Hacker News Reader

Dont focus on the titles, focus on what you work on, it pays off and it's easy to create a contrast with the more amateurish.

First, dont consider your job is mainly coding, it's not, it's mainly solving problems. If your amateur journalist solve company problems as well as you with that little education: change company to solve harder problems, it's not their fault they re super good where they are and you're just the same seething you over educated yourself while stuck at changing button colors.

Now focus on how you solve problems beyond coding: do you understand requirements, can you even propose some, is what you build always either well working or fast delivered (both are ok, rarely done by the same people, both can increase your reputation).

I work in a large bank full of very old devs and empty of fad. I m a bit of a wild card because I m only 35 yo, so I know javascript for instance, prefer maven to ant, etc: but my true value is that I deliver prototypes fast that I increase in quality as they are used rather than spend 2 months hesitating over impossible edge cases: this worked fairly well and I have enemies as well as support, and that's fine. Do what you can, help your company, change if you're useless, and that ll make you worthy of the craft :)

That cuts both ways though.

I switched careers, spent a lot of time on learning to code and am a great developer but have to work alongside people who have a CS degree but consistently write poorly-designed spaghetti code.

Boot camp graduates probably do drag down the average competence level a bit, but it was already shockingly low.

I agree with what you are saying. In one of the teams that I work with we have a developer who was a truck driver for a couple of years and then decided to learn to code. He is one of the best developers I have ever worked with, he spent so much time learning on his own, studying and the passion and drive that he has is inspiring. Even now, after 15 years in the field he is always there and improving himself. In the same time we also had someone with proper formal education, and he was one of the least talented and most arrogant developers that I met until then. So it can go both ways, of course.

In the same time, I think now people just take this profession for granted. I don't like being X, I heard that being a developer pays well, so I will become one in 3 to 6 months. I wouldn't be able to be a tax consultant in one of the big 4 for example, just by reading about taxes on Udemy.

There are two emotions at play here.

One of them is "I spent years to learn this and now these plebs can just learn it in 3 months then take my title?". I'm not saying this is _your_ emotion, but I certainly notice this in me.

Anyway, I think this kind of emotion is not productive. If programming really is so easy to learn then maybe we made a big mistake by taking a 4 year university program to learn it.

That said, I actually think programming is hard and whatever you learn in a 3 month bootcamp will in no way give you all the tools and experience you need.

The problem though is the average.

New programmers look out to what everyone else is doing in order to learn.

But because most programmers are beginners, it ends up just being a cycle of beginners teaching each other.

When people with experience do speak out, what they say sounds so completely different from what the rest are saying, so the beginners don't listen to their advice. They will think these people with contrarian perspectives are just weird.

They make take your title, but they cannot replicate the code quality that should go with it, if that's of any consolation.

Unless they write higher quality code than you of course.

Then they would deserve the title, and I would be proud of them.

It's not just about the code quality, although that's an important aspect of it. It's the quality of everything. The development environment. The architecre. The product itself. The "engineering" mindset.

> demeaning to our craft

This is exactly how I feel. Even having gone through a more practical IT education, most of the folks in my class were really really bad (and not very excited about programming besides). That combined with folks that do a little bootcamp and then end up doing some sort of frontend development is honestly just depressing. It's hard enough to help managers understand good vs bad engineering, I don't want to do it every day for the people I work with too. Especially not knowing that a large percentage of them will never get any better.

I feel you. I'm one of those those that jumped from Biochemistry to programming. I remember the day in 2012 I wanted to switch to CS while in my second year of varsity and the head of that department looked me in the eye and straight up told me she had no space - despite the painfully obvious lack of queues and scores of empty chairs.

But alas, I've spent 6-7 years learning and grinding, I wanted to be a proper web developer. Just this morning I read another post discussion about RISC-V and ARM architectures and thought to myself - I'm still an idiot. I have no idea what these guys are talking about. I still feel like an impostor. I've helped my company deliver some awesome products and get paid really well but theres is still too much I don't know.

Now Im in charge of training new devs, freshly minted CS grads and they can barely write readable code. I'm still jealous that they have a CS degree which can open many more doors.

I studied applied mathematics. I feel like it gives me an insurmountable advantage over most developers when it comes to the real high-leverage stuff: Process automation.

Every company needs a website and there are plenty of cheap services offering to build one. But the real money is made if you can make someone's internal processes or production planning more efficient. For example, what's the worth of an AI that automates a process that currently costs $1 mio annually? Management will be ecstatic to pay you $200k annually to get those cost savings...

And for those tasks, you need a strong algorithmic and mathematical background.

> And for those tasks, you need a strong algorithmic and mathematical background.

Why do you say this? If you implement it via AI then sure, but I’ve done plenty of process automation without needing a strong mathematical background.

What I have in mind is speaking to business people to understand what they do, learn what the business rules are and write systems that implement those flows (and hopefully skip steps that are actually redundant).

Perhaps you meant something else?