Knowledge is transient and unimportant. The real reason for the difference between the educated and uneducated ones is in structure and rigour.

@@vitalyl1327 in 20 years I have seen no correlation between educated and (experienced) self taught developers and their abilities. An education is a good place to start and will help point you in the right direction, but self taught developers often have a passion that has led them to become developers.

@@vitalyl1327 nah

Yeah, I take issue with him calling CS majors "traditional programmers". Actual traditional programmers read through the manuals and learned to code that way. There were no Computer Science degrees back then. Every contributor to the field back then had degrees in engineering or mathematics. No one was holding your hand to teach you anything.

@@Rexvideowow key word here is *engineers*.

What about no degree at all :( ?

@@willneve7306 That's my case, and tbh I haven't really had a problem with it yet. There are companies that will only hire people with a degree, but considering that it's fairly widely recognized that universities unfortunately don't do a tremendously good job of preparing software developers I figure more fool them.

​@@willneve7306some of the richest people in the world were dropouts. College is a business.

People with degrees are not "self-taught". They were taught how to learn. It is people without any education who are the root of all problems.

@@willneve7306My typical role is Chief Architect at organizations that build sophisticated Service-Oriented Architectures in FinTech, banking, payments, fraud detection, ML, etc. My specialty is in 0-1 projects, and un-f@#$%ing technical debt, monoliths, and spaghetti code, using world-class code generation and automation techniques. Among many roles I’ve had, a previous role was the Software Architect overseeing both the Commerce and Payments platforms at Sony PlayStation, processing billions of dollars a year. My current company builds software ventures. So not just one start-up, which is hard enough, but multiple start-up as a commodity. The gentleman above is right: it’s not what you were spoon fed in college… it’s the knowledge and discipline you learn on the job. You’ve either got it, or you don’t. I have no degree at all.

Great Addition! Often those "soft" skills are the most important ones, unfortunetely hard to measure and therefore often neglected.

state of confusion is permanent 🙃

Such a great point about staying in that place of uncertainty.

I want to frame this comment

lol, yeah, when all that COBOL stuff still running the world was made CS degrees didn't even exist. i always cringe when I have to IT archeology COBOL stuff and reengineer it. that's systems doing their job for 7ß+ years in super stable high performance environs. Like flight booking, money transfers or container management of ships. Stuff that moves crazy amounts of trillions of USD.

with the advent of AI and our processing power getting so much more powerful, its a new gold rush.

Good call Lawrence - the cleverest guy I knew at college "moonlighted" by writing the IEEE specs for the implementation of UK and European broadband. His watchwords were, "keep it simple, stupid" KISS. You are indeed correct. Our local USA library is super well funded. It's huge. Like yours they have almost nothing on computing. They have one tiny shelf for computing. The legal library was worse. Thousands of volumes on property law and NOTHING on cyber crime. Kevin Mitnick cracks his knuckles.

Pioneers aren’t self-taught so much as inspired inventors, creating the knowledge that them becomes the foundation that others can then build upon

I agree! I see a lot of people (myself included) way overcomplicate things for no good reason. It's always really inspiring for me to read about the beginnings of computers... there was some ingenious stuff (like the old fully electromechanical TTYs), but a lot of those early innovations were just regular people coming up with clever workarounds.

Wtf based boomer detected?

No you haven't.

I agree, with one caveat, specifically on point #3 - a good degree will usually select languages not just to teach the language, but also to reenforce concepts for example a functional language may be taught to improve comfort with recursion and immutability. There is nothing stopping a self-taught engineer from building their own learning path to cover the same ground, but a CS grad (on a well balanced degree) is forced to cover this ground.

Yeah I'd personally say 1 and 3 make sense because school is supposed to teach you concepts regardless of language and engineering focused schools will introduce you to the idea of requirements and thinking about design before starting. For that reason I'd say 1 is the big one (although in large classes with mediocre teachers it often does just turn into get something to work.. But a proper software eng. class should at least get you thinking about planning it out first though and expose you to industry tools or concepts to do so) But 2, 4, and 5 are just misc skills that schools won't teach. If you get a good professor you will get critiques (instead of just checking that it works) but never has a professor told me my commit was too big (if they even care if you use VC in the first place) and no one in an acedemic setting gonna tell you you're working on too much at once lol. Maybe you'll get exposed to this in group projects or senior design but it's doubtful it'd be an important part of any curriculum.

nu uh@@thecollector6746

​@thecollector6746 maybe critical thinking isn't for you

Science vs Engineering.

The mark of an engineer is experience in applying and improving their craft

Most of the people don't realize that the end of a degree is the start of a new Learning experience In which, most of the time but not always, you're alone and are self taught

@@juanitoMint I never went in to getting a degree thinking id gain knowledge from it. Matter of fact, I knew that I would be learning outdated information and technologies through the lenses of the academic field. Not the practical and useful side. I got it to check a box. Since I got my degree at the end of 2022, I have been just learning whatever interests me.

Everyone on here agrees with you, me included. Thinking the topic is endorphin based click bait isn't it? Nothing riles an engineer more than a ridiculous intern hosting a code review.

Well, this kind of people will never work in, say, finance, so they have no chance of getting their minds violated irreversibly by the certain APL descendants that are so popular im algo-trading.

Yeah, paradigms can be different and using a language effectively isn't a matter of syntax. Doing things in Java then copying over that code to rust can make the rust code suck, but redo it in the rust way and it'll work well. I guess basic syntax can for sure be understood, but the way you use a language definitely differs

@@ToaOfTech Any Bilingual will confirm to this.

Matlab: you like ()'s? Lets use them for arrays and functions. I'm sure nothing can go wrong. SAS: You want a loop, you are going to have to pay for it.

Python to C or ASM 💀

You can learn at any age. But keep in mind it takes time and you might be too old to enjoy the fruits of your labour. In addition to python, I suggest you learn Bash to orchestrate your python scripts when your projects get larger

You can do it! When times get tough, remember ... 1. You're not alone. My husband is 51 and studying Python too. People change careers in their 50s all the time, and tech isn't just for the kids. 2. People don't retire from this gig until they're in their 70s, so that's a 20-year career if you start now. 3. Resumés don't require years anymore, and most interviews are conducted by video, so it's much harder for them to discriminate against you. 4. Don't let these ageists get you down. They're talking like you're a foot in the grave when you might outlive them by a score.

Thank you!@@LuzMCosta

If you truly love learning, then you’re already ahead of half the developers I’ve encountered. I’ve worked with some devs who are younger than me (I’m in my 50’s) and they haven’t read a single book or article in years. Never stop learning… you can totally do this!

you inspire me aaron...lets get it!!!!

Yea I was gonna say, this is just devs without work experience period really

All people with degrees start off as unexperienced programmers.

same, often. In every place I've worked. Frankly I find the self-taught variety are more willing (and able) to learn and have a better perspective than the walking textbook types. The textbook types have some very clever knowledge, but don't know when to use it. They also tend to impose things that make project development pace grind down. I tend to like people who can make systems, but then actually use them / make tools. You figure out the pain points of certain methodology very quickly.

Graduates pretty much can't be trusted, but IT graduates are probably the worst of the bunch. Either way, people thinking they're engineers when they really aren't is a problem, as is dismissing the importance of and difficulty in achieving high quality in software systems.

I'm not sure what school you went to, but as a computer engineer, I studied and worked along-side many computer science majors who were still struggling with the concept of loops and conditional statements. As far as discipline goes, none of the classes ever got this far. Professors didn't think that things like code repositories, clean code, or even server-side database connectivity were important topics. Not when most students were still struggling with the basics.

Effective code can be created in many different ways. As long as it works, is supportable, and fits in with the general scheme, I see terminology like the above as a weak attempt at gatekeeping.

This is 100 percent the case. I see the same thing in both people who have the degree and people who don't. I'm almost certain anyone who disagrees with how you put that is suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The author is not meaning "self-taught to PhD", he is talking about "self-taught to writing some sloppy apps". Suppose a guy pretending to be a proper biologist after dissecting a few frogs at home and learning a few random fragmented statements from a biology book. That's what majoiry of self-taught programmers are.

@user-dz5pt3yr9z I get what you're saying, It does require practice, but we should not neglect that not every self taught is bad at it, and that we should not let a minority ruin the image of the majority, the majority of self taught developers are working very hard to improve their situation and making a scary leap into something that is very difficult to master and they end up working through it ! That said, it should also not deminish the effort that people who went through a college education to obtain their positions or knowledge.

​@@salimbendag6274 Talents can exist. People could learn math. People could develop math knowledge independently of the mainstream; that's what we are taught to do at universities - all that complicated stuff can be derived from the basic principles. Only we have to live in a certain real environment where most IT newcomers are there for quickmoney and not because they are interested in the scientific part of it.

That's because you didn't study computer science as an undergrad. Regardless of the difficulty of coding in a particular language, there are many adjacent concepts that you learn in a university. Such as computer architecture, computer networks, operating systems, compilers, parallel programming, database management systems, computational complexity, linear algebra, numerical analysis, etc. All these may or may not matter depending on what you're doing. If you're just coding the front end of a website for example all these probably have very little importance. But if you are coding the back end for example, or developing a standalone software suite then all these may come into play depending on what you're doing. Just like in biology, if you're studying e.g. immunology there are many background concepts that you should know, such as chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, etc. This is why people say that if you've only studied one thing, eg Python programming, then you're not a software engineer. You are a programmer sure, but a software engineer (should) have much more generic knowledge.

As someone who switched out of Biochem to Chem E and finds bio very intimidating I find coding to be one if the easiest things ever. Every bio-related class I have taken has, at one time or another, resulted in pretty severe panic attacks due to the sheer amount of information I needed to know.

Hardware is to software as physics is to engineering. I wish I had realized the cost of abstracting away everything into black boxes much sooner in my career.

Becoming a well rounded developer is something to strive for, but the most important thing is to function in the role you have. Knowing what is going on under the hood is good, but often it's not relevant and on occasion it can send you the wrong way. There are many environments like databases or CMS systems that are so encapsulated that reasoning with basic concept on how thing should be done or estimation performance is nearly impossible. In such cases you just have to read the documentation, consult with the community and test things out. I think in general the higher the level of the software you are building on the more that this is the case, but opinions may differ.

@@Muskar2 The difference between hardware and software is a logical one.

@@dancingdoormanable A basic understanding of B-Trees and how modern relational databases store tables and their indices as such is kind of indispensable for tuning performance of non-trivial queries. Just an example of how something one would learn in a college level file processing class is applicable to professional work.

​​@@markteague8889Wow man, I definitely couldn't learn about those things in any other way. Surely having my hand held for a few tens of thousands of dollars will make me a super smart fellow!

Hey Sam! I remember our Saturday morning business chats. Hope you're doing well! And thank you!

Hey, you got me curious. What is the book?

@@e.m.r1124 Probably it is "Just One Thing"

​@@e.m.r1124 It's a productivity & self-help book titled The ONE Thing (240 pages). Travis talks about it in his video: THE Book That Changed My Life As A Developer.

I've heard that proverb worded differently by my old Algebra II teacher in the form of a question and answer: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."

​​@@user-tx4wj7qk4tthey know enough computer science to do the job. The rare self taught dev are the ones who are able learn cs and implement it in their work using direct learning.

​@@user-tx4wj7qk4twhat the heck bro lol, you keep copying salty replies everywhere hahaha

@@angelocarantino4803 Find the lie. You clowns don't....hence the reason why you routinely lose out to those who do hold CS degrees.

Not nearly as fun as it is when I interview "self-taught devs" and they can't; down to a person provide me with a concise definition of OOP and or polymorphism, and why either should be used. But remember everybody.....Self-Taught-Devs aren't the deluded, generally unqualified, ignorami who thinks reading Medium Posts and copy/paste from Stack Overflow is the equivalency of grinding for 4 years in an accredited program instructed by actual Computer Scientists.

It's funny how everyone sticks to one specific language (usually the only one they know) these days. In 1990s it was like: "We have got a bunch of code to migrate from platform A to platform B and from language X to language Y. You don't know the language X? Well, the project is 7 months long, which is more than enough time to learn it and migrate those 500'000 lines of code". I've been quite fluent in 3 programming languages even before applying for a trainee position at my first job, and that was sort of normal. Now indeed everyone is pigeonholed with a language sticker on them. It's like a Babel language confusion. Had to create 2 CVs differing only in the language name in the title, otherwise recruitment simply can't match them to a position.

@@InconspicuousChap Currently on the job hunt with roughly two and a half years professional experience (I was a hobbiest doing mostly C# for years before), It's remarkable how many companies specifically ask about your experience with a language or framework. Great at C# but they're hiring for a Java role? 0 years of experience as far as the first few interviews go. I'm not sure I've come across a single role that requested a certain level of experience in computer programming in general. I wonder if it's a reflection of more dug-in frameworks, though I'm not really sure how it was back then. Or maybe it's due to companies industrializing the recruiting process to the point where it takes a while before you get in touch with someone who knows that C and C# are in fact different.

I think you job sounds awesome!

@a225 - I guess I'm in my dream job actually. At first I thought, gee this is a bad situation but over time and with each new success, I really built my confidence and began to see that long term, this was to my benefit when I eventually make the jump to Cybersecurity at some point. It really takes a lot of guess out of what is happening inside all the the black boxes. 🙂

This is one of the most interesting jobs I have ever seen, I would love to try this out. If there is any way I can experience this job, please let me know.

If it's not committed and pushed it doesn't exist.

@@streetcoder76 I agree - I usually make my own branch and commit and push whenever I'm finished for the day - just in case my computer explodes overnight, my work is saved to the cloud

​@@streetcoder76Even if it's pushed you can make it not exist. Just rewrite the commit history. It is mostly useful when you've accidentally added sensitive data though.

I don’t commit anything that won’t build

@@luke5100 Roughly how big are your commits?

I keep seeing these everywhere what the heck are they

@@bbrainstormer2036 They are people. Surely, you are not used to them. And they talk about the things they think they master.

Bro had to include emojis 😂😂😂

@@p3ter408 Thank you for noticing it.

Ah, you're talking about Salesforce engineers.

When I worked on a small team of three we did single branch development where we all worked off the development branch. This was possible because we were such a small team, but also our code base was only worked on by the three of us with some people from other teams committing from time to time. I loved it. It forced small non-breaking commits. As for Jira, today's Jira culture at companies is a cargo-cult. I'll never forget the time I had a single character commit that took two days to get into a simple staging environment because of all the "ceremony" and red tape it needed to go through. Absolutely insane.

Such an overcomplicated and overseparated process

@@MrC0MPUT3Ri am currently working in a team of three and I am pushing my fellow engineers to use jira and github and code reviews as much as possible, because every time they merge directly to dev I have to solve some nasty conflicts or the code quality just isnt 100 there. I never understood why people cant allocate 70% of the time to coding and 30% to planning/refinement/etc. Its a simple step that from my experience makes working async on big project much more enjoyable

@@CyrilCommando Did you ever code anything non trivial in a team?

Many but not all. There is no single rule fitting for all it depends on your company, project and team.

Far too often those people who broke in are breaking things and wrecking havoc. There is a lot of wrong people in this industry, who should have stayed far away.

@@user-tx4wj7qk4t I think it's youtube itself, its auto-moderation is absolutely unhinged. My comments get deleted randomly. Often it's simply because of a stray dot in between words instead of a whitespace (thanks to the mobile phone keyboards), it's interpreted as URLs and punished. Sometimes it's for some keywords - a lot of my comments here disappeared that mentioned the abbreviation for atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability.

@@vitalyl1327 Not exactlly.... the ones wrecking stuff are the "tech lead" with 9 years of experience who on multiple occassions tell me a snippet of code works when it doesn't and he sounds like he hasn't touched the language and framework he's supposed to be leading the team in for at least 5 of those 9 years, and isn't familiar enough with the language, getting shocked by its unique features, AND also costing the company extra thousands for months by provisioning more expensive cloud resources for no good reason and then going on vacation. This same guy asks me to write high latency code for no good reason other than it looks clean. Clean code will kill a web server, thanks to him the microservice I wrote is basically useless because it does multiple queries for one request other than the one query I wanted to do for that request and has about hundreds more lines of code. Readability and maintainablity is down the drain and I now hate working with that code. He also told me exceptions throwing exceptions don't cause latency issues. LMAO. Latency basically shot up by 4x when I added more exceptions. I had to tell him it doesn't work (because each exception has to collect the stack trace) but of course he's the tech lead he doesn't believe me, the intern, because I'm not the tech lead. Or the other senior devs with 9 years of experience who come in to "help" and leave at least 3 bugs behind for me to fix. Their unit tests were useless at catching their bugs. I have less than 1 YOE and mainly self taught, and the newcomer "senior dev" with also 10 years of experience come running to me to ask how to do this and that. These people have MASTERS DEGREES. Look, good sirs, with all due respect I'm sure there's good software engineers with Masters, but someone with a Bacherlor's or Master's degree isn't necessarily good, especially if they've been out of school for a LONG while. I'm bloody tired of them and would rather work with a self taught dev with integrity and common sense.

​@@vitalyl1327why because they read the same books and did the same projects at home while you paid thousands for some dude to say "hey do the project on page 58 by tomorrow"? 😂 collge is a joke for 98% of professions. Everyone teaches themselves. Some do it cheap and some do it expensive. Who's smarter? Does it matter when you're dead? Your boss will have a new ass in your seat before it's cold and who knows maybe they are "self-taught" doing a better job than you were 🤷🏼‍♂️. There's always someone smarter, faster, bigger.

@@mrfixitm3345 you so very obviously have glaring gaps in your fundamental knowledge. And the funniest part here is that you will never be able to detect them yourself. Again, people without higher education have no ability for systematic learning, they do not learn bottom-up, they are unable to form comprehensive systems of the knowledge they acquire. You're an obvious and hilarious case in point here. You have no faintest idea of what education is. I am so glad I will never have to work with someone as low as you are.

Ever heard of Horizon / Post Office scandal? This is what happens when bad developers are unchecked and unregulated. Also, your users suffer every day, faced by bugs and glitches of your otherwise probably benign "websites". This should not be dismissed either. High time software development is regulated. And I'm not even a CS graduate, I'm an engineer (as in, a proper, regulated mecatronics engineer).

@@vitalyl1327 ha. Yeah, bad software can hurt people. 95% won’t. I’d love to hear, in detail, how you can regulate software. And where. We already have regulations on our financial systems, defense systems, strong requirements on medical systems. What are we missing in regulation? Your concerns are real, for sure. But taking aiming at “self taught” engineers is objectively a dumb angle to take

@@cody_codes_youtube self-taughts are just the demographic slice where the problem is the most pronounced. Being a self-taught is not necessarily a root of the problem, it just tends to correlate with a lack of rigour that is otherwise present in those who had a more structured education. Regulations work pretty well in medical and engineering domains, and I cannot see how the same framework cannot be applied to the software development. Personal responsibility, to start with. Centralised certifications that should be required in any sensitive development (aerospace, automotive, financial, civil service related, personal data handling, etc.). Responsibility of the certifying bodies for the failures of the certified. I.e., all the same as we have in the engineering.

@@vitalyl1327 respectfully, if you haven’t been building software, or have experience building software in the industry for more than 2 years, you wouldn’t realize how much of an ask that is. We have formal structured education with information systems, we have an incredible amount of certifications in every framework and software discipline, yet saying most problems come from that slice of demographics is ridiculous. I’ve worked with 100s of engineers throughout my freelancing career and in my experience the level of due diligence and safe programming has not been correlated to how they started and is directly informed by their professional working career

​@@cody_codes_youtube LOl those "engineers" are so haughty, I thought there were like this only in France but it looks like they are assholes all around the world 😂 They are so insecure and starving for validation after years to learn something you can learn by yourself that they have to tell everybody in the world "i am an engineer " 😂 for real the worst people on earth in the professional world

You absolutely hit the truth of it. University gives you access to materials, resources, and typically helps with a plan of how to tackle learning them, but the actual learning is always a self-taught matter in the end. People can pass courses without a full grasp of a subject simply by plugging and chugging on some topics. Ultimately understanding a subject requires a person commit to teaching themselves what the material means and how to use it. That has no relation to learning from university or from other resources outside of a formal school. No one can learn it for you, as you said.

The phrase is "self-taught" not self-learned.

They are self-taught 😂

Just curious, what do people learn in tourism degrees?

Don't take my word for it, but I think that's dangerous given JavaScript and React is your chosen specialties. React is a very replaceable framework and JavaScript is a hard language to learn fundamentals in. Don't feel bad about it, but just know that it will benefit you greatly to get comfortable doing something timeless, like writing in C and/or building something from scratch with minimal dependencies.

@@Muskar2 I don't disagree, I just meant to specialize as a beginner in these things. I am currently starting to learn C actually!

@@Muskar2 It's probably more dangerous for the reasoning that browsers are tightly coupled to JavaScript and vice versa. So much so, coupled to browsers where the GUI is untestable and not standardized. If anything, JavaScript has valuable lessons in navigating/avoiding this tight coupling with the complex configuration system it has via various json configuration files. From a perspective of creating patterns of programs, I would say it's all mostly still there but maybe only less accessible due to all previously mentioned overhead.

This right here

If I saw a developer with say a two-year diploma and a year's work experience, yet have C++, C#, Python, JavaScript, React, Angular, etc. I'm going to have to ask WTF they've actually been doing and whether they actually worked in any to actually get proficient. If you are 50 and know everything from assembler, Pascal, C, JavaScript, SQL, VBA, Python, etc., etc. that's a different story. You could have been in five different positions for 5+ years each. However, even in those cases, you should probably either skip them from your resume or just focus on the ones key to this job.

​@@BW022what if they started coding at 14?

@@kabiskac I've interviewed and hired lots of developers. Like most, we look at three main things -- education, work experience, and job specific skills. None of these show up well prior to around 18 on most resumes. When an employer asks for X, they typically want to see that you've used in a professional setting -- if not paid work, at least a school project, etc. Most development isn't just coding, it's working with others, needs, testing, versioning principles, documentation, testing, etc. Those rarely come from self-taught experience. That said, it may help you get through a technical interview, you can certainly say "X years of experience" even if some of that happened before school, and maybe it you can use it to provide examples or "projects" to discuss -- if you made a web site, you could include a link to it. If you are self-taught, only a diploma, and/or not much work experience, just realize what (and why) employers want proof of experience using these in team/semi-professional environment and try your best to highly any experience you have.

@@BW022 Peope who know assembler and K&R C don't use Python! IMO, Python is the new BASIC.

@@andydelle4509Clearly that statement isn't true since I know assembler and C and I do use Python. I agree that Python is the new entry level general purpose language, but that doesn't mean because you know something else, you shouldn't use it. My choice of which language to use comes down at a lot of decisions -- time, ability to deploy them, policies, ability to share it, etc. Sometimes you just need something quick and dirt and that often happens to be Python. I've had to write small utilities, analysis, document sorters, etc. in Python since others dev don't have C (or Delphi compliers) or is it necessary. Then again, I've had to rewrite some of their Python programs in VBA (inside Excel) so non-programmers (who can't install Python) can run them locally. Finally, I've had a few 'quick and dirty' apps which were so painful to run in Python or VBA, I gave up and fired up MS SQL and Delphi. And once, I had to rewrite one of their Python utilities in JavaScript so that everyone in the organization could access and run it.

I'm a chemical engineer doing software development and i dont mind being called software devloper since i didnt study CS. I agree with your country though, the title engineer is used very loosely nowadays. Example some countries will call a millwright an engineer or the aircon technician engineer. It is a very hard course to do at university just to be so diluted and used by everyone. It should only be reserved for people who actually studied to be one

​@@fabianpetersen2452people with CS degrees should not call themselves engineers either, they are supposed to be scientists.

People in the US don't mistake a software engineer for someone that can do the traditional kind of engineering. If you heard a mechanic market themselves as "Truck Doctor" you wouldn't be confused and think they were a real doctor would you?

And this is exactly why robust regulations are so important. With a personal responsibility, with severe consequences for screwing up, bad engineers will be weeded out.

@@vitalyl1327 As I pointed out, some of the best people I worked with had no formal qualification. Why would regulations be expected to help?

@@softcolly8753 same as they work for medics and engineers - by placing the responsibility where it should be.

@@vitalyl1327 medial error is the third leading cause of death in the US.

@@softcolly8753 which can be attributed to one of the most relaxed regulatory regime in the world. EU is a far better example.

That's called living in Europe bro.

Hey fellow, ex electrical engineer turned into software dev role here. In my experience it's quite different, I'm able to make the code works, but folks graduated from CS always find a better way in terms of maintainability, and often better performance. Or maybe it's me being dumb. Either way - there's a lot to learn.

@@rosyidharyadi7871 I studied micro electronics that had a lot of computer science in it, writing assembly and controlling IO and interrupts. My experience is that I generally come up with faster solutions because of understanding the hardware side, a lot better. They seem to be better than me in abstract problems but I don’t deal too much with matrix multiplications anymore.

I know what you mean by hostile. I get defensive when my world is threatened, but I let it all come in and marinate, and I'll come around or form a stronger debate basis. A lot of people can't or won't do that. IMO it is a clear red flag and that dev needs to get replaced soon as it is viable if they are consistently cagey. Titanic waiting to happen, hiding a burned hull... A junior can still teach a senior on occasion and its part of what makes the mentoring process so beneficial. The moment where a dev thinks there is nothing else to learn, its time to go flip burgers. Another way to put it, someone who wants to be a developer who won't develop themselves can't be a true developer.

There's 2 different mindsets needed during the PR process: 1. While creating a PR the coder should have a lot of pride and ownership to produce the best code they can 2. While the PR is being reviewed the coder should take their ego out of it and instead consider that the code belongs to the team, wishing for the reviewers to surface as many issues and good suggestions to improve the code as possible In this way each PR has the best opportunity to be of the highest quality and the coders skills will grow at the same time This is something that every successful (team oriented) developer learns early on in their journey

This branching strategy could also harm testability in this case, too.

@@retagainez We normally aim for branches to live for about 2-4 days. The work is all scientific work and mostly involves a lot of math. The way the code is structured conflicts are pretty rare. A person working on chemical reaction equations won't conflict with someone working on mass transport because those will be in separate areas.

@@Immudzen Ah. In that case, a lack of merge conflicts wouldn't really detract from using branches. I am more curious about the problem domain you guys write code for and it makes me sad and confused to hear about the hostile pairing sessions. I would do ANYTHING to work in a company with pairing, but I highly expect I won't be exposed to that for possibly up to an entire decade or so.

That is just not true. It's the mindset of a slave. "look at me, I have climbed higher than you" for people who are really free, they don't give shit about titles. That means they don't care about the title people have. They care about who they are.

Being an engineer, by definition, is having legally binding personal responsibility for what you're doing. Nothing about the status.

@@vitalyl1327Indeed, that's why I unit test the crap out of my services, unlike some people with degrees. I've seen some of the laziest shit coming from both self taught and degree holders.

​@@vitalyl1327engineering is just an applied science, legal obligations are predated by engineers lol

As a completely self-taught programmer of nearly 40 years, I have to vehemently disagree with the supposition that self-taught programmers are not exposed to as wide a range of knowledge as formally educated programmers. The greatest hindrances I ever experienced while learning my craft were while in a classroom earning my degree. I had been programming for about eight years before I stepped foot into a University, and exposed myself to many different programming concepts and techniques that my University classes didn't even mention in passing. In my experience, formal training is a choke collar.

@@anthonyobryan3485 +100. I learned how to code first and then studied web development at a local college. With regards to the exposure to knowledge, as I see it, the vast majority of it is gained as experience during one's career, so regardless of whether you're self taught or college / university educated, it's what you do after you learn those basics that determines your exposure to knowledge and experiences. As far as college curriculum was concerned, it was relatively general at the beginning and there was a lot of material being taught that was fairly dated. Don't get me wrong though, glad I learned it all because it was all super interesting nonetheless! I was very fortunate that all the teachers and the IT department head were very open minded and willing to accept input from students for some parts of the curriculum - for example, I found out they were planning to teach ASP classic, this is about 20 years ago, but it was already losing relevancy. Myself and another student wrote a proposal for switching the language to PHP. While PHP surely isn't "the best", it's a great language to learn in terms of web development, given it's wide availability and large community.

This is definitely something I struggle with even in traditional storytelling and writing. There’s a fine balance and some it helps to have a generalized section like a template and fill in the relevant sections. It makes it easier to commit out sections that don’t work or still need some more lines to work. It sounds odd but it sometimes helps to write the beginning and end and meet in the middle

Absolutely, and you probably have many to teach this blogger, including: how to speak and label concepts better. UKposts as many inefficient universities, let incompetent people speak as if they got the knowledge.

Wise words

Respectfully, if I may offer some feedback, the “how” you say things are just as important (maybe even more so) than the “what” you’re saying. You may not mean for any negative or unhelpful tone to come across but, for example, your message sounds like you may have a chip on your shoulder about CS grads. I’m not saying you actually do but the tone of what you say can communicate that even if it’s unintentional. The soft skills of dealing positively with people, teamwork, communication, etc are equally as important as the hard/technical skills. Just my 2 cents, sir! 😊

@@paxsevenfour I do agree with what you say, my storie is that I trusted people too much and it shows more then I'd like. I don't have anything against the students, it not there fault that none really cares about making anything of quality. I worked for under a lead engineer who complained about response size and could not comprehend that client side caching exists and you are not limited to 5mb on a browser. Lets just say I have a hard time trusting people these days. It's not even that they don't know, they don't want to know. Or don't want to look stupid.

@@fulconandroadcone9488 Students don't learn the "trade" side of writing code. In my University I had ONE course that maybe mentioned any semblance of code quality as a brief aside in a lecture. That was my software engineering course where we developed a project for stakeholders for an entire semester. One lecture mentioned agile, another unit testing, one talked about assertions, design patterns, and some about Git practices. And even that was in passing and not really remarked upon past that.

By the way I’m from denmark

It does not matter how and where did you learn. What matters is who will be *responsible* when your code goes south. This is the difference between the wild west software development and properly regulated fields such as civil engineering and medicine.

@@gppsoftware You are right, that's what you prefer and it has to be respected by those who will look for employment at your company.

@@gppsoftware I agreed with your point, meaning I would still agree with a billion other people who share your view. However I have worked as a programmer for 5+ years now, I have a college degree but has nothing to do with Programming. During my years as a programmer I have come across a lot of graduates with CS degrees but cannot code beyond the old none usable projects that they did in college, and now as I speak, I know of several recruiters who prefer someone who knows hands on programming than just a certificate holder.

A version control system is not a replacement for a backup system, so please don't use it as such.

Except that some of the largest organizations use Trunk Based development and only push to master. If you take this long to push, it could be you're not only not committing compliable code enough but also not testing frequently enough.

That's a fair assessment.

Given the large number of programming languages that are basically shades of C, it can seem like it's all just syntax. From time to time you'll come across the work of someone who thinks "it's just syntax" and writes C code in Python, it's a good exercise in controlling your murderous urges.