Comment by sebstefan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebstefan | Hacker News Reader

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>I'm a bit confused here. I was referring to the first paragraph in your original post, whereas you seem to be referring to the second paragraph?

My point is, I think, that I would wager you are not the norm among the exclusively self-taught crowd

There's going to be a lot of people on Hackernews to debate me on this, but I'm going to go out on a limb there and say: There's already a selection bias if you're hanging on here.

Programmers who have an issue with the academic parts of CS (self taught or otherwise) probably wouldn't hang out on Hackernews to read such content as: "Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days (2024)".

It's hard being self taught and overcoming the comfort zone, it's hard to go out of your way to figure out what you should learn as you don't have the luxury of being forced to follow a curriculum drawn by experts of the field you're studying.

My thesis is that I disagree that "Self-Taught Engineers Often Outperform"

Formally trained engineers mostly outperform, with a few self-taught people that are going to stand out, but they are the visible part of the iceberg, and if you advise someone to go self-taught, most likely they'll end up underperforming compared to someone who's gone to university. And that's normal, because being self-taught is harder.

> I would wager you are not the norm among the exclusively self-taught crowd

What is the norm?

> the self-taught people I interview

That's another small and unrepresentative group, possibly much smaller than self-taught developers who visit HN. In total, how many self-taught people have you interviewed? Either way, there's selection bias.

> a few self-taught people that are going to stand out, but they are the visible part of the iceberg, and if you advise someone to go self-taught, most likely they'll end up underperforming compared to someone who's gone to university.

That's kind of the point, though. Who would advise someone to go self-taught? That would be strange advice. There's definitely survivorship bias in self-taught engineers who have managed to make it in the tech industry, which is exactly why you should pay attention to them: they've successfully overcome the odds and obstacles. The % of self-taught who get to that point is likely much smaller than the % of university-taught. As you say, "being self-taught is harder."

You are taking the average of two groups but there is no iceberg, the self-taught people who make it are the only ones in that group...the other people do other things. It is like including the people who drop out of college in your group. As you say, self-taught is harder so people who go through that are going to know more and will end up knowing more that is useful.

People who teach at university aren't the experts in the field. The situation of university is inherently artificial created to fulfill a wide range of objectives which are largely unrelated to utility for students (and certainly not, utility for employers). For most subjects, people who teach at university are going to be very far from the experts...if they were experts, they wouldn't be teaching.

> My thesis is that I disagree that "Self-Taught Engineers Often Outperform"

They do in FAANG.

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