* How does the internet work

* Binary search trees, tries, graphs - u wut m8 (Thankfully, there's this: https://medium.com/basecs/archive/2017/01)

* Basic cryptography, hashing, etc

* DNS, IPs, HTTP, etc

* TCP, UDP, etc (I still don't know these)

* Stack, heap, queue, malloc (Again, very little exposure to this without learning a low level language.)

* How modern computers work

* Logic gates, clocks, memory, (actual) binary math

* Wifi basics (actual physical data transmission)

* Linux

I can go on and on and on, but these are things you don't pick up at work unless you go out of your way to learn how they work.

Regarding the parent post - I have a very generous training budget. And guess where I will never spend it? At the best University in my state. I got a degree in something other than Comp Sci, and 95% of the classes were useless and way-too-drawn-out. So, you might not be as behind as you think.

A pretty-smart co-worker of mine with a Comp Sci degree said he didn't figure out the point of object oriented programming until he got his first Java job.

This is only related to other comments in this thread, but I do feel that formal education is oversold, and particularly to people who are from poor families with no guidance trying to have a shot at life.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by nostrademons on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @02:11PM (#18241827)
I have a CS degree, but I learned basically all of the above on my own. In some cases I also had a class later that taught it, but for most of the networking stuff it wasn't even taught in school.

If you're self-taught and worried about your CS fundamentals, there's a really simple algorithm to get an education better than any CS student at roughly 1/100th of the price:

1. Look up some famous university like Stanford or MIT.

2. Download the course syllabus for the course you're interested in off their website. (Nowadays you can often get the full course, including all the lectures and handouts.)

3. Buy the textbook. When I was in school you could pull shenanigans like buying the European version of the textbook for 1/4 the price or (if you live in a college town) buying the textbook, reading it, and returning it before courses are finalized, but these loopholes have probably been mostly closed. There's now a thriving used-textbook market online that didn't exist when I went to school, though.

4. Read the textbook. Do some of the exercises. Implement the algorithms.

Incidentally, this is largely what CS students do for homework. Most of them kinda gloss over it because it's required, though, while if you're doing this because you really love the material, you've got a big advantage.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by gregmac on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:14PM (#18241190)
I've interviewed people with degrees that don't know about many of these questions. In fact I make it a point that if someone puts something like "TCP/IP" or "networking" in the laundry-list of skills/knowledge they have, I ask them a basic question about it -- and a depressingly large amount of time people can't even explain the difference between TCP and UDP.

I've also worked with people who can explain what big-O is and yet they'll write completely inefficient nested loops and N+1 SELECT queries, and then wonder why everything is slow in production even though it works great in dev.

Comp Sci can teach you theory and concepts, but as they say: there's no substitute for experience.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by ryanmarsh on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:24PM (#18241280)
Self taught programmer and I'm strong in all these areas. You can read three books and know all of this. It does not require a college education. In fact the TCP/IP stack and Linux I learned back in high school just by reading two books. It wasn't hard. The Data structures and algorithms I picked up a few years later when I was about college age. Again, you can read books about this stuff. It's not that hard.

If anything, a self-study program with a list of books to read and skills to master would save many self taught / self motivated people quite a bit of time, but its absence is by no means a show stopper.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by madeuptempacct on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:35PM (#18241407)
What three books? (Especially interested in data transfer protocols - I got a little bit into it for game development, but never found anything resembling a good source).

I learned a lot of these things from taking Harvard's CS50 online, reading the blog posts I linked (and doing problems), and I would imagine this book (https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/) would help out - a friend recommended it, but I never got around to it.

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...

^Covers logic gates and the basics of how a computer is built to an incredible degree, but it's VERY time intensive. Still, I really recommend it.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by ryanmarsh on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @02:06PM (#18241773)
These days CS50 lectures are online. The TCP/IP and Linux books I can't recall. That was some 20+ years ago. I think the TCP/IP/Protocols book was from Sams and the Linux book(s) were from O'Reilly. Algorithms/Data was The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena. Cracking the Coding Interview is great too. Crypto was just a bunch of reading online, I haven't found a good book on that I would recommend, same for data transfer protocols. I didn't just read three books, I'm saying, 20/20 hindsight I could have read about 3 books to garner most of the stuff I didn't learn by skipping college.

Maybe some of us self taught developers should get together and curate a clear path for CS knowledge and ancillary helpful things.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by madeuptempacct on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @02:29PM (#18242087)
"Maybe some of us self taught developers should get together and curate a clear path for CS knowledge and ancillary helpful things."

I wouldn't mind spending some time contributing to something like that. There is an endless amount of material to read and classes to take, but narrowing it down and prioritizing is the hard part.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by vxNsr on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:38PM (#18241436)
Please share the 3 books that taught you everything on this list. Not being sarcastic, I would love to have them.
Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by thaumaturgy on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @04:39PM (#18243576)
Given the timeline he mentioned, the TCP/IP one may have been "Inside TCP/IP". It was an extremely valuable reference at one time, but it's a bit dated now. I'm just about to finally give away my copy.
Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by vxNsr on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @05:47PM (#18244128)
You wouldn't happen to have a good suggestion to replace it?
Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by thaumaturgy on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @06:15PM (#18244318)
You might try the two-volume "TCP/IP Illustrated" set, although I haven't personally read those. Otherwise, no, as far as I know there was never an edition of "Inside TCP/IP" published after 1997, and no book exactly took its place.

Which is a real shame.

If you just want to get a good sense of UDP, ICMP, TCP/IP, datagram headers, and a handful of older protocols (like FTP), "Inside TCP/IP" is still valuable.

Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by wonderwonder on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:13PM (#18241167)
I can second this. Self taught programmer and I am weak in all of the above areas. My math skills (only high school math) are also especially weak which has really bitten me in graphics based jobs (simulation) where I have had to calculate view rotations and similar in 3d. I am lucky enough to have made it to the 6 figure club but I probably could have been here a decade ago with the right education. Also imposter syndrome has been a major limiter at times.
Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by vxNsr on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:36PM (#18241411)
I started college (Comp E) and didn't finish and I, can vouch for the fact that the classes I didn't take would have taught me nearly everything on your list (aside from the last 2).
Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse by hathawsh on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:45PM (#18241500)
FWIW, I learned all these things on my own, including object oriented programming. My blind spot was SQL, and thankfully I learned that in school. I preferred lower level coding and I had to be pushed to see that the performance overhead of SQL was not important compared with the productivity benefits.