Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)

If there is a virtue to CS degrees, it's that most engineering tracks require an immense amount of coursework in hard sciences that require a high intellectual aptitude to complete.

I'm really struggling to believe that a majority of people can work through that material and then can't do the type of work that most developers do. And in the most difficult realms of development, I think you'd find a majority of the developers have advanced degrees in CS.

I think having a deep interest in software is more likely to yield traits you're describing (and described in the article). Some people who have that didn't study CS. A lot did.

Self taught people are naturally filtered. The ones that arent able to come up with a solution in unfamiliar territory arent employed.

People who come up through regular education channels arent bad but arent great either.

People who worked everything out themselves, and then undertook tertiary study to ensure that not only are they doing things well, but are doing them correctly, are absolute power houses and cannot be stopped.

Yes, there is something to learning in your own way, in the "play" explorative style that humans are so very well adapted to.

However, there is definitely something to be said for proper training by a professional. A big part of my early career involved unlearning bad habits, learning the compsci tools that my peers already had, and learning to think holistically.

It's a lot like learning guitar. You can learn it yourself, and some people can even really excel that way. But maaaaaan, when you've been trained by a professional, the effort required to play well goes WAY down thanks to the centuries of knowledge, skills, and techniques you're taught. All the bad habits you DON'T pick up are so worth it.

There will be talented, creative people coming from both paths; professional instruction isn't going to diminish that. All it does is amplify what you already have.

In my computer architecture class, there was a lab/test where you were expected to implement strlen() in SPARC assembly. It was open-doc, but they intentionally hadn't taught some of the opcodes you'd need to inspect a single byte. Maybe 25% of the class poked around the docs and found something, but the rest floundered and were quite angry at how "unfair" it was.

And that doesn't even touch on the fact that most professors have absolutely no clue how modern software engineering is done. The courses are planned by even more out of touch heads of departments. And the quality of most of these student's projects is atrocious. How could they know better? They've just got a tiny micro assignment to do, and maybe 50-100 lines of code per assignment.

I'm not trying to be too pessimistic, but let's be real here and say a modern CS degree is a terrible way to be trained to be a modern software engineer. You'd be just as likely to succeed with a degree in mech engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, math, philosophy, or accounting. Or spending a year or two working on an open source with some mentors.

Granted there's also a huge range of quality of degree programs. I regularly hire Drexel students who shock me with how good they are, but that's a 5 year degree with 18 months of on job required training. That's a degree made for turning out quality software engineers.

My coursework to finish all my classes had me write a grand total of under 4k lines of code. And I finished those courses with high marks. That's such a small amount of code, I remember graduating and still being confused what a function was. It's unbelievable I paid almost 6 figures and spent 4 years to not even learn what a function was. I think that I'm not alone in this.

One thing I have learned is that it’s not enough for a junior/intermediate programmer to practice practice practice. They also must read. I respect self-taught devs (I am one), but self-taught devs who don’t read books plateau quickly.

I scare the living shit out of consultants, because a lot of them made the mistake of assuming I'm just a dumb firie - the uniform means I don't look like my corporate IT peers at all - but quickly recoil and backtrack when I ask direct technical questions they don't expect and should know the answer to, or call them out on their misleading (if not outright false) statements.

My supervisor loves me, even though he doesn't love the disruption as much, because it leads to better outcomes for the organisation.

Generally, self-taught programmers make shit like this up to feel good about themselves. What are the odds that the article is also written by a self-taught programmer?

The truth is, most self-taught programmers don't actually learn enough to make it in industry. The ones that do make it pass at least some threshold of knowledge at some point to be able to stick with it.

There may be occasional gaps in "practical skills" like using particular tools and libraries among college grads. But these skills are easy to pick up on the job. The advanced stuff that really benefits from a bit of handholding is taught in school, which self-taught programmers skip entirely.

I've been in quite a few orgs now (and always the only self-taught) where business run roughshod over dev and people are seemingly unwilling to stand up for the big picture even just stand up for basic best practice. The absolute insanity of code I've seen, all maintained by degree educated engineers who don't seem to care that much about the long-term future of what they work on. I'm starting to wonder if academia also teaches compliance to hierarchy as part of the process.

I worked in a department of a fortune 500 org with a unsecured server where everyone was told to log in over http using basic with their org creds (i.e. the creds that give you access to everything in the org and are effectively your corporate identity) everyone merrily did this without question, except me.

Granted, it was on the internal network but they had that setup for YEARS, with a privilege escalation just out there waiting to be discovered. I had a workaround but that expired due to some network changes, so it came to a head, they refused to allow me to install a cert myself and then I was the only one putting my foot down about it. I got put on disciplinery and was then forced to reach out to the Corpo HQ security team (who did side with me) and then got shit-canned internally by my department as a result. I still cannot fathom how people in more senior positions than me, with apparently better educations than me, square that one in their head, like I was the problem. To me, its like the technological equivalent of not wearing pants, and it just baffles me that my demand to wear pants was framed as the problem.

As a self-taught programmer I agree with this. I started teaching myself on 8 bit computers in the mid-80s and didn't go to university. By the time I got my first full-time programming job, at the age of 19, I'd already been programming for 9 years. By the time most people are leaving university I was already nearly 15 years into my programming journey. It's hard to ignore that kind of passion and drive.

I'm now four decades in and love it in the same way I did at the start. I'm a maker, I like making. I keep reading the papers and am constantly interested in where this thing is going ... and I write a lot of code!

However, I don't like the premise that self-taught engineers lack foundational concepts just because they didn't go the academic route. I think many of us find the academic aspects just as interesting -- it really depends on the field you're in I think. For sure, we don't normally have the time to do a deep dive of something, but by the time you're decades in you've probably got just as many if not more 'foundational chops' than someone who spent a few years at school.

Anecdotally, as someone who's hired and fired plenty over the years, I think there is something to the Self-Taught Engineers Outperform theory. But I think it's purely that they spend much more time doing. They do more in work and they do more in their free time. The passion brute-forces the learning.

Sure, but passion also drives self-teaching. It's less necessary in a classroom setting because there's always someone trying to keep you on track.

> Self-taught approaches tend to be goal oriented (I'm learning X because I want to do Y), which can overlook fundamentals that are important.

For some, understanding a system can be a goal in itself.

If there is a consistent argument, it's that self-taught people have all demonstrated leading themselves to some water.

A bit of a self insert, but I think you described the reality so well that I wanted to offer my own anecdote.

I'm somewhere between formally educated and self-taught. I did not complete higher level undergrad maths like discrete or linear. Because of this, my vocabulary is lacking. I don't even know what to google, even if I could teach myself!

Some subjects really benefit from instruction and direction. It's actually hard to find a math tutor to proof your vector math program in your late 30s. My colleagues either forgot or are using that energy elsewhere.

That's me. Took plenty of college classes, but never tested well, so never got a degree. I learned most everything on my own, but those classes were a foundation for what I taught myself, and I couldn't have done it without them (as quickly).

Coding bootcamps weren't really around when I started, but I avoided online courses and traditional learning methods. I would have also avoided bootcamps for the same reasons. I wanted to create and solve problems that were exciting, rather than follow through a textbook and take tests.

I'm self-taught and learned C in my early teens because I really wanted to do something that I couldn't find any code or preexisting solutions for, and I knew C was really the best way (for me) to solve it. I didn't want to learn it but I wanted the cool thing more, so I struggled through forum browsing, reading documentation, and trial/error and successfully got what I wanted while gaining more skills that led to where I am today.

The desire and drive to learn something matters more than the method, in my opinion.

* Courses designed to fail out many students * Courses designed to extremely theoretical and impractical because teachers found them fun to teach * Making the subject inaccessible to as many people as possible

When I went to uni in the UK I didn't study CS (now senior dev at a large US tech company) because of the above, the subject had the highest fail rate, had the most unpleasant faculty, and had the highest rate of unemployment after graduation of any subject (this was a top 5 CS uni that only took people with top grades).

It is great if people got something from their experience but this isn't how it goes for most people. And, from working with many people who have CS degrees, you do still see issues: poor communication skills, poor business understanding, often have significant trouble prioritizing work because of the previous two issues, etc. In other words, some can code (even there, grads come out...not great) but a CS course is usually not a comprehensive education to work anyway.

I am not sure what represents comfort zone more than the way most universities teach any subject.

I don't think anybody denies that, but getting into and paying for a university is very much a financial and social class issue.

> When I was self taught I would never have pushed through learning the socket API in C, doing so many projects in bash

You speak only for yourself though. I'm largely self-taught and have done these things.

> I interview a lot of self taught people, or boot camp graduates

These are often two very different types of job candidates.

> they fall apart when you ask them about academic topics that are relevant for the job

Yes, I do tend to fall apart in audition-style job interviews. But I can solve the same problems when just left on my own, with nobody standing over my shoulder.

I also remember university being great. I built a compiler, a toy OS and interfaced with GPS.

But a few years ago I was invited to teach on another university and I was very disappointed. The curriculum was basically a modern bootcamp stretched over a few years with a lot of unrelated classes sprinkled in. (EDIT: I just checked it and: lots of business, management, humanities, chemistry, environment, entrepreneurship... and one e-sports class?).

Almost no fundamentals, except for an algorithms class, almost straight to React and a few backend frameworks that were popular in the startups in the area.

If what you are learning is purely theoretical and you see zero application, you likely won't be super invested, might skip a few things and will likely forget a lot of them soon.

However, if the problem is relevant for you, or even better if you are working on something related, all of the sudden it quickly moves from pure theory to a very applicable thing.

I think that's why people who tinkered for years before university if they keep the passion can build insane things during/shortly after the university.

However if you build things first, then study theory, you more clearly become aware of what the real insights are.

The author cites examples such as Linus and Margaret, but IIRC they studied CS and/or math as part of their educational upbringing... so I feel like they're almost counter examples of what the author is arguing for.

It seems like the author is really championing the "self-tinkering engineer" as the outperforming engineer.

As a self-taught person on a lot of different matters, I find myself exploring rabbit holes that expand my knowledge, but don't progress the task I originally started doing.

Also, this (and other things I’ve read) always seems to argue against the strawman that “you need a formal education to do well in software “. I’ve never seen anyone say that (including during many years involved in hiring at big tech). The argument is that the pool of CS graduates are more likely to do well (and bigger and simpler to find) , so it makes sense to focus there if you need to hire a lot of people.

Those self-taught engineers who don't even perform aren't going to be engineers for long. So of course you'll see a lot of self-taught engineers in the outperforming category, it's necessary for survival.

When I started tinkering with Ruby on Rails I never thought one day, in a different context, I would need to write a hardware-specific, custom binary (de)serialization protocol. Then it happened.

Started in the 80's with a C64, then progressed through computers and time until began my studies in the university ... for chemistry. Turns out my head doesn't work that way. Began working or a logistics software company on the side.

In 2001, I wrote at work a literal bin-packing algorithm without any formal background or real CS education. I only later learned that it's generally considered a pretty hard problem.

Some time after that, applied to officially change my major subject to CS. The department head was quoted from the meeting, "about time". One of the first mandatory courses I had to take after that one was on data structures and algorithms, which to me was a properly fun one. It was also enlightening: I realised that at work I had independently come up with Djikstra's greedy algorithm for the bin-packing problem.

Ever since then I've followed a simple rule of thumb in hiring - aptitude beats raw talent. Anyone who wants to learn because they are genuinely interested in the field and its problems is in high probability going to be a better hire than someone with talent and education but without the internal drive.

Am I biased? Yes. But am I unfairly so? I don't believe that. And I agree with other posters that self-taught are likely to get more out of theoretical education because they can map the lessons into things they have already done, or things they have done in the wrong way.

I taught myself coding, but struggled through some of my CS computer science classes because I hadn't learned some (important) boring details. My peers who hadn't coded before, but were otherwise bright, excelled in these classes and have had impressive career trajectories after school.

Based on my personal experience, I don't believe prior experience with programming before college is that predictive of engineering talent.

I've seen self-taught software engineers build great looking UIs and during the code review point out things like "data structure X" would work better. I get a response about "Premature Optimization," when in fact the right data structure would be less code and I have to show them.

I've also met self-taught engineers who read detailed research papers on topics on and sometimes made things perhaps more complicated than they ever needed to be.

passion & formal education definitely play interesting roles in what people produce.

I think you're engaging in some weird goal-post moving. The phrase exists to highlight the difference between "i had someone else tell me all the things I should know and let them give me that knowledge" (e.g. college or a boot camp) and "i went out and found resources and did experiments so that I could learn what to do without that guidance". It is not "i discovered everything for myself by first assuming some principles and then rebuilding the whole field for myself".

The example was Torvalds building Linux. Linux was written before he attained a CS degree.

> Higher education isn’t just about what you learn, it’s about learning how to study and learn.

You'd have to have screwed up your life pretty bad to not have already learned to study and learn before reaching the point of going to a place of higher learning. But that wasn't a problem for Torvalds anyway. It is well known that he was writing software since he was around 11 years old. He is unquestionably self-taught, as the term is normally used.

Higher education is about gaining access to machinery that mere mortals can't afford on their own. Linus' university story is significant because that was where he was first able to use Unix. It is unlikely that Linux would have come to be without that experience.

But that is also the contention around a modern CS degree. What is the "Unix" of our time that you can't reasonably access without going to university?

Citation needed.

At least with the devs I've known over the decades, they were self-taught but didn't learn "on the job".

In my view, the difference between self-taught devs and devs who learned it in school is passion. Self-taught devs are self-taught because they're passionate about software. Devs who learn it in school, generally speaking, do so not because of a deep passion for the subject, but rather as a means towards getting a job.

Gallup's study on the "top 1%" kind of backs up the idea, to be fair.

Well, sort of. It is a bit more nuanced than that. It shows that a degree is significant when it is an advanced degree that offers exclusive access to a market (think medical doctors, lawyers, etc.) But dropouts are more likely to be in the top 1% than those with only a bachelors or other insignificant degree.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html