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Comment by leadgenguy | Hacker News Reader

I am a self taught PHP programmer. Been working in tech as a freelancer since early 2000s. Built real applications.

I thought I was pretty good so a few years ago I moved to Silicon Valley to get a startup job. Boy was I wrong. Even though I had created real applications and knew MVC, etc. etc. I was basically told I was worthless because I didn't know algorithms, unit testing, etc. etc.

So I moved back home (Tel Aviv) and started my own company (lead gen market). Programmed everything myself. Last year I did over $2 mil (70% margins) and this year I am on track for $3.5-$4 mil in revs.

The technical interview was the best thing ever for me because if I had passed I wouldn't be where I am today.

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Both could be right. You might not have had the skills they were looking for, but could build a successful company (lead generation isn't algorithm intensive, is it?). I've seen exactly that happen more than once. Shipping something and running the business matters far more in many cases because the technical challenge in most companies is very little.

Nice story and surprisingly not that rare. The idea that someone can develop fairly complex software but not learn something mundane like unit testing is insane. There is a terrible plug-and-play mentality that acts like smart, hard working people are somehow not able to learn new things to fill in minor knowledge gaps.

I really like seeing this. I also write PHP for my projects, and I know it's terrible. I have no delusions about this. I use mysql_query despite knowing it's deprecated and possibly insecure, and if I'm building something that doesn't store any sensitive data and the worst case scenario of someone finding an exploit is that I have to restore from a snapshot, I really just don't care. I focus on building the product quickly and efficiently. Let the programmers of the world thumb their noses at me, at least I'm building something of value for me instead of some company.

The thing is when the company gets big and its not just you, your going to wish your original language was something more scalable.

For example, you tube engineers probably curse that the thing was made in python, because in a 1000 engineer org, making changes can break things you wouldn't be aware of elsewhere. While something more statically typed like java or go would break on the compile step instead of the run time step.

Python was fine when the project was 1 - 20 engineers, but it became a liability later on.

That is why people want you to spend a week or two to learn something better and more maintainable, so you wont curse your future self later.

But if your making small build utility type things, then it's fine. Contact websites for small firms. Or if it's for your quick test project, etc.

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