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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

My attitude isn't condescending, and there is nothing wrong with being a handyman either.

The truth of the matter is that unless you have a very good fundamental knowledge of computer science and primarily math there are things that you cannot tackle as "programmer" unless you are a unique case. A self though programmer is also unlikely to be working on optimizing databases or search engines, compression, driver/os architecture, various algorithms such as video and audio compression and many other things.

I don't claim to be able to do those things and I don't mind thinking of myself as a 21st century mechanic or handyman because in the end I know that my capabilities based on my knowledge and experience are limited.

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I know self-taught programmers working in drivers, operating systems, video and audio compression... It's primarily about gaining a deep understanding the system and the problem domain.

A formal education is a starting point towards gaining that understanding, but it's not the only possible entry. (Who would you rather have working on the Linux kernel: someone who has been following development for 10 years and has read most of the source code, or someone fresh out of school with a CS degree?)

Maybe you're selling yourself short by assuming you wouldn't be able to do those things?

> Who would you rather have working on the Linux kernel: someone who has been following development for 10 years and has read most of the source code, or someone fresh out of school with a CS degree?

False dichotomy. I'd rather have a CS major who has 10 years of experience and has read most of the source code. There's some pretty complex stuff in there: http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/19759/core-algor....

Ditto. I went to grad school for physics, and pretty much all the code there is written by self-taught programmers. I was, too, to some extent, though I did take a grad level algorithms class. A lot of the code was pretty rough.

Indicative example. I was writing code to characterize the datastream from an instrument. It was a compiler of sorts: the end user could write some domain-specific language file to specify certain metadata to observe, e.g. power spectrum in a certain band, etc. These could be reused by other users so one could have a global standard for some state of the instrument. So, I decided on a hash table to store these user-written rules since it was a constant time lookup, and the characterization program ran real time while the instrument was running. Talking with a senior physicist who only wrote Fortran 77, he asked me why I didn't just use an array since "everything ends up being an array, anyway."

There are some things that one may not pick up just from practical experience.

Did they introduce theoretically innovative concepts to any of these fields? It's one thing to write a great database that people love, it's whole another to make a contribution to database theory. And nobody's arguing that people with a formal education are very likely to have the chops either. It's that people who do end up making great contributions are very likely to have a formal education.

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