[jaabe]

I’ve never hired someone who was self-taught, not because self-taught people can’t be equal or better, but because you’re trying to buy security and stability. The most expensive mistake you can make as a manager is hiring the wrong person, and self-educated people just aren’t worth the risk when you have a dozen other candidates who are great. I’m Danish though and things are a little different here because education is free. In face the government will even pay you a small amount of monthly money while you study. So we don’t have that many self-educated people, and those who are, are typically self-educated for a range of reasons that put them at a disadvantage from the get go.

So my point isn’t to discourage you, but to make you aware that managers might see your lack of formal education as a risk that you need to mitigate.

Everyone can learn to program, but learning how to program, correctly, efficiently and safe comes with formal education and you probably need to show that you know at least something about how to make CS based decisions. Maybe you do, if so great. If you don’t, spend a little time researching best practices, read up on design patterns and maybe complete the MITX intro course(s) to CS on edx.org.

I’m not sure knowing a specific framework is really all that valuable. If your can build something with LAMP/JS that makes money then you’ve already demonstrated your ability to write software. On the other hand it wouldn’t hurt you either.

[randomvectors]

1. As a hiring manager you should be better at differentiating between people and treat a degree as just one data point that you take into account, and not as a filter that gives no false positives.

2. You're pointing out that self-educated people aren't worth the risk and then you go on to advise him that he should self-educate.

3. A point that I think you're kind of making and that I agree with, is that a degree is a signal that you've gone through a certain process of education. If you don't have it, then you'd better signal the same thing in a different manner and demonstrate that you're familiar with theory, best practices, design patterns and so on; and that you can stick with something for a continuous period of time (showing up and doing at least the minimum amount of work for 4 years isn't a signal that all candidates have).

[jaabe]

You can certainly have a degree in CS and suck, but the odds of that happening are much lower than with people who don’t have a CS degree. Why should I waste the resources if I have enough decent candidates?

The rockstar developer is kind of a myth. If you compile 100 applicants into the 5-8 best ones, then the truth is that you could probably hire any of them and get good results.

That doesn’t mean self-educated people should give up. Especially because very few countries have as easy access to education as we do.

[thetrost]

Yeah, nobody gets fired for buying IBM. I don't know how the market for good developers is in Denmark, but I think restricting your potential employees to just formally trained limits your potential as team/company.

edit: Plus, I know quite a lot of formally trained developers who at some point just stopped learning. To me that is much more dangerous than not having a formal education in the first place.

[jaabe]

I’ve hired a lot of people, I do a lot of networking and I work as an examiner for CS students, I’ve never seen someone who was self-educated remotely compare to someone with a degree. It just doesn’t happen in a country where anyone who wants to put in the work can get a degree.

Which was kind of my point. The people who failed to get a degree are typically the people who won’t become great when they are self-taught either.

I can see why you would chose not to get an education in a country like America, where it would be a huge financial burden to do so, but we literally pay people to attend their free education.