I’ve never hired someone who was self-taught, not because self-taught people can’t be equal or better, but because you’re trying to buy security and stability. The most expensive mistake you can make as a manager is hiring the wrong person, and self-educated people just aren’t worth the risk when you have a dozen other candidates who are great. I’m Danish though and things are a little different here because education is free. In face the government will even pay you a small amount of monthly money while you study. So we don’t have that many self-educated people, and those who are, are typically self-educated for a range of reasons that put them at a disadvantage from the get go.
So my point isn’t to discourage you, but to make you aware that managers might see your lack of formal education as a risk that you need to mitigate.
Everyone can learn to program, but learning how to program, correctly, efficiently and safe comes with formal education and you probably need to show that you know at least something about how to make CS based decisions. Maybe you do, if so great. If you don’t, spend a little time researching best practices, read up on design patterns and maybe complete the MITX intro course(s) to CS on edx.org.
I’m not sure knowing a specific framework is really all that valuable. If your can build something with LAMP/JS that makes money then you’ve already demonstrated your ability to write software. On the other hand it wouldn’t hurt you either.
1. As a hiring manager you should be better at differentiating between people and treat a degree as just one data point that you take into account, and not as a filter that gives no false positives.
2. You're pointing out that self-educated people aren't worth the risk and then you go on to advise him that he should self-educate.
3. A point that I think you're kind of making and that I agree with, is that a degree is a signal that you've gone through a certain process of education. If you don't have it, then you'd better signal the same thing in a different manner and demonstrate that you're familiar with theory, best practices, design patterns and so on; and that you can stick with something for a continuous period of time (showing up and doing at least the minimum amount of work for 4 years isn't a signal that all candidates have).
You can certainly have a degree in CS and suck, but the odds of that happening are much lower than with people who don’t have a CS degree. Why should I waste the resources if I have enough decent candidates?
The rockstar developer is kind of a myth. If you compile 100 applicants into the 5-8 best ones, then the truth is that you could probably hire any of them and get good results.
That doesn’t mean self-educated people should give up. Especially because very few countries have as easy access to education as we do.
I think everyone can learn to write an app by following a few YouTube videos. This is how we’ve got our project managers and lean-operators to write RPA projects in python after all.
On the flip side, I’ve never personally met anyone who went through 5 years of university and came out knowing nothing.
The thing with CS is that it’s not the programming itself that’s actually valuable. It’s being able to create efficient, safe and maintainable code. If you can’t tell me the bigO of your program, if you don’t know how to remove the top node of a binary search tree or if you think using NPM packages to do simple computation is a good idea, then I just can’t use you, because it’ll be way too expensive to teach you.
If you suck at our specific tooling, but have already proven you can obtain a university degree, then I know that I can re-school you relatively cheap by sending you on a few courses.
I’m sorry this is rubbing non-educated programmers wrong, but an education is actually valuable, and it will be increasingly so as the younger generations are all getting them.
Yeah, nobody gets fired for buying IBM.
I don't know how the market for good developers is in Denmark, but I think restricting your potential employees to just formally trained limits your potential as team/company.
edit: Plus, I know quite a lot of formally trained developers who at some point just stopped learning. To me that is much more dangerous than not having a formal education in the first place.
I’ve hired a lot of people, I do a lot of networking and I work as an examiner for CS students, I’ve never seen someone who was self-educated remotely compare to someone with a degree. It just doesn’t happen in a country where anyone who wants to put in the work can get a degree.
Which was kind of my point. The people who failed to get a degree are typically the people who won’t become great when they are self-taught either.
I can see why you would chose not to get an education in a country like America, where it would be a huge financial burden to do so, but we literally pay people to attend their free education.
You've already said you never hire self-taught programmers so how would you know?
We have a lot of self-taught programmers in my generation in the UK (I think mainly because of the BBC micro programme for schools a few decades ago). I've seen awful CS educated programmers and I've seen awful self-taught ones.
The two best programmers I know, one was self-taught and one was not.
The worst programmer I've ever known was formally educated, could quote you reams of technical specs, advanced CS, and managed to write 20 lines of not working code in 3 months.
Well I do interview self-taught people when their CVs are stellar, but I’ve yet to find one that was the better option.
I’m sure you can potentially get a CS degree and never learn anything but I don’t get the point that makes. I wouldn’t hire those people either. I don’t think it’s true though. I’ve never met anyone who went through 5 years of university without picking up anything useful.
In Denmark where I live you can loan 1 million Danish kroner at around 5k each month. A decent downtown apartment in a bigger city or a house in the suburbs is 2-4 million. Renting the equivalent is 10-15k, and with renting you obviously skip a lot of the maintenance cost and taxes. On the flip side loans are tax-deductible, meaning you actually don’t pay 20k to borrow 4 million, you pay 12k.
It can still be cheaper to rent, at least if you look at the small scale. Because in 30 years, those 4 million will be yours while people who rent will still have nothing. It’s also risky, because maybe those 4 million will really be 1 million.
Over all, owning real estate in a safe location is always going to be much better than renting. At least in Denmark. Hell, if you can manage to buy around 15-30 lower-cost apartments in a university city and rent them out, you’ll be able to pay your loans and have enough spare in passive income that you never have to work again.
I doubt that the house would be 4 million. Thanks to reducing population, increased building and housing. Plus who knows how the weather will be, I'm not sure that owning a house is the right thing in 20 years.
When I lived on Amager about six years ago, the prices were definitely around the 3-4 million mark in the suburbs. Prices fell somewhat once you got out of Copenhagen, but it was still ludicrously expensive.
Are you saying the prices droppped sharply the last 5-6 years?
But I probably should have been more clear. I mean, first of all, there are more cities than Copenhagen. I have a 3 room 92m^2 apartment that is 15 minute walking distance from Aarhus H that cost us 2.2 million. Secondly, I’d personally call a place like Valby “downtown” Copenhagen even though it would probably be more correct to label it surburbia like you do.
I wouldn't call Valby suburbia, although it'd definitely a suburb. The real Copenhagen suburbian hell start out at Kastrup, Glostrup, Ballerup, Lyngby and thereabouts.
Of course, there are other Danish cities than Copenhagen, and prices do vary. The parent comment I replied to simply stated that there are no 4M DKK houses, which simply isn't true.
That is interesting loans are tax deductible in Denmark, I always thought that was just a US thing! From my understanding of the new federal tax law though, the higher standard deduction makes the mortgage tax credit less feasible for most people.
Do you have a medium account? Because I don’t, and I don’t think anyone in my network does either.
I can see why you would use YouTube, videos aren’t easy to self host, but I’m really not sure why anyone would chose medium above self-hosting or even using github pages.
But maybe I’m just special, and maybe everyone else has a medium account?
The old deal on Medium was that you could host content there and they would then promote your article across their network. Often that promotion could bring thousands or tens of thousands of readers (I've run a pub there for four years and I'm basing the numbers on that).
Then Medium switched to focusing on a subscription service which also came with a divide between articles that are inside the subscription service and those that aren't.
If you post outside the service, you get free hosting in exchange for Medium running "recommended stories" at the bottom of your post. These are essentially ads for the subscription service. But they don't promote your article or bring you any extra readers other than the ones that you bring yourself or who come through SEO. Obviously, this is a much less appealing deal than it used to be and so there's a sorting out where a lot of people who want to post outside Medium's subscription service are leaving.
However, if you post within their subscription service you get a pretty good deal. You keep your copyright and could republish elsewhere. Medium will promote your article to their readers. You'll still get SEO. You'll make some amount of money, not usually life changing money though especially if you have a programmer's salary. Also, more and more, you're likely to run into an editor who will at minimum offer to give your piece a copy edit and sometimes work with you on how to make your piece even better.
But does medium have readers? I mean, I read medium articles when they appear here on HN, but I’m not really a medium reader, and unlike personal blogs, where I will bookmark you if I find you interesting I’ll never come back to a medium author unless it’s by chance.
I mean, that’s as anecdotal as it gets, but I’ve never been very unique in my media consumption, so I’m fairly certain I’m not alone in this.
I'm sure there are plenty of people like you who aren't Medium users, but if I understand your question, you're asking how many people there are who are dedicated Medium readers.
I'm saying, yes, obviously there must be a lot because when we publish articles they get read by people from within the network. I also sometimes see my own stats split into web vs. app and the app numbers are about equal. Only dedicated users would be using the app. Then on top of that the money is coming from paying subscribers, the most dedicated type of user.
I'm not that interested in what the total number is across Medium because what actually effects me is how many show up at a given article. It's common to get thousands or tens of thousands. The best article I ever published got 1.1M total views with 407k views from within the Medium network. HackerNews or other external sources that drive you to Medium get counted as external views.
Oh, I forgot one of the most important changes in the deal. If you want to post inside the subscription service you can't include Calls to Action (with some exceptions). That's a huge cost for a lot of authors who are only writing in order to promote other things or collect email address. It's generally been a good deal for readers though, who are seeing less marketing pieces in their feeds.
In Denmark we have a fairly recent political party called Liberal Alliance. They were funded by billionaire, bank owner and businessman Lars Seier Christensen for almost 10 years and at their height achieved 7% of the votes and a spot in our government. At some point Lars Seiers brother founded a political party and Liberal Alliance fell out of favour with the billionaire.
In our very recent election Liberal Alliance was decimated and Lars Seiers brothers party was voted in and is now bigger than Liberal Alliance.
Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for. There are a lot of reasons things went the way they did for these two political parties, and most of them could have happened without the easy access to money. I do, however, think it’s a worrying show of how just much influence, a single billionaire can have in a small democracy, compared to the average citizen.
Speaking of LA, according to Politiken,[0] their leadership believes their terrible showing in the polls is partly due to a lack of financial support by the Danish industry at large. Specifically, they mention that LA got 3 million DKK less in support this election compared to 2015.
So maybe money does work? Or perhaps the LA's leadership is focusing on exactly the wrong reasons?
I believe their main problem has not been funding, but rather a clash of very strong-willed individualistic people in the party, people who all desire to be The Man/Woman In Charge, above all.
That tends to create a lot of internal friction, which became very obvious as the election results rolled in, and they all started backtalking each other and pointing fingers.
Maybe it's obvious, but LA is a political party I intensely disagree with. In my perspective, if they want to stand a chance in the next election, they need to do some serious restructuring, otherwise the internal friction will end them.
Root of the problem is the lack of inclination/resources for average person to participate in the democracy as much as a focused entity, especially one who doesn’t need to worry about putting food on the table everyday.
Many people I’ve met are completely apathetic of their voting powers. They don’t want to read current events, research candidates, go to town meetings, and work to inform fellow voters. On the other hand, many people are also burned out from going to work, getting kids ready, making dinner, putting them to bed, working 80 hours a week, etc. And they may not have the cognitive abilities to analyze data to figure out what is true and false.
Democracy relies on having numerous “informed” voters, but what happens when the machine gets so complicated that there are not sufficient “informed” voters?
> Democracy relies on having numerous “informed” voters, but what happens when the machine gets so complicated that there are not sufficient “informed” voters?
Democracy relies on level headed people doing politics.
In Finland we have similar attempt happening just now.
"Movement Now" is just starting. It was created by multimillionaire (net worth $300 Million) member of the parliament after he was denied promised position in the cabinet.
Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for.
We had (in Poland) at least one party which suddenly sprung into existence with decent poll results, was very pro big business and had pretty shady financing.
Fortunately they(especially their leader) were incompetent.
What I'm trying to say is that to me your account is not surprising at all.
Why is this a bad thing? Is the implicit assumption here that the electorate is primarily mindless, and that things like advertising or facebook or fake news or russian ad buying is all it takes to directly translate from dollars (or euro or rubles) to votes?
It seems to me to run counter to the democratic idea that an individual’s opinion matters. Either individuals are good at forming their own opinions from the world and voting is the practical realization of that into a government, or the electorate is an unthinking blob to be managed, as it will only vote for that for which it has been sufficiently inundated with propaganda, in which case the whole election is somewhat of a farce to begin with.
Why isn’t the will of the people (given an equal opportunity market for people to buy mass media advertising) respected more?
Everyone is susceptible to propaganda, including you and me. Democracy is based on information, so if you mess with that information, you can most definitely have a noticeable effect.
The propagandists exploit the asymmetry of resources and time between them and you. They can lie easily, they have all the time and money to craft careful lies. You don't have all the time and money and domain knowledge to figure out each and every one of their carefully crafted lies.
Not to mention other more sinister tactics like tracking you, finding out your biases and using them against you with targeted propaganda campaigns.
Sure, but isn’t that the nature of the beast? If propaganda works on everyone, and people get to vote, then what is the meaningful difference between propaganda and campaigning?
I really don’t see how this isn’t a system working as intended. Freedom of expression is freedom to spread propaganda.
Either the electorate is to be respected and their opinions held as valid regardless of their media consumption, or propaganda is too dangerous and effective and elections are just a farce. I’m not sure you can have it both ways.
> Why isn’t the will of the people (given an equal opportunity market for people to buy mass media advertising) respected more?
Because some people don’t like the implications of what the public wants. Around the west you’re seeing a dramatic shift in people becoming more conservative in certain fronts, especially on the points of immigration and nationalism. The folks who dominate the kinds of sites that write about that stuff can’t abide by that. So they have strong incentives to denounce that all as the product of sheep-like voters being influenced by propaganda.
While it is certainly problematic it doesn't change the fact that the fault is ultimately with the voters and their lack of critical thinking and evaluation skills which makes it effective.
The scenario is akin to computer security. Sure it is wrong for a hacker to manipulate flaws in the system enmasse but the underlying susceptibility to the bullshit is the root cause. Even if you stop that bad actor the root cause remains open to all with evil intent.
If I were to spend trillions on the worst political campaign - say "lets ban the anti-retrovials and give everyone AIDS" in a remotely sane electorate I would have essentially zero impact other than the massive reputational damage I would take. In a terrifyingly insane one where the worst casually proposed idea achieved 100% acceptance the entire populace would be dead without outside military intervention.
Fixing it is easier said than done but would involve education and deep investment in critical thinking.
What is special about this day and age? For reasons of manipulation of large numbers of people, this has always been true. He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.
An important note about Liberal Alliance is that they are not a liberal party in the American sense.
They claim to somewhere between classical liberal and libertarian, but they are in fact by-the-book Ayn Rand objectivists. However that label has some negative connotations (for good reason), so officially they stick to the claims of classical liberalism, libertarianism and individual freedom above all.
It's a very interesting party, and as their recent collapse has shown, a party of very strong-willed individualists.
Money is not magic. Yes it opens doors when it comes to political power, but it also paints a big fucking sign on the head of the spender, that this dude is the one to milk. They do get milked much more than they actually influence anything, the whole while having their heads inflated about their importance.
My advice, drop in onto their caucus and start talking something big. Dress smartly. Make an impression of you being a "big man."
Believe me, it works.
I was a complete nobody on a work visa in Canada, yet I crashed on nearly every caucus party Christy Clarke had over 6 years I was there, and was making sure to make big fuzz with my appearance every time.
My wife is using my old mbp late 2015 and it does everything she needs a laptop to do. If I hadn’t gotten myself a usb-c setup both in the office and at work it would also be doing everything I need a laptop to do. We’ve gotten to a point where laptops are powerful enough that their performance isn’t actually that important to a lot of us. longevity, battery life and weight were always important, but now other key features are power consumption and sustainability.
I really hope that by the time I need to replace my mbp 2018 someone will have cooked up a solar powered laptop made by environmentally friendly components that’s easy to repair. 20 years ago I would have primarily looked at performance, now I don’t even give it a glance.
That’s just me of course, but I suspect I may not be alone with those hopes.
You can already do that with a solar charger. I don't think we'll have solar panels integrated to laptops if that's what you meant, it doesn't make any sense (super bulky and fragile, only used a couple hours a day, needs perfect angle for optimal efficiency). It's much easier/more efficient/cheaper to get your house or office to use renewable energies than to add a solar panel on top of every devices you own.
It may work with very low spec laptops, but forget about macbooks. You need something like 6 hours of direct sunlight + 4 times the area of the laptop to get decent results.
As I understood it, scripting languages will still be available to the user, they just won’t have ancient versions preinstalled. Of course that also means you can’t rely on them being installed at all as a developer.
Which means you should start bundling the stuff you need to run your app, and, they’d like you not to use the same ancient batteries as they have previously made available, because, well they are ancient.
Ok, I guess it's worded vaguely enough to allow for the possibility of optional installation ("by default"), even though they don't outright promise that they'll offer a way to install it. (I interpreted it in the same way as "macOS doesn't include Photoshop by default".) Having it come from the app store doesn't seem totally appropriate since it would need to do more than dump a bundle into /Applications, like making some /usr/local/bin symlinks. Maybe they'll allow themselves that exception.
"they’d like you not to use the same ancient batteries as they have previously made available, because, well they are ancient" --> Right, I couldn't figure out if that's all they meant. Valid point or not, it doesn't seem appropriate to make it in the context of those notes. If you're going to make me bundle the language anyway, don't also give me a lecture about which version to use. :)
I suspect they plan to distribute the scripting languages the same way they currently handle the command line developer tools package, where the OS offers to download and install the package the first time you try to run one of those tools.
I just don't see the win of that over supplying the thing with the OS in the first place, unless the commands to do it are a nascent versioned ecosystem along the lines of brew, apt, etc.. It seems like the whole point of not supplying them with the OS is to make the versions less tied down. If there's some opaque command to get an arbitrary version, that's not going to help anyone.
I think the top submissions have declined somewhat over the years. Maybe it’s just my personal taste that’s changed, but I like two types of articles. The ones that are interesting and the ones that are actually useful to me. There is still a lot of interesting articles on HN, that diver story from yesterday is a great example of one. It’s rare I see an article that’s actually useful though. Google cloud being down, and google engineers explaining what was going one is one of the few useful thing I’ve seen on HN in 2019. (And that actually mainly involved the comment section).
I realise that you will always get a lot of hype-technologies on a technology focused social media, but they are actually not that interesting to me. Sure Rust is cool, but chances are that I won’t actually ever meet someone who uses Rust professionally in my lifetime. This frankly makes the majority of Rust related content rather irrelevant to me, and I say Rust, but I could be mentioning a range of the other cool, new and not-adopted technologies. Now, I’m not saying that those articles shouldn’t be here, because I think they absolutely should. It’s obviously more news-worthy to write about something new and cool, rather than something old and tried. When the majority, or all, the content is made up of technologies that will probably never see real world adoption, however, well then HN becomes somewhat irrelevant, at least to me. Maybe that means I’m just on the wrong web-page though.
I’m Danish and I realise our benefits and rights are generally a lot better than most places, but I would never work 70 hours a week unless I owned the company. So I think you have the right idea in leaving as soon as you can.
Is it? Because I’m fairly nearsighted and have astigmatism, which can make text on screens very blurry when there is a low contrast, and it’s a lot worse with dark mode.
Still, I agree that having both a light and a dark mode is better than having just one of them.
So my point isn’t to discourage you, but to make you aware that managers might see your lack of formal education as a risk that you need to mitigate.
Everyone can learn to program, but learning how to program, correctly, efficiently and safe comes with formal education and you probably need to show that you know at least something about how to make CS based decisions. Maybe you do, if so great. If you don’t, spend a little time researching best practices, read up on design patterns and maybe complete the MITX intro course(s) to CS on edx.org.
I’m not sure knowing a specific framework is really all that valuable. If your can build something with LAMP/JS that makes money then you’ve already demonstrated your ability to write software. On the other hand it wouldn’t hurt you either.