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Comment by nxsynonym | Hacker News Reader

Blame the young, beautiful people all you want for not slaving away over a 4 year degree that puts them in the same position as 1 year of self learning would get them, OR blame the business yuppies who keep coming up with the SaaS business models that don't need anything more than plug and play code monkeys.

I understand memorizing data structures does not make a good engineer, but honestly who is still asking for cream of the crop engineers, especially at the entry/junior levels?

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At the risk of sounding like a cranky old codger, I'd like to point a couple of things out. If all you have are "plug and play code monkeys", all you'll have is shitty software. The fact that shitty software is "enough" for so many businesses is just another symptom of the biggest problem with our society: we optimize for profit and damn everything else.

Oh I agree completely. I just take issue with the fact that it somehow is a "youth problem", as is being pointed out by the parent comment. It's a business problem, not a lazy millennial/education problem.

Stop hiring shitty coders and you'll stop getting shitty interviewees. Less shitty interviewees means less need for these types of "beat the coding interview" services/blogs.

Honestly a lot of times the comments in these threads amount to "I was a geek and it wasn't cool, I know CS from the ground up, and nobody deserves to have an easy path to being a coder". It's an exhausted form of gatekeeping and doesn't make anything better for anyone.

I'm not defending such comments, but there's more to them than just gatekeeping. Speaking from my own point of view, the "I was a geek and it wasn't cool" sentiment comes from feeling betrayed by having your lifestyle become an industry that too often focuses on profit more than on quality; the "I know CS from the ground up" comes from frustration with all the people who dismiss learning from the ground up without understanding all the insights it gives you; and "nobody deserves to have an easy path to being a coder" is an exaggeration of "when you try to make learning easier than it can really be, you end up dumbing things down".

Recently I found myself struggling to formulate my attitude towards software development and the best I could come up with is "lifestyle coding": sure, it's important to me to make something people will use and like, something that will improve life in some aspect, but in the end, I'm in this because I love to create programs. To me programming is more than my job, more than just means to an end, it's what I truly enjoy. People like me will often feel bitter about many aspects of our industry and it takes a conscious effort to keep aware of that feeling and to make sure it doesn't taint our decisions.

A four year degree at a quality program will open up a lot of jobs that the one year of self learning will not prepare you for.

That's not to say one year of self learning won't prepare you for a lot of programming jobs, or that the person with the four year degree won't be starting at one of those same jobs. But there are a lot of types of software I would only want someone with a real CS degree writing.

(Of course, 1 year of self learning, plus 3 to 4 years of real world coding plus further supplemental self study, could very well get you to the same level as a CS grad's knowledge, or beyond.)

I wasn't suggesting that a 4 year degree confers any advantage. I think it's merely status signalling to potential employers. Practically speaking, my degree only helped me at one point in my life: moving to a foreign country.

There's nothing wrong with software that only needs code monkeys to write. It doesn't have to be technical masterpiece to be useful, or valuable to business. Just think of all the code monkeys with jobs.

Basically every place I've worked for in the last 35 years has been desperately seeking new grads who can actually program a computer. And it's getting harder to find them.

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