From Law School to developer: An interview with Andy Zhang

You do learn certain basics from a degree, and building fundamentals is important. That being said, a degree is neither the exclusive nor universally optimal way to grok logic and problem structuring. The most important piece of the puzzle is your willingness to turn over stones, ponder problems, and fill in blanks tirelessly. Software engineering is an immense field, and there are always more blanks to fill.

The fortunate thing about online education today (coursera/udacity to name a few) is that it strips away a lot of the tough/complex issues, offers you a bite-sized problem, and breaks it down into a manageable chunk that a non-tech person can solve. It's not unlike how a management consulting case interview might go - you can't possibly know everything about an industry/space, but you can (1) break out a facet of the problem, (2) ask some questions, and (3) distill the incoming data. You develop understanding incrementally.

I'm a big fan of incrementality (also in writing software). Everybody starts out writing "Hello World!"

I wonder whether this is actually possible for someone who didn't have a computer science background at all. I have spoken to Andy and I know he did coding when he was young (Note, this is Elli from HireArt). I guess I wonder if it's possible to make such a huge transition if you had no prior CS background at all

That's true ZhangBanger. But don't you think you get at least some basics from an MS in terms of logic, how to architect an idea, etc? For instance, as a non-tech person learning the basics was so incredibly difficult. Just understanding the basic frameworks of how a computer "thinks" was hard....

From an anonymous friend: most of the hard learning happens with practical work. He has an MS in EE, and he felt like he knew nothing until he really dug in and put in the coding hours.