/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>778008
I'm not sure but the internet told me that programmers will be needed. Then again back then they also said we needed more engineers in Canada; now we have too many engineers and too little jobs.

Just have a good enough Github, but a degree is really good to have!

>>778013
Still , its going to be one of the last things automated , pays well and you can lean on your freetime

>>778008
Programming is the sort of job where employees don't give one fantastic fuck about where or if you went to university and only look at what programs you've created.

Is math required?
you will spend the rest of your life in front of a computer screen watching numbers and solving problems?
Decent pay?

>>778051
>Is math required?

Depends on your focus. Programming itself is really just logic.

But you'll need math to understand algorithms, to solve some problems, etc.

>Decent pay?

Yes. Your typical programmer wouldn't get out of bed for less than $70k/yr.

>>778029
I'm pretty sure they still care about your degree in SV.

>>778008
>Can you get a decent paying job with no degree just by learning programming?
ofc, you just need tthree things:
1. don't be a fucking aspie.
2. network a fucking lot, get to know people
3. build a great portfolio.

>tfw you get hired before the aspie fuck that spent 4 years getting a degree, no to mention he is in debt

>>778102
what languages would you recommend for someone just starting to learn?

>>778008
>Is this really a viable path?

not really

>>778020
>Still , its going to be one of the last things automated

oh how wrong you are
programming is already half automated.

>>778120
>programming is already half automated.

It actually isn't, kid.

>>778029

You can get a job in programming with no degree but not necessarily a good job. If you have no degree you're going to be competing with all the cheap third world code monkey labor unless you're in like the top 1% of self-taught programmers.

It is very unlikely you'll be allowed creative control of a project if you don't understand algorithm analysis and optimization. And it will be tough to find work on interesting, complex projects without knowledge of data structures, graphs, machine learning, etc.

Obviously you can teach yourself that too -- you can teach yourself anything. But for the more mathematical topics, I think employers want to be sure that you were held to someone's standard and received instruction from a professional

>>778008
>implying any programmer has the social skills to create a network of people and connections to help him get a job

That's why you go to study it in school, they help you find a job and force you to get internships, thing programmers never would do on their own initiative.

>>778068
>70K
That's starting for an entry level job in a top 4 city.

>>778145
>in a top 4 city.

Not everyone lives in a 'top 4 city', kid.

>>778008
>Can you get a decent paying job with no degree just by learning programming?

During boom times, yes.

During economic downturns, like in 2000, or 2008, or whatever one hits next, you will have much more trouble finding work. By that time you may have a family etc. and will be in a worse position.

The best thing to do is go to college. It's always doable. If money/time is a problem, enroll in a local (non-community) college with a good CS program. If you can't do more, do one night/weekend class a week. Anyone can do that.

College consists of about 1700 hours sitting in class, and 5000 hours studying outside of class. The 5000 hours of studying dwarfs the 1700 hours of class. You will have to be spending 5000 hours studying on your own to have studied as much as a college person. Plus the 1700 hours of class learning. So it makes sense to just go to college. With public colleges and financial aid and Pell grants and the like, it is not that expensive.

>>778124
>>778411

Ok actual people who seem to know wtf theyre talking about.

So I did some digging last night and that seems to be the consensus , you can get a "job" just by really applying yourself but youll be shut out from the big leagues and if I wanted lower middle class income I could just become a copvor something.

Could you expand more on ehat youve said? Would it make sense to learn to code websites or java before starting college? Maybe some IT certifications so you could work part time while going to uni and not flip burgers?

Any real programmers reading. Whats your job title? Pay? What degree do you have?

Anyone who has actually gone the self taught github networking route , lets hear your story

>>778420

I had some CompTIA certs before I went to college, which I got all through self-study and landed a decent $11/hr job at a repair franchise. But I did have years of prior experience in fixing friends'/family computers so it wasn't like I just read a book and that was it. I recommend the red and yellow Exam Cram books if you're gonna go that route.

Aside from that I didn't really know shit about coding before I went to college outside of fucking around with shitty Flash and VB stuff. I don't think there's much of an advantage to trying to learn it all before college. You'll have opportunities to intern after the first year and that'll give you time to figure out what kind of programming you want to do. Webdev is a lot different from software engineering and both are different from research coding.

I got burnt out on programming but the skills open a lot of doors and ultimately led me to a job in trading

>>778420

I'm not sure if this completely qualifies as self taught, but I have an electrical engineering degree and have a CS job for programming in a language I taught myself (java). It's my first "real" job out of college and I started at ~70k. I don't live in CA or anything like that, but it pays decently for a job that's 15 mins from my parents house so I've been able to save up a lot of money. I'm planning on staying here for maybe another year and then try to move to a better paid position somewhere else (probably NY or CA).

I didn't really spend that much time learning Java before I got the job. I probably spent maybe 2 months learning it from a book I bought on Amazon, but I didn't seriously study and wasted a lot of time playing video games. A week before my interview I coded some really basic application and put it on a github account. Then during the interview I mentioned it to them and they ended up being impressed. Later on I learned that they interview a lot of people who seem like they have never coded anything at all (e.g. can't solve fizzbuzz).

My job is mostly internal CRUD application stuff, I don't really do anything complicated. There's a lot of older people here who are honestly way way worse than me and write absolutely horrendous code, for instance having an entire program written in one class, extremely poorly named variables with no comments, lots of methods/fields that just never get used at all, complete disregard of any naming conventions, every variable declared as public, etc. Just the other week I saw some guy not know how to use a Map and decide to "parse" the key-value pairs by calling map.toString(), splitting the result on the commas and using a for loop to call Integer.parseInt() on everything.

While it's not a famous technology company, the job's somewhat boring and the pay isn't amazing, I think a lot of self-taught people could probably get hired and do a good job here.

>>778008
Bump

>get a great idea
>write the software
>?
>profit

>>778517
Damn your co-workers fucking suck. Does your company do bug tracking? Version control?

>>778517
>Just the other week I saw some guy not know how to use a Map and decide to "parse" the key-value pairs by calling map.toString(), splitting the result on the commas and using a for loop to call Integer.parseInt() on everything.

Jesus fucking Christ, and I can't get a job because no degree.

Incidentally, where do you live?

>>778008

No degree here, making $95k as a programmer. I have 12 years of experience though, when I started out I was making around $40k.

>>778411

Except when you spend a shit load of time in school you are spending a shit load of time learning useless shit that will not contribute to your career at all.

If you do a Computer Science undergraduate program at a typical university then around half of the total amount of courses you enroll in will actually be Computer Science courses.

Then out of all the Computer Science courses you take at school you will use very little of what you learned at a typical job.

Going to college/university for Computer Science or Software Engineering is not worth it. People on /sci/ and /g/ will tell you the same thing.

A person should attend a technical school or teach themselves instead because they won't spend a lot of time taking bull shit general ed courses and learning things that will not to contribute to their career.

>>778974
Yes we do version control and bug tracking. Unfortunately it's all through Microsoft TFS, and the bug tracking is done by outsourced QAs who barely understand English.

>>779035
I'm in the Northeast US. By the way the map guy has a CS degree from a reputable school.

>>778100
SV self-taught programmer here: some people do but the majority do not.

>>778109
ruby/javascript or java depending on if you want to do frontend or backend

>>778124
cheap third world code monkey labor is not really all that good at programming. i've worked for companies that have been lured by gigantic offsite code farms of 30+ programmers that couldn't do the work of 3 good US programmers. OTOH, I have been wicked impressed by some russian and chinese programmer skills.

>>778145
less than starting in SV

>>779131

You're joking right? Obviously it's possible to get a job programming without a degree in CS, but you're not going to be anything other than a code monkey when you first start. The fact that you would take /g/'s advice seriously when they lose their fucking cool at any problem that demands the use of basic math skills tells us that you don't know what you're talking about.

Most good Silicon Valley companies won't even look at your resume if you don't have a degree. Not saying you can't learn algorithm analysis, graph theory, language processing, etc on your own, but you're competing against hundreds of people who received formal education in these topics -- you're already at a huge disadvantage.

Big companies like Google and Facebook are ok with hiring recent college graduates because teaching programming is fucking easy, the theory is the part they want you to come in with. I remember some brogrammer type came on /g/ complaining about a cyclic linked list question he got at Facebook or Amazon. Everyone told him the question was way too hard and gave the typical "when r u even gonna use that bro??", when the interviewers didn't think twice about that retard because there are 100 kids lined up behind him that can solve it with their eyes closed. These companies want people who can do real research and make a real contribution to the company, not someone replaceable who can just churn out boilerplate code. If your idea of a good programming job is doing CRUD in .NET over and over for 60k then by all means don't go to college, otherwise pay attention, get the most you can out of your professors, and collect that free research grant cash

>>779176
I posted >>779171 but I also agree with your points; there are some amazing college educated people around me and they learned things in a few years of college that I picked up over 10 years on my own. There are a few subjects that I will probably never know as well as my co-workers. If you can go to college, go; but if you can't and are willing to work hard to pick up the theory, you can make it as a hobbyist-turned-pro

>>778008
Real professional software engineer here, you should go to a college or university which will greatly help you understand programming much more because a person learns more when they are in a classroom and they are more motivated to do so in a classroom sitting. If you actually want to make money doing it you will have to read and do all the practice exercises in textbooks. I would recommend starting with a language of your choice, learning design patterns, and learning algorithms. This will include a lot of reading of huge textbooks and the more questions you do the better you will become.

Current CS student here in community college, planning to transfer. Self-taught for a few months before starting college (theory/intro to OOP, Java, JS w/ HTML5), which is when I really decided on the CS path. I enjoyed the small amount of time I was learning through online videos/material, and I started out with smoking A's in my CC classes. Just had a mediocre semester though, and I need to refocus myself. Did well in my C++ class, but might need to take English again, mostly due to procrastination and missing assignment dates.

Really it just comes down to putting in the work. Do the homework, the lab work, read the book if you are in school. Otherwise; watch videos, read books, practice lessons on your own time.

>>779209
Oh and my other main point with that was to say that learning about programming on your own is entirely beneficial to programming classes in school. How could it not? Makes the material vastly easier, understandable and more familiar. I have excellent syntax and coding/naming conventions, etc compared to anyone who is trying to start out in the field with almost no knowledge

The information you learn in university is already out there on the internet. Also you can always pirate books from any of the big ruskie book repositories or torrents.
What the internet does not give you is context, you have all this information but you don't know where to start. University gives you a decent foundation to build your skills. It also can give you very good networking opportunities if you're not an autist which sadly disqualifies most of /g/.

>>779131
We had Mathematics courses which were prerequisites to CS courses. So while they're not under the CS department, they were still necessary. Discrete and continuous math, statistics, graph theory etc. all helps CS.

My college had 16-18 CS classes and 3-4 Math classes.

I didn't have to take many other courses. I had three English/writing courses, psychology, art, and we had to take 2-4 science classes. I did not find this burdensome. Also, work is not just pounding out code. Many people can't communicate in e-mail or documents for shit, and could probably use some more writing courses. Science is useful as programming is a kind of application of the scientific method. I found psychology useful in a number of ways.

This kind of myopia that you should just sit down and learn Java is what leads to a not-so-great programmer. The best programmers believe in learning "something about everything and everything about something".

> all the Computer Science courses you take at school you will use very little of what you learned at a typical job

This is bullshit. Also, maybe it will allow you to work at better than a "typical job".

> Going to college/university for Computer Science or Software Engineering is not worth it. People on /sci/ and /g/ will tell you the same thing.

I have been working in IT for over 20 years. Good luck, when with no diploma you're in your early 40's and have a wife and two kids and a house, and the economy tanks and you get laid off. You'll have mouths to feed, you can't just take off across the country with your house and kids in school. The few jobs that are available will be flooded with resumes, many from people with a degree. if they have a pile of resumes of people with a degree and experience, why will they even look at yours? This happened in 2000, in 2008, and who knows when next...

My community college offers a certificate of Computer Science. Would that be just as good as an associates degree in computer science?

>>779084
Well feed us some info bro

>>778102
For some reason I really wanted Bart to move in that GIF.

>>778109
#1 Depends on what you want to work as.

#2 And in no particular order JAVA, C++, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP (shit but it pays), C, C#, and Objective-C

With the web oriented languages like Ruby or JavaScript you should probably learn HTML/CSS and some kind of SQL. But that isn't super difficult.

The hard part isn't learning the languages, it's learning how to build things with others. This is why a good github or webpage will get you hired. People can see that you have learned how to work with others. The language doesn't matter so much as the skills you build.

>>779389
>working in IT for over 20 years
there's your problem faggot

>>779783
>This is why a good github or webpage will get you hired. People can see that you have learned how to work with others. The language doesn't matter so much as the skills you build.

Do they pay a decent wage for remote coding and such if you have a github to back you up or is it a race to the bottom vs indians and chinamen?

What would be a good resume project that would show competency, be useful to people and maybe even bring in some money? Everything I've made has been small stuff with no real significance.

>>779176
Bullshit, no company (especially big companies) wants to sit there and take their goddamn time to teach you how to program. They are too afraid that you will leave before you will become an asset. Too much money/ time for something that isn't guaranteed.

>>778008
Bump

>>778008
You've gotta build a portfolio of damn good things you've done. You can easily tell a good programmer and a bad one from the projects they've done/ contributed to and just looking at their source code. Most CS majors are just fucking script kiddies anyway because they just too dumb/lazy for real science or they just wanna "make" video games. Teach yourself and build yourself a nice github.

>>778008
While web and mobile apps are the big thing right now, they won't always be. You could update your skills wherever things change, but you'll hit a point where you're too old.
This is probably also true for CS grads, but when HR sees that they have a degree and you don't it'll be an easy choice.

>>781726
Yeh but from anecdote its clear that you can land a job and if ypure kind of self motivated to solve problems rise up. The problem is if they cut you when the economy turns

>>778008
>Is this really a viable path?

It's the ~preferred path~ according to a lot of hiring managers and coders.

>with no degree

A G.E.D. or high school degree is strongly preferred if you're over 17. A BS degree in anything ELSE (math, physics, philosophy, theology, linguistics...) would make it a lot easier to get passed the great HR firewall but you don't need to study garbage and major in CS or basket weaving.

>>781726
Mobile / Web Development will be here for a long time however. Desktop development is going bye bye however.

>>779193
Which language should you be most fluent in for the majority of programming jobs? (or, what list of languages do employers look for the most)