How many of you program just for fun or are self taught? Im talking about people without degrees in CS?CE/IT.
If so how did you learn and what do you do for a living? And how did you manage to learn with other RL issues

I am 100% self-taught. I have no formal education of any kind (dropped out of high school) and certainly no "official credentials" in programming.

I learned by being interested and persistent. If you genuinely care about doing something, you will find a way to do it - "other RL issues" are more or less irrelevant. As I often tell a good friend of mine: some people stare into space dreaming of living among the stars.

Other people don't stare into space, because they are busy building the rockets to get there.

I'm self taught and do it just for fun. I did a semester and a half of generals in college almost 20 years ago, that included a Modula-2 class, but for the most part I've taught myself since I was 15 or so. I started with GW-BASIC from a shareware 5 1/4 floppy on a Sanyo 8088, upgraded from there to doing Mode X assembly programming on an old 286. Didn't have the Internet back then, so I had to figure out as much as I could and consult a couple of wildly out of date TI-BASIC manuals from when I was 11 along with some books from the library and try to grok how programming worked. Wrote my first game at 17 or so, a tile-based RPG in assembly for 16-bit EGA that drew so godawfully slowly you could watch the rows of tiles rasterize. (Hadn't quite at that time figured out the art of optimization.) Get off my lawn.

Since then, I've been a plumber, a house builder, a woodworker, a mechanic, and a writer. I work on Goblinson Crusoe in fits and spurts, in between spending time with the wife and kid and working full-time in woodworking and fine carpentry and part-time writing the occasional magazine article. These days, I spend more time doing 3D artwork with Blender than programming, though.

I agree with Apoch. I tried to take a computer course and got about as far as doing some math and some string stuff, but I had already done that for months in PHP so I dropped out.

The problem with institutional learning is that you just can't deal fairly with all the individual levels of skill involved. For people that are closely around the norm its fine, but for people above or below its hell.

I am 100% self-taught. I have no formal education of any kind (dropped out of high school) and certainly no "official credentials" in programming.

I learned by being interested and persistent. If you genuinely care about doing something, you will find a way to do it - "other RL issues" are more or less irrelevant. As I often tell a good friend of mine: some people stare into space dreaming of living among the stars.

Other people don't stare into space, because they are busy building the rockets to get there.

you inspired me so much. I got weeded out of CS in college but now that I look back im having way more fun doing it as ahobby and coding what I want. Im starting DirectX and I know it's gonna be a blast

I'm 100% self-thought as well. I've been programming for 10 years now, starting at age 14. I am currently following a course in computer science and doing excellent(because of my experience), I used to study applied physics but I just couldn't motivate myself enough to complete the course, doing something you can relate to really matters in that respect. In those 10 years I've had very long periods where I wouldn't program at all, but I'd always get drawn back into it and somehow I'd always be better at it when I came back. It was like my subconscious processed the information in the background and my knowledge and interest just kept growing over the years.

Most of my knowledge is self taught, learn by doing and all that, although these days what I don't find out myself I pick up from those around me who I work with.

However, I also have a BSc in Software Engineering, which did help me refine my design skills a little but was mostly for the bit of paper.

Which brings me to this;

The problem with institutional learning is that you just can't deal fairly with all the individual levels of skill involved. For people that are closely around the norm its fine, but for people above or below its hell.

As annoying as it is the system does serve one purpose; it gives an indication of what people can and can't do which for an employeer is important. If you never plan to get a job coding, great, don't worry about a formalised "education" and the bit of paper but if you plan to get into it then you have to get past the HR drones and give some indication you can do what you can do.

The formalisation, from a work point of view, also serves to improve things from a development point of view; there is another thread asking if developers should get sued or not for security holes which is a damning comment on the state of the art. As complex and as hard as 'big software' is to design the only thing likely to aid in pushing things forward is to formally educate people so that everyone talks the same language and can work to a certain level. Frankly the only way we are going to push towards a world where things don't fall over is if the education level improves - I'm not saying that what we have no will forfill that role either but frankly something needs to be done.

Those "below the curve" get weeded out, frankly I wouldn't want to work with them anyway as I have enough on my plate dealing with my own work without having to hand hold someone who can't or won't do things. If you can't complete a course then there is a chance you'll be a liability to a company anyway. (Granted, many of those who do complete I probably wouldn't like to work with either, but such is life...)

For those above; suck it up.
If you are as good as you think then the work should be trivial and you can use your spare time to learn your own stuff; in my degree periods 95% of the work assigned to me was easy and I could knock it off in a couple of hours, often at the 11th hour because that's just who I am. Hell, I did my disertation in two weeks and that is something you are meant to spend a year on.

In fact looking back over it most of my time over the two years was spent either messing about, slacking off, hanging out with friends or drunk and dancing about like an idiot... ah, good times, how I miss them.

Anyway... I now await the crowds of 'X doesn't have a degree!' who for some reason think that exceptional cases of people who started their careers many years ago somehow applies in all cases or something like that...

My initial programming experience was self taught. I was one of those qbasic kids in elementary and middle school. In high school I got involved in an educational robotics program called Botball (google it), and that's how I learned C. My first C program was on an embedded device! Then I got into programming on the pc with some old version of Borland C++ my teacher gave me, and then I started playing with OpenGL. I even made some money on the side doing some short programming jobs for the company my dad worked at. (small company). But even though I could do a lot, I was undisciplined and my code looked horrible. But, I learned important things I needed later.

Then I went to college, and let me tell you, If it wasn't for the self-taught skills, I would have been one of those new CS college freshman who doesn't get it and drops out. There was so much information thrown at us all at once. I already knew C programming, and I thought the assignments were somewhat difficult. I had some classmates who never programmed at all until their first cs class, that ended up graduating. That's completely impressive to me. No way I would have picked it up that fast.


The downside to school was expense, stress, and I had no time for my own projects, for which I had a million innovative i'll-change-the-world-because-I'm-an-18-year-old-programmer ideas. Then I got a job and still had no time. Now I stay up late working on my own projects at home. Finally managed to find time to work on my own projects slowly, sometimes not touching them for months at a time. And I'm not changing the world, just messing around with some simple game ideas my own. But the quality of what I do, and my understanding of how it works, is greatly improved. Even though school laid down a lot of knowledge, but it was WORK that really disciplined me. The code for my school projects was nearly as dirty as my high school code. But working on a large, existing codebase with a team of other good programmers really taught me how to write good clean code.

If you are a self-taught programmer and still in high school, I would strongly recommend at least trying college. If you get that CS degree, you can make a good career for yourself. If you end up not getting a career in CS, never stop programming, just make it a hobby and program what you want to program. And just because you don't have a degree doesn't mean you can't make money from programming. It might be more difficult to prove your worth to an employer, but you can always find a use for your programming skills.

I understand why formal knowledge is important. But I don't think suck it up is the right answer. It would be better to improve the educational system instead.

When people constantly tell you that its going to get harder and it never gets harder, you just stop respecting and believing those authority figures.

Also for certain classes like maths you can't really get it done fast because you have to show every specific step for hundreds of problems and each 20 of those problems are the same.

Eventually an occasional teacher would let me skip some work, but it was rare. And one other argument is if you don't show the work you could have cheated and dumb shit like that.

Plus sitting in a lecture for 3 hours where you aren't allowed to use a computer is annoying as hell. I can't afford to buy a 500 page book every day to read during class. In computer class it was somewhat easier because I could search the web.

Another problem is examples. A teacher will try to force you to use a certain method by saying that eventually you will be forced to do it that way, and its never true for some of us.

Another time my teacher would mess up answers even though she had like a master's or PhD in math and when I would point it out she would have to test with with Wolfram Alpha. You would think if you were teaching college algebra and had a masters that for a short problem you could just look at it and know the answer.

Plus all the teachers blow at education theory. We still have douchetastic morons that think single sex education is a good idea for improving our STEM scores. And these people have degrees. But I'm supposed to respect someone just because they have a degree? Please.

I took a sociology course where we had online short answer/essays to do. And the teacher was getting all happy because some kids submitted the same assignment 40 or 50 times. Because it looked for obscurely defined keywords and didn't understand synonyms. And this was a huge state school. Although maybe if Mizzou spent more time on education and less time any money on the football team, at a unviresity for fuck's sake, they would have had a better essay grading system.

If a paper I write or an essay question on a test I take causes my teacher to cry, literally cry in the middle of class because its that good (granted Mizzou teachers probably have low standards and not all my essays incite crying), but the essay software gives me an F, then maybe they need to either hire a human grader or stop trying to charge me 20000 in state tuition per semester when they are too incompetent to run an intro level writers comp class.

And I'm supposed to sit through 4-6 years of computer science to get a degree with shit like that going on? What, are they trying to prepare me to deal with the MBA holding "business" men interfering in the development process when I get a job at a major studio with my shiny framed degree?


I know that a lot of people despise standardized tests. But I fucking love them. The 70% of the courses I passed in college were Cs and Bs I got for acing a test or writing a paper. I got a 5 on the Gov AP test but a D and an F in the class while every other student whether they had a 4.0 GPA or not got a 3, except for 2 4s. Out of like 30 kids. Why? Because GPA is fucking stupid. Its padded by fluff projects and take home tests and homework assignments with the answers online but you still get a grade.

And no, that is not just highschool. Its not even just general education requirements in college. Even lower level degree specific classes have this bullshit.

I dropped out of first college and then community college, and now I work a 4am-12am shift at a Target grocery section because at least when I stock shelves I'm not wasting my fucking time with stupid bullshit. I'm doing something that needs to be done, is productive, and isn't bogged down with garbage assignments that have no value to either myself or society whatsoever.

Then I come home and do game programming for like 4 hours. Then I do social justice work for another 2 or more hours. I don't complain about education systems because I'm lazy and entitled. I complain because somehow with your vaunted degree process supposedly screening out people who are not capable, some moron with an education PhD things that single sex class rooms are a good idea. Some other moron with a PhD thinks we should implement 4 day school weeks. Other policy makers think we should give equal time to creationism. Another person thinks its a good idea to switch in a new math curriculum, without training teachers in it first for a couple years, switch it out in 1 year even though they were told it would need at least 3 years to see if it was viable, put in a new one, and then are shocked because instituting a new math system every year where each system is taught fundamentally differently, but of course each system only teaches one strategy instead of allowing students access to multiple strategies to find the one that is best suited for them, results in poor standardized test grades.

I know a dozen people who quit the industry because they were stuck working with idiots, who had degrees fyi, or stay in but hate their jobs and then another 6 who realized that their degree didn't prepare them to actually program. Then there are the people with a CS degree who cannot do simple math without a calculator.

Formalized education is only effective if said education isn't shit.

100% self-taught, although I'll probably head to college for a CS degree, one day.