10 Weird Signs of an Inexperienced Self-Taught Programmer
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2022
- Apparently, this is how to tell if someone is a self-taught programmer. Here's my response to "5 Weird Signs of a Mediocre Self-Taught Programmer" and "5 Weird Signs of an Inexperienced Self-Taught Programmer" blog posts written by the same author.
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A few comments have tried to vilify the author. That's not the intent of this video. He has his perspective, I share mine and there will be people who disagree with both of us. Hearing different opinions helped me form my own, so hopefully you find nuggets of value from both perspectives. Let's keep our community respectful and full of awesomeness! 🙂What are your thoughts on the points in the video?
I would add, I think he is trying to give advice in a clickbait kind of way. And clearly it works, because it draws our attention.
I thank you so much for these videos! I have decided I am going to learn coding "self taught", as soon as I can save for a PC. In the meantime, I am researching languages, tips etc. I also handwrite code until I get a PC. I also liike hearing different perspectives. While I do believe this guy is a bit peeved that he spent all that time and money for something people are doing for free with in 9-12 months. His critique is useful, as it points to things I haven't yet thought of. Thanks for sharing!
So does a self-taught programmer only stick to the tech they know or only want to use the lastest hype tech? Very contradicting, bias and bitter.
I'm building full-stack javascript projects 11 months, 5-6 hours a day (sometimes 7 or more), and when I talk to college / university students about code they dont understand what I say. Maybe the level in my country is low(Greece). I believe unless you put the endless hours of work ALONE, neither university or college will help you learn and understand anything.
how could you not be a self-taught programmer?
great point! we all end up self-taught.
I did computer science for almost 2 years, learned a lot of math, but about programming for real my internship and self study are what made me a programmer.
Functional programming skills come from challenge and curiosity much more than having to do exams on paper about things nobody uses.
Sounds salty because he paid $$$$'s for his Computer Science degree and he's now getting paid the same as self taught developers who've paid a fraction of that cost! 🤣
The automatic response fits very well the scope of the channel 🤣🤝
@Traveling the USA I feel special now knowing that folks want to impersonate me for automated spam :)
I agree ! Lol the writer just seems biased and pissed at something. Was he like an immediate god tier programmer as soon as he graduated? He’s just ignoring the learning process
dont be mean, he had to take a total of 8, EIGHT, computer science classes, coupled with 24 elective classes in gender studies, arts, english, native american transgender history. So by default he is like God tier compared to people who learn to code and not learn to pronoun.
Upppsss! Painful!😅
The original author was stating things he sees self taught developers do more than others , not that only self taught developers do this or self taught developers do only this. It is advice for self taught developers. Seems useful as guidance to watch out for things.
Code quality is very important. However quality comes with time and experience - after 7 years, I would not pretend I write the best code ever. This idea is good or bad code is a mirage that never happend. You would be surprised by very known companies I've worked for where the code was very dirty. But CTO always answered: it's working. That's a lesson I learned.
I started self taught (HTML, CSS, PHP) and recently attended a boot camp. I've always been obsessed with code quality but it wasn't until I landed a job that I was really willing to learn more languages as I go. Now I just like to learn more languages on my own to prepare for my future career.
The thing about self-education is that if you have a friend who also wants to learn the same, it makes the process an easier challenge. I have a friend who is a programmer. He left Ukraine more than 10 years ago and now he helps me, but I don't have friends close enough to be challenged. It is now a matter of survival, I must say.
@@StryKhymorodnyk I learned early on with friends but I never pursued it as a career until recently... I only did small freelance projects mainly with CMS and being able to build them out, etc. I've learned that coding is a matter of learning to learn coding and not necessarily learning to code. Having friends in that matter is very helpful. Bouncing ideas off of them can also bring "fresh eyes" to the issue at hand - something employers pay big money for even when it's just an entry level position.
@@leoashcraft3 why you choosen php after html and css, bro instead of javascript?
Tell him "no one is above anyone".
I've been watching your videos for a couple weeks now among others relating to being a new developer and I have to say I think this is by far the one that will be the most helpful going forward. It reduced my anxiety from being self taught but is also teaching me novice mistakes the community clearly doesn't love that I can work on. Lastly its reinforcing my desire to take my cs50 in the future. I know degrees aren't held very high in the community but getting my cs50 will build tons of confidence and give me a structured history of programming.
I've faced plenty of computer science programmers that have the same thing lol. I would mostly call that inexperienced programmer in general, that "self-taught" developers is for clicks.
agree
Your points are right, at the end of the day it’s more or less the lack of experience. We live in the age of the internet, you can learn almost anything. I learned Chinese when I was 25 years old and speak better than some Chinese language graduates.
Hmm, looks like people that wrote these articles are not developers just some randoms interested in programming and making clickbaits.
Honestly first point that self-taught programers don't like learning new things? That's literally what we do in first place, we are learning new things constantly and I bet you any new developer will be more eager to learn new things then senior that used same things for last x years...
School or not, we all end up self-taught.
Bad programmers like me are people who want to get better but have such a bad memory that even after 7 months of doing it, simple solutions to easy leetcode still don't just pop up. Sometimes I have to spend 2-3 hours on easy problems. It hurts.
I also spent quite some time on kinvyMD, yet my brain just deletes everything within two coding sessions so that I have to look shit up again.
Yet I really like to talk and teach in the hopes of actually making it stick and having access to my knowledge faster.
Has anyone else experienced this hurdle of memory? I don't know how often I had to revisit the basics...
Sometimes I know what I have to use, but I completely forgot how to use it. Like dictionaries (to be fairt I use dicts here and there but I never felt the need to use them frequently). Or some modules.
Hell... how often have I looked up the difference between sort() and sorted()?
Clever codes can be annoying for beginners and hard to read but yes it does make your code look cleaner.
Just left a team where the lead / architect who held a CS degree was 100% against the idea of moving on from Classic asp and web forms, was he afraid to learn something new?
I bet......he just wanted to maintain and oversee legacy systems! No way to grow there at all sadly.
I think you should put the not exclusive to self-taught programmers point into a function DRY principle and all that
Haha! I would love to take a class from Sanjay Priaydarshi, PhD in Computer Science! Which prestigious university does he currently teach? Taking this with a grain of salt. Sounds like he’s got some “workplace” issues that need to be resolved.
Interesting. Didn't look deep enough to see what degree he has.
@@jamescross I think she was being sarcastic
Awesome content as always, can you please post a Python road map and suggestions on where to learn it? Thanks man, keep up the good work.
As always, great value 🙏🏻
Glad you think so!
What really speaks to experience is knowing that the "rules" aren't gospel. Me and other "super-senior" software engineers made the decision to repeat code in two different places 😱...that had to do with different domains, to clarify code paths for future devs when adding features.
We felt comfortable doing this because we write automated _tests_ for each feature that reveals right where any changes need to happen, or any regressions may have happened with a change.
Great points. Totally agree.
I was self taught, but I eventually got formal college training. I think I learned a huge amount of invaluable content in college that helped me excel in a job. Without knowing the fundamentals of comp sci, I don’t see myself being nearly as effective as I am. That said, I work very close to hardware, which isn’t the same as web dev
I guess, it would be about me in my search for the perfect in self-teaching quest. I just have started a 12-hour lesson by Ania Kubow.
I always wait towards your videos as for the motivation!
Thanks!
It also comes down to what the self taught learns. Code quality and removing excess code is one of my main goals. Shrinking code to perform the same tasks is a main goal for me too. I did CS for 1.5 years and I did self taught before and after. The CS classes were similar to codecademy and books I've read.
I'm a self taught who wound up getting a masters in SE. I started coding with an electrical engineering degree and went back to school during covid. Self taught vs degreed is a false dichotomy. If you spend 50k and four years and you can only complain about how you learned nothing, then you're the problem, not the university. You will be spending 10 to 20 hours a week with a group of experts (professor as well as students) discussing and solving problems that are generally more abstract and esoteric than the ones you will be doing in your day to day. If you don't get anything out of that, then its because you have an attitude problem and you don't want to get anything out of it.
totally agree
Having an EE and a CS degree is not too different. I would not consider a EE programmer “a self taught” as a “from scratch self taught programmer”.
It depends how much you study outside too vs. if you lean on the curriculum a lot. Some programs are strong and just generate better technologists, others are weak and require more disciplined focus and self-study. People learn differently too, so it's really key to know yourself and how to make the concepts really stick.
Personally I enjoy learning concepts and then applying them in a live project.
Sounds like somebody is regretting all the student debt he got into for his CS degree and trying to justify it with the sunk cost fallacy logic.
As someone whos just getting into development i have to say new upcoming frameworks and libraries are very exciting. Simply because it feels like it evens the playing the field a bit it probably doesn't but learning react 10 years ago wouldn't have the same anxiety as learning it today if that makes sense. Oh i have 3 months experience with react.....and so does everyone else as apposed to i have 3 months experience with react and everyone else who applied has 9 years experience.
As some of them start to get more demand from companies there will be a good opportunity to ride the trend. That's what I did with Angular.js when starting. For the reasons you mentioned.
Also those same people "you're closed to ideas, let's go only Ubuntu and python". Which is again cool, but as you state "the right tool for the right job" is my philosophy as well; I'm not going to force business users to do it my way if there's an easier way to do it.
While I agree with most of the points, inexperienced and experienced fall into the same extremes either for positive or negatives things (for experienced could be over testing for example and for middle ignoring data optimization later on the road).
As for example the 5. (hyped technology) is contradictory with the perspective at 1. (that self taught is unwilling to learn new things) yet at this 5 it's stated that it's wrong to learn the latest on the field, so which one is it?
good thoughts
Where can I find the recipe for this?
Some of these answers really depend on the situation. If your client is a small start up who needs an mvp that just "works" on a limited budget, you'd be doing him a disservice by spending too much time on code quality and refactoring. He may want to get to market on his budget, get users, and then polish up the code when / if he gets a round of funding.
If your client has a more mature company and budget, then you might want to focus more on code quality and maintainability.
great points!
I highly doubt he’s trying to say these issues only occur in self taught devs just that they are commonly seen in self taught devs. Which is probably true (see last paragraph).
You also tended to fixate on the self taught part and ignore the mediocre and inexperienced part.
I didn’t personally read the article and maybe I’m to optimistic but I felt like he was trying to point out things to avoid as a self taught dev. Not necessarily attack self taught devs.
If a C.S degree puts down a self taught dev even for inferior quality work remind them that for four years they had someone standing over them giving them feedback and advice. A self taught dev learns it all on their own in less than a year.
If I like a website and I want to know which language is used in it, how will I do that?? Plzz reply
If it's a website, you are looking at HTML and CSS for the visual. If there is much interaction on the page, then Javascript. If it is JavaScript, then you could look at the source code and identify patterns to know if they are using a framework like Angular or the React library. If it's a web app, this is likely the case. For other types of websites it is possible that the pages are rendered on the server in which case there are a bunch of possible languages and it can be hard to tell. If the url ends with .aspx then it's using asp.net. It can be harder to identify some of the others. Unfortunately, there's not a clean way to know every language. It's a little bit of snooping looking for clues.
@@jamescross thanks man..
Except the point of self taught preferring same tech stack, every point written by the author is absolutely trash and vague. He is like he is the best and knows every aspect of SD
I have another problem. Is there any api that will generate auto subtitle from video?? plzzz...reply
There are transcription services you can pay for, but I don't know of any free auto generated subtitle apis. If you find one, let me know. That would be cool.
@@jamescross Another doubt!!! please reply...
In react js, i created a div containing a sample text and a input (type number).
What i want is
👉 If i type a number in the input. I want that number to be the font size of the sample text. And also If i select some portion of that sample text and type a number in the input. I want the number to be the font size of that selected portion of the sample text.
How will I do that?? Plzz reply 🙏🙏🙏
clickbait article. you provide a nice contrast
At the end of the day, there is no such a thing as self-taught because there is always something or someone doing the teaching, be it a book, a teacher, video tutorial, etc. Which ironically leads to the conclusion that we are all self-taught in the sense that if we are absorbing knowledge and information, regardless of its source, then we are teaching ourselves new skills etc. So a university student is as much self-taught as a self-taught individual is. Someone can go to university and learn little, and others can teach themselves much more if they have the will, knowledge and access to quality information and guidance. I think however in general that some of those who go to university to study something in particular like computer science, and pay tens of thousands of dollars in the process, get really annoyed when someone who studied on their own (aka self-taught) without having to pay much if anything, can do anything they can do and sometimes much better.
The author's opinions sounded more like someone rattling off a bunch of stereotypes or caricatures about the idea of self-taught developers. I just finished my first year as a junior developer and the most disappointing part of my year has been working under two not very helpful lead dev's. The first was fired during my second month and the second one who I was asked to help interview(?!?!?) isn't very friendly, is condescending and acts like I don't exist unless he needs something and then it seems painful for him to have to include me. I am determined not to let these experiences taint my opinion of working with more experienced developers. Without being a determined self-taught developer I would have never made it nor still be employed. Everything I have learned on the job I have taught myself asking very few questions because there has either been no lead dev or the one I am working with seems to have no desire to be a team. I have found that some experienced developers like to project an image of being "naturally gifted" when the truth is the opposite and I used to fall for that. Whether self taught or college educated most people don't walk into an entry-level or junior position being a "rock-star" developer.
It's too bad you had to start under those kind of people. Everyone starts at the beginning and expectations should reflect that but some people are just not pleasant to work with.
code quality can learn by experience
Guy is just being a flexaSaurus!
Interesting. I assume there will always be a cultural belief that knowledge that is paid for is more valuable than freely available information. If that's the case the more a person spends on education, the higher quality that education must be. Not really a statement.
React sucks so bad I'm a new developer, I really want to cry to think that I will have to do React everyday just to be able to work.
no wonder that articel was written by an Indian. People here have a really bad attitude towards selftaught people.
Christ, that article is a very bad take. Change it to "5 signs of an inexperienced programmer". Self taught or not makes absolutely no difference. Depends on interest and willingness to improve and learn more. Anywho, I think most people see the articles as the BS they are.
really does come down to the individual.
Sorry, about self taught programmer feeling themselves expert in the field, you just can see how many people after 3 or 6 months programming teaching Porgramming even selling courses 🤷🏽
In college they taught us to understand how broad is C.S. and how much take to be consider an expert in just a section of the field, always somebody will humble you when you feel cocky.
It takes time for sure and especially to become an expert in an area like you said.
Tinyass but vocal minority is all. It takes a special type of entitlement to truly believe yourself to be a god of programming when you're just starting up. IT has an incredibly steep learning curve, comparable to that of physics or chemistry. I remember how during my first hit at Java I gave up as early as the for/while loops since I just couldn't understand the difference. Beyond the merest basics, software engineering is very unintuitive to an average guy or gal. Hence the crushing dropout rates during the first CS term at any given university. If you can't keep up, not only won't you be able to build anything interesting, you will in fact frustrate and bore yourself out of your ass.