The Apprentice Programmer

http://tobi.lutke.com/the-apprentice-programmer

by seubert • 13 years ago

408 145 13 years ago

tobi.lutke.com

gdsimoes2• 13 years ago

I wish we had these type of programs in my Country...

uokyas• 13 years ago

In Portugal we adopted the same system, 5 years ago or so, and i can say its not working as good as in Germany, for young adults who live in rural areas they don´t have the industry to get an apprenticeship like you did,not everybody gets a chance to work with smart minds like you did, and have the adult discern like you did to make yourself useful at such early years of life. That´s is a good story, i can tell you that. But it does not means that its reachable to everyone everywhere.

terhechte2• 13 years ago

I can see the problem there. Germany has the advantage of the Mittelstand, a strong net of middle class companies layered over the whole country. Even ever-so-small villages oftentimes have one mid-size company that does processing, engineering, or something else to modify or edit products for another companies toolchain.

However, oftentimes these jobs are mostly catering to blue-collar workers. If, instead, you want an apprenticeship as a programmer or something other more white collar, then - in a small village - chances are dim, too. In my case I had to move to a different city, so I could find one. Which is something many of my friends did, in order to find a suitable apprenticeship: Move away.

templaedhel• 13 years ago

I feel like confirmation bias is in play when you read about successful people who have dropped out of school, succeed, and then blogged about it. You have to keep in mind the hordes of people who have followeded a similar path only to archive not enough to blog about.

Self education may appeal to many of us here, but it applies to less than it appeals to.

jdotjdot2• 13 years ago

Yes, but you could say the same thing about people who went to traditional schools. How many people went through that system and succeeded--and then how many people went through that system and didn't?

I agree with you in that I don't know we have the data to argue that apprenticeships are better, but I don't think we have data to argue that they're worse either, and I can't see how having it as an option is bad at all.

jmduke3• 13 years ago

> Yes, but you could say the same thing about people who went to traditional schools. How many people went through that system and succeeded--and then how many people went through that system and didn't?

I think the whole point is that, statistically speaking, many many more people go through the system and succeed than otherwise. That's why it's the system.

(I'm not saying that's still true.)

xal4• 13 years ago

Obviously - the system clearly doesn't just produce huge successes. I simply wanted to tell my story because it's sufficiently different from most people's background to be interesting, or so I was told.

rossjudson• 13 years ago

You've been told right. It was news to me that Germany had such a well-organized system of apprenticeships. It explains a lot.

ihsw• 13 years ago

There is a very long sliding scale of success attributed formalized education (either through academic or vocational studies) or otherwise garnered from personal experience.

There is value in both, and the confirmation bias is apparent but it may not have been the intention of the author.

jacquesm• 13 years ago

> Self education may appeal to many of us here, but it applies to less than it appeals to.

I think a key ingredient is that you have to love to learn, that you would do it regardless of circumstance and that learning itself is your passion.

If that's the case you can safely drop out of education, but if the motivations are to some extent external then better stay put.

doktrin• 13 years ago

> Self education may appeal to many of us here, but it applies to less than it appeals to.

That's missing the major point of the piece, IMHO. The OP isn't describing "self education", and (coming from a US perspective) is not even a typical drop out.

What's being described here is a vocational pattern of learning, where on-the-job experience is backed up with classroom instruction. That's not exactly what "drop out" or "self educated" imply in the US.

keithpeter5• 13 years ago

Yup. In the UK we are trying to reconstruct the 'dual system' and we have things that are called apprenticeships but not quite as well organised as the ones they have in Germany. The OP is not a drop-out. He has followed an established path!

ahoyhere4• 13 years ago

There's also a bias if you look at dropouts as a homogeneous group, because they aren't. It's just as ludicrous to predict the same outcome for someone like me, who was always way ahead and bored to death of school, and a poor kid from the city or country who couldn't read at grade level.

I doubt Tobi ever had reading comprehension problems and I bet he was passionate about his hobby leading up to his track switch.

As for me, I'm a high school drop out and everybody told me "You'll end up stacking shelves at 7-11!" because that's what dropouts do. They made the same mistake you are accusing us of making, when we talk about our own pasts. I knew several outstanding HS and college dropouts among my online friends at the time and they inspired me to stop wasting my life. I'm so glad they did.

kostya-kow4• 13 years ago

I completely agree with you. You expressed exactly what I was thinking.

I am 15, and I am planning to drop out of school.

It is extremely frustrating trying to persuade my parents that dropping out of school doesn't mean I am giving up on life, and that I am not a failure.

I cannot function in this artificial society that exists in schools, and I learn much better by myself. Finishing school would be complete waste of my time, for a stupid piece of paper. During this day and age, it is extremely easy to attain knowledge for free without attending any institutions. Currently, I have several dozen textbooks on my kindle, and I am taking 3 classes at Coursera.

My parents are trying to compare me to all the stupid kids that usually drop out, and I cannot comprehend their close-mindedness and ignorance.

Because of their stupidity and effort to "help" me, I may even end up homeless by the end of this year.

herdrick• 13 years ago

A key point of the post is that in Germany it wasn't dropping out. It was joining a school of a different sort, a much better one for certain kinds of learners.

icelancer7• 13 years ago

>I feel like confirmation bias is in play when you read about successful people who have dropped out of school, succeed, and then blogged about it.

And what of the people who graduate, get a job, and blog about it?

shanelja4• 13 years ago

I was an apprentice, fairly recently actually, only last year. I loved it - the crappy pay, the meaningless jobs and the terrible teaching aside - I found that I was in my element.

Half my life I've been fascinated with computers, for a quarter of it, I've been actively building programs to populate them, replacing the typical childhood experience with code and logic.

When I got my first job in programming I had been a hobbyist for a few years and I was a fresh mind to mold, but I felt used, I had a house and food to pay for and it was a hard experience.

It's more than a year ago now and I'm at another company, one which valued my skills in a better way, more money, better prospects and far better training, I feel like I learn more every week at my current job than my entire time at my last job.

To anyone out there who is young and jobless, or unsure of what they want to do, or sick of stacking shelves at Asda, I implore you, try one out, the job satisfaction and the change in your mentality will be more than worth the effort.

You don't need to program from your youth like me, most people start between the ages of 16 and 21 (so far as I can tell) and codecademy and other services are making it a lot simpler to learn these days - anyone else remember learning HTML from W3SCHOOLS?

I said this to my best friend a few months ago, when he had just had his baby and had no job: Why do nothing, when you can do something you will love?

oliverhunt• 13 years ago

What country do you live in and what company did you do your apprenticeship with?

shanelja4• 13 years ago

I live in the UK, in the north, the company was tiny: www.cicsolutions.co.uk, only a small 3 person company, don't get me wrong, they were a great bunch of people, but the teaching style was all wrong - I was punished severely for infrequent mistakes (accidentally deleting a CSS file instead of renaming it, there was no backup system etc in place) - and the money was fairly horrific.

jmduke3• 13 years ago

This is well written, but I feel as though I'm missing something.

The best way to get better at being a career programmer is to be a career programmer. This is understandable! And the author's initiative at 16 years of age to identify his passions and stick with them at the exclusion of higher education is commendable.

But I've learned a whole, whole lot in college -- and yes, I completely agree with the author that the amount of time I spent tinkering around with computers is smaller than it otherwise would. Instead, I spent time joining a fraternity; taking classes comparing Milton to Bradbury; learning how to pitch a stock; volunteering with the homeless; getting blackout drunk on a Tuesday night; learning the differences between Brahman and Brahma.

Do those things make me a better programmer? No, but I absolutely think they make me a better person than had I spent the past four years as an apprentice. (And, I'd wager that they're better for my career in the long term, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.)

So, I guess, my takeaway: if you know with absolute certainty that computer programming is your sole passion in life, then college is probably not your best choice. (I'm not saying that the author is being anti-college in this post: but I fear most of the readers might interpret his post as such.)

terhechte2• 13 years ago

I did both, I first did an apprenticeship, and then some time after that went to college. I think that's a great way to do it, because I first learned the pragmatic way, and then could expand it with theory. In addition to that (I think), I had matured enough when college started, to better decide what to do, which courses to choose.

I wholeheartedly agree on all the other things you list about college; doing an apprenticeship doesn't give you any of that. I'm confident that going to college was one of the best decisions of my life, maybe the best decision, given all the contacts / friends I made, the things I exprienced, the new topics I learned about, the discussions I had, the parties I had, etc.

MikeKusold• 13 years ago

I wish I did things this way. In college I formed a lot of uneducated opinions (why would you ever not have a completely normalized database? That's dumb) that only thanks to my extensive coop experience did I retrospectively see the value of.

sebcat• 13 years ago

I dropped out of school (college equiv.), started parachuting from airplanes and solid objects, joined the military, dropped out of the military, ended up as a software developer.

All that matters in the end is that you like what you do. And if you don't, you can always quit. You might not always know what you want, but you'll figure it out.

ahoyhere4• 13 years ago

I think the confusion here is that Tobi is telling his story, not your story, and he's not telling anyone what to do. If you reread the essay and don't believe he's talking about your choices, it will make sense.

bromang4• 13 years ago

the ability to do all those things without having to work at the same time is a real luxury. it is certainly a nice thing to do, but someone (you or the state) has to pay for it, so the costs and benefits of different types of education/training still have to be considered.

jimmaswell• 13 years ago

>(And, I'd wager that they're better for my career in the long term, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.)

How so?

TheEzEzz• 13 years ago

Most kids don't actually read Milton or Bradbury in college when it's assigned. On the other hand, people who do want to read classics can do so while also being a software developer.

I'm all for enrichment, and I did enrich myself in college, but no more than I do on my own now that I'm in the real world.

(Edit: Also, I didn't learn how to really party until after college =)

dreamdu5t• 13 years ago

I'm so sick of success being portrayed as an institutional choice rather than a process of individual choices.

mijustin• 13 years ago

I'd say that Tobias' post portrays both: his individual choice to make certain choices (and pursue Jürgen's team), and the context of the German apprenticeship.

blt• 13 years ago

I wish I could have a mentor like Juergen in the article. Ever since I started writing code, nobody has had enough time or dedication to go over my work line-by-line like that. I learn those lessons by trial and error when my code breaks. And they aren't lessons I could have learned in college. I've got a long way to go, but one day if I'm actually a good programmer I'll try hard to be a mentor like that to the new guys.

ams61102• 13 years ago

This is a good point. A university CS education will not be about writing good code in any particular language (at least mine wasn't). If you are not at an engineering school there will not be a lot of emphasis on software engineering practices. And you can't really lean on your peers very much because they are as inexperienced as you are. Even your TAs and professors likely don't have any experience writing production quality, maintainable code in a commercial/business setting: they are more likely to write "proof of concept" code for their particular research interests.

In short, a traditional Computer Science curriculum is not designed or intended to churn out e.g. Rails developers who can be immediately productive. An apprentice-style training system could do that, however at the expense of not teaching some of the more theoretical computer science (or teaching it in a much more applied style).

icelancer7• 13 years ago

> Ever since I started writing code, nobody has had enough time or dedication to go over my work line-by-line like that.

Commit big changes to open source projects. I bet you get a wide variety of reactions.

hkarthik• 13 years ago

I actually met with some programmers from Shopify at a conference this week. They spoke of Tobi's leadership very well and I could see he's worked hard to cultivate a certain culture at Shopify. Reading this essay really validates a lot of what his programmers said about him.

ender7• 13 years ago

The OP was incredibly lucky to find a mentor like Jurgen. Being handed a thoroughly "proofread" review of your work is perhaps the best way to improve at almost anything. Unfortunately, creating such high quality feedback demands more time than most people are willing to spend, especially if it's above and beyond their normal duties.

xal4• 13 years ago

I find that Github pull request style discussions are a good approximation of this ideal which strikes a great balance between effort required and social acceptability.

seubert• 13 years ago

I wonder if a company that stressed a role like this up the career ladder as an alternative to a high-level architect role would see much success.

invalidOrTaken4• 13 years ago

I don't know, but I can think of several things to make it more workable:

---you could probably pay less. Programmers' opportunities for meaningful, understood-by-the-recipient service are few and far between. I don't think it gets any more meaningful than this. One of my favorite gigs ever was tutoring Python for Tutorspree, and watching my students progress. ---It has a higher meaningful skill ceiling. The problem with "architects" is that every programmer is an architect, or should be. The title creates the idea of "one smart architect, many stupid implementors." But the 10x phenomenon means this is the last thing you want: you want a few smart developers, not a lot of dumb ones. So why waste your talent managing labor, when the labor is useless and what you need is more talent?

xal4• 13 years ago

we are actively pursuing this idea at Shopify.

icelancer7• 13 years ago

We did that at my last company; we hired brilliant out-of-work mathematicians and physicists and turned them into developers and data scientists. We paid less for labor and got way better product out of our training program.

inquist• 13 years ago

I work for a US company and have had a similar experience to what is described here! My employer had that type of practical education, and so even though I have a bachelor's in Physics I am working as a programmer, gaining valuable experience and feedback.

larrywright• 13 years ago

As someone who essentially went the same route (though I finished high school, and took a slightly more circuitous route), I've often wondered what I missed out on by not going to college.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it would have made much of a difference in where I'm at in my career, but I wonder about the rest of me. The people I know who went to college tended to have social experiences that I didn't have (though perhaps working at a startup these days offers some of that). They took classes in subjects that I have only a basic understanding of (physics, chemistry, politics). In some sense of the phrase, they're more "well rounded".

I'm not certain how much that matters. Maybe it doesn't matter at all.

dxbydt• 13 years ago

I simply do not understand this anti-college anti-credentialling sentiment. I am featured in the latest Hacker Monthly ( print version of HN). So they asked me for a bio. I wrote something about how I learnt everything in college...am not a hacker...and that you should go to grad school if you want to get better at CS. So they edited out all of the pro-college stuff and just said this guy is data scientist. You don't figure out Dirichlet allocation and principal components and matrix regularization hacking away in your garage. This stuff isn't going to occur in your mind out of the blue. Its fairly complicated and even those of us who were systematically taught these things at school take years to internalise it. Don't downplay education. You are missing out on a treasure trove of knowledge humanity has collated over centuries, just to hack away and reinvent the wheel by yourself...well, good luck with that.

jmduke3• 13 years ago

I agree with what you're saying, but I think that sentiment is more present in HN's comments on the submission than the submission itself.

soneca• 13 years ago

Exactly. I feel like every topic that enters HN become a replication of some of the old HN discussions. The post is much more about creating an institution of educating people that is alternative to high school/college than about diminish the value of college. The author actually explicitly says that this is common in Germany.

And saying that personal experiences in college was important to oneself, so everybody should try is the same that saying that my personal exeperiences in playing competitive soccer were important to me, so everybody should try.

invalidOrTaken4• 13 years ago

Is it intrinsic to this treasure trove that the knowledge it contains must be transmitted for pay, with exercises to be completed on a deadline, and with little choice on the learner's part as to what is learned?

Fargren2• 13 years ago

No, it mustn't be transmitted for pay. In Argentina, for example, public college is good and free.

More importantly to your question, teaching a hard curriculum to a lot of students at the same time is a hard problem, and exercises with deadlines and relatively tight syllabus are a method that has been shown, for many years, to work for a large number of people. It certainly doesn't work for everyone, it certainly isn't the best way to learn, but it's an effective tool for the problem at hand.

tmarthal• 13 years ago

Have you ever seriously considered PhD programs? No one that I've ever heard of has ever had to pay tuition to attend college for their PhD (myself included). It is usually a "work exchange for education"; a research or teaching assistantship while taking classes and writing a dissertation.

And to say that the learner does not get to decide what they will research for their dissertation is just flat-out wrong. It is assumed that the student will pick what to write their dissertation on - they need to study it in-depth for 2-4 years and picking something that they do not find interesting will most likely lead to dissatisfaction (but it is still a choice).

Granted, a PhD program requires a prerequisite BS degree or equivalent which is generally not paid for and follows a typical regime. However, not all knowledge is the same - highly specialized "brink of human understanding" type learning is paid, unstructured and definitely has no exercises to complete (since the one learning them has the most understanding of the topic).

jonheller• 13 years ago

I agree. I feel as though my time spent in computer science courses in undergrad and, even more so, graduate school, helped me be a better programmer than I could have hoped than if I had spent those years just programming instead. It taught me to think differently.

Of course, this doesn't apply to everyone. A huge number of people skip computer science degrees and are still highly successful.

But one swallow does not a summer make, which seems to be the approach of many of these articles: Hey, look at me, I didn't go to college and I'm successful!

This seems to be an argument that is very difficult for either side to argue, because I don't see a way you could really look at a statistical analysis of the careers of CS grads versus non grads and make some kind of conclusion.

seferphier• 13 years ago

Author is simply trying to say that going to college was not for him since he is a kinesthetic learner and prefers learn by doing.

I believe he is advocating a dual system of education with a combination of college or apprenticeship since there are different types of learners out there. College is the 'only way out' for many people, otherwise you would be considered a failure and cannot find a job.

jmspring• 13 years ago

A dual system, if you wanted to just turn out programmers who know the basics of scripting, how to use a language, and build applications might work.

If the "dual" system were to include architecture, algorithms, discrete math, and deeper subjects that a typical CS curriculum usually covers, what's the point of an apprenticeship system if it is replicating academia?

I can see a need for a trades like class, but here in the US we already have an assortment of community colleges, certificate programs and the like that replicate that model.

jakobe• 13 years ago

> Don't downplay education.

Are you saying that training on the job with a good mentor, with classes once a week, does not qualify as "education"?

eli• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure Dxbydt is referring to academia when he says education, not looking for a semantics refresher :)

kostya-kow4• 13 years ago

Most of the knowledge you will ever need you can attain for free on Internet with MOOCs.

And some of the more advanced concepts that you mentioned are not beneficial to know for majority of things you will do in day-to-day work, although I bet you can still learn a lot of it for free with online e-books.

If you want to do research on some really advanced topics then a degree is a must, but an average (high-)school education is a complete waste of time.

rcfox• 13 years ago

That knowledge didn't just appear once there was an internet; it had to come from somewhere. You're able to make geo-local picture sharing apps inside of instant messengers because someone with an advanced degree figured out how to make transistors. Then some other person with an advanced degree figured out how to make combinations of those transistors perform coherent operations to achieve complex goals. Then some other person with an advanced degree distilled the mathematical theories required to parse languages. And so on.

It's fine to say that you're getting by just fine with stuff you learned on the internet, but to call education a waste is to declare that what we have now to be sufficient and there's no point in learning anything new. That might be working for the Amish, but it doesn't work for me.

ismarc• 13 years ago

I'm of two minds of this. 1) I'm very much NOT anti-college/anti-credentialing. 2) I don't see your average business application software developer having any need for a degree in CS.

I believe the anti-college/anti-credentialing stance is primarily how people are sold on degrees. People are told they will get better jobs and make more money if they get one. However, no one really takes the time to tell them that just getting your degree does not qualify you to immediately go get a job doing exactly what you want. Essentially, people have been oversold on what the degree actually gives them.

My belief is that a vast majority of the technology related jobs are the modern day equivalent of 'blue collar' work, more akin to tradesmen, such as electricians. If you read up the requirements for an electrician in the U.S. (a brief read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrician#United_States is good enough), it follows the same general trend we see with software development experience, even if the lines aren't as clearly drawn.

One caveat, I don't have a degree. I'm pretty close if I were to want to go back and finish it, but I didn't drop out by choice. I'm of the firm belief that it is possible, but significantly more difficult, to gain the same knowledge outside of a college or university, it's just harder to quantify the knowledge you have. I would also suggest everyone go to college and get an undergraduate degree in something that interests them, but focusing on core classes and general requirements, not their particular interest. Universities are great for two things, imparting a general base of knowledge and specialized knowledge. However, undergraduate degrees have shifted to focus on specialized knowledge at the expense of general knowledge.

One last note in my long-winded comment, I really appreciate how you state 'you should go to grad school if you want to get better at CS' rather than the usual defense of schools saying that it's absolutely needed.

prawks• 13 years ago

> Essentially, people have been oversold on what the degree actually gives them.

The degree certificate itself, perhaps. But I think people also miss what can come along while getting the degree. Networking with senior faculty members. Participating in undergraduate research. Independent classes with those faculty members. Networking with peers of similar interests.

It's what the student makes it. As such, you're quite right that just "getting a degree" doesn't make you qualified for anything aside from being a degree holder. I think it's important to keep this in mind when discussing undergraduate degrees.

tamersalama• 13 years ago

> ... vast majority of the technology related jobs are the modern day equivalent of 'blue collar' work ...

That's certainly how most of tech-workers are treated. However - should they? Even for non-degree bearers (or those like me transitioned from other fields), it's a highly creative non-mechanical work. The notion of treating tech workers as blue-collar ones is I think stemming from the black-box sophisticated nature of work (and perhaps introversion of many in the business) which the industry bike-shed into previously known moulds.

aviraldg• 13 years ago

It didn't sound like "anti-college anti-credentialling" at all. All the OP was trying to say was that the traditional method of teaching ie. "all theory" didn't work for him, while a mixed hands-on/practical/theoretical approach did.

Your comment, while true, is fairly irrelevant in context of this article.

LVB• 13 years ago

So what did the OP really mean by this:

Not that degrees matter anymore. They do not. Experience does.

gdsimoes2• 13 years ago

What I don't understand is this anti-learning-from-books and anti-learning-from-computers sentiment. In many cases and for many people learning in nonconventional ways is much more efficient then going to school.

codeonfire• 13 years ago

In many engineering cultures, employees are perpetually required to play the role of pupil as a form of submission despite credentials, education, and experience. This is where all the downplaying of college and credentials stem from. There is almost no corporate culture which does not require new employees to play a submissive role to whoever is already there. Find one, and you'll maybe find people who value college and credentials.

rachelbythebay2• 13 years ago

Speaking only for myself, it comes from a combination of selection bias and general mistreatment at the hands of others.

When you see someone who has three degrees in various flavors of computer science (BS, MS, PhD) who doesn't know about what happens when you use "==" with two floats, it builds.

When your boss tells you that he won't pay you any more because you don't have a degree, it builds. When you find out he's paying the three network engineers 3x what you get and they don't even really understand TCP/IP (so they wind up coming to you for everything), it builds.

When you see someone who is hired as a sysadmin because they are clearly such a great computer scientist and can do anything, and then who can't manage the simplest of Unix maintenance requests, it builds.

Any time someone tries to use their degree as a club instead of a wall covering, it builds.

That's just me. I can't say why other people feel that way.

For the record, I only got my degree two years ago this month. I mostly did it because I really needed to "walk the stage" at last. Everything else was secondary. Now that I have it, does it make me any better than others? No way. If anything, it puts me behind the 8-ball having to pay off these stupid loans for the rest of my life.

genwin5• 13 years ago

> When your boss tells you that he won't pay you any more because you don't have a degree, it builds.

It's just a convenient excuse. If it wasn't a degree it'd be something else. The boss was negotiating, so negotiation skills are what's needed in this situation, rather than a degree.

genwin5• 13 years ago

Unless there's money to burn a career should be treated like a business. For many people getting a CS degree would be a big net loss. One can certainly master Dirichlet allocation from the comfort of home, no fees required.

bromang4• 13 years ago

Most people reading this site are not doing machine learning or advanced technical work. The day to day work of the vast majority of programmers does not require completion of advanced formal education (or the self taught equivalent).

Even then it is not actually that hard to learn about principal components or matrix regularization if you have some mathematical background and the desire to teach yourself...

gfodor• 13 years ago

The point isn't that you shouldn't learn latent dirichlet allocation, but that the best way to learn it is to come upon a problem that warrants it and then have a mentor point this fact out to you, motivating you to learn it so you can expand your capabilities.

There are plenty of engineers who love to pour over academic research of the bleeding edge who have no problems to solve with it, yet when you ask them to hack together a prototype of an idea they don't know where to start. I think there is a clear personality type that prefers to continue reading before doing, since there is an ever-present fear that just around the corner there is some kernel of knowledge that will remove the need for a massive body of work. In reality, this is almost never the case, and elbow grease and experimentation turns out to be the solution to many problems, not digging through libraries, frameworks, algorithms, and academic research.

huntedsnark• 13 years ago

That's not the tone I got from the article at all. Your comment seems incredibly defensive and largely blinded by your own experience, how is your view any more valid than his? You must have never encountered any of the numerous CS graduates that can't code their way out of a paper bag.

cliftonmckinney• 13 years ago

I think where the college and credentials bit is failing--for me at least--is the lack of differentiation between "learning to do" and "learning to think." I went to a liberal arts college and spent most of my four years learning to think. Liberal Arts are good for that kind of thing, and depending on your background (I'm not the product of highly educated parents) it can be extremely useful and a completely justified reason for going to college. One can learn to think elsewhere, but college is still a great place to do it.

As recently as ten years ago, it was impossible to learn to do outside of a formal training program, but today it's completely possible to learn to do almost anything via Youtube, iTunes, and the rest of the internet. And the problem is that today's university system--except in fairly rare cases--actually hinders learning to do. The world outside moves too fast for the educational bureaucracy to keep up. Formal education is valuable, but maybe more for learning to think than learning to do, at least in modern times.

yarou• 13 years ago

I wouldn't characterize his post as anti-college in the least. It's cheap to say that Tobi's post espouses only one viewpoint; rather, he's giving an anecdote that suggests there's more than one way to do it when it comes to a career.

lsc3• 13 years ago

>I simply do not understand this anti-college anti-credentialling sentiment

Speaking as an anti-college, anti-credentialist person, well, a lot of it, for me? is that I didn't go to college.

I mean, everyone likes to pretend to be altruistic, but in the end? we all see the world from our own perspective.

And really? most people seem to think that you go to school, you get a cs degree and you will be pretty good. And that's simply not true. I've hired people with CS degrees only to have to fire them, because it turns out, they didn't actually learn anything.

I mean, I've also worked with people who really did learn incredible things in school. Things, as you said, that I certainly have been unable to teach myself.

I also think a lot of this anti-college stuff is people who went in to debt for life, having been told they'd get useful job training and, you know "find yourself" (you know, the class thing. No matter how much money I earn? I'll never be middle class; in the eyes of most people, i'll never be a 'professional' a 'real person' unless I go get a degree. I'm the guy who fixes the pipes. Which, eh, I am mostly okay with at this point.) - but anyhow, yeah, these kids graduate and find that the market value of their degree is, well, pretty close to zero. (and yes, a lot of these kids got degrees in philosophy or fine arts... And yes, we laugh at them for expecting to turn those degrees into money. But they were 17, goddammit, when they made that decision. What kind of asshole expects a 17 year old to make good decisions, especially when they receive bad advice from every trusted figure they talk with? Then we go and say "unlike every other bad loan you will take in your life, the person giving you the loan takes no responsibility. You have to pay this one off. No bankruptcy.")

This idea that "you can do anything you set your mind to" also permeates education, and it's incredibly destructive; it's how we end up with those people with CS degrees who can't outcode me.

necubi2• 13 years ago

You don't learn to code in college, or at least not in class. Good coders almost universally learn outside the classroom. This is true for people who go to college and those that forgo it.

So if you don't go to college to learn to code, why go at all? You go to learn the fundamentals of computer science and math which underlie everything that we do.

It's certainly possible to obtain this knowledge on your own with serious self-study. But it's a hard route (albeit one getting easier thanks to Coursera et al.) and given two candidates with equal coding ability, the one who went to college is far more likely to have a strong grip on theory.

Is theory actually useful? I would claim that it is, even for programmers doing CRUD apps and the like. Knowing the fundamental abstractions of computer science and the ways people have applied them in the past saves an enormous amount of needless reinvention. As a concrete example, parsing is a very well-studied problem in academia. But somebody without that background trying to write a parser will struggle far more than another familiar with CFGs or PEGs.

Being able to program is just scratching the surface of computer science. It's necessary but not sufficient for being a great programmer.

betterunix• 13 years ago

College is expensive, and if you need to take out a loan to go there (most do) it is risky. Not only that, but credentialism (the idea that college exists in order to get credentials) coupled with the enormous expense has led to declining standards and quality at American schools. It is not unreasonable to ask why one should be paying so much and taking on such a large risk for an education that is of questionable quality, particularly in fields where vocational skills can be learned elsewhere.

mbell• 13 years ago

I'm definitely not one that thinks credentials / college matter for most software developers (or frankly, people in general) but setting that aside and looking at what options exist:

I think a big part of the problem is the irrationality of getting a degree in 'Computer Science' to be a programmer (aka 'Software Engineer'). My degree is in Electrical Engineering with a Computer Engineering focus and I would never have gone for an Electrical Physics degree. I wanted to build things, not be a research scientist.

So, why is the de facto degree for programmers Computer Science? How much do you actually learn about building software in a CS program? My experience indicates, not much. You learn a lot of computational science, great, most products have 1 or 2 difficult algorithms at their core, but they often represent an amazingly small % of overall development time, where is the training for everything else that needs to be done?

The biggest problem is that there seem to be no good Software Engineering programs. Software Engineering degrees do exist but they seem to be woefully outdated and only address a small subset of those people whom wish to 'build things' with software.

richcollins• 13 years ago

You could spend years in college or you could just start trying to solve problems collaboratively that lend themselves to principal components analysis. You'll learn PCA much faster via the later approach.

frozenport• 13 years ago

Problem:

Get a 4 year college degree, do Qt for a living.

There is large category of jobs that don't require complex math or a good understanding of algorithms, yet we treat them like they are 4 year degrees. This is bad, because it wastes a lot of time and causes a lot of pain.

walshemj5• 13 years ago

What he doesn't say is the the dual system in Germany is very stratified it can be very difficult to go to a tier 1 university in Germany if you don't get steamed into the right sort of high school.

note that he moved to the USA where the stigma of going to the wrong sort of school is less of a problem.

mickgardner• 13 years ago

I would love to have done an apprenticeship in Programming. Australia really needs an apprenticeship program like the one Germany has.

genwin5• 13 years ago

If you don't have a degree then simply leave an education section off your resume and don't bring the topic up. Ignore degree requirements for jobs; apply regardless. Doing this, your lack of degree will probably have little remaining impact on your career. This strategy works because a CS degree has small actual value to an employer, and most employers know it.

jboynyc• 13 years ago

It may be worth recalling that Americans have been interested in the apprenticeship system for a very long time. For instance, Booker T. Washington's strategy for racial uplift at the Tuskegee Institute was based on the apprenticeship/vocational training model -- that's more than 100 years ago!

His critic, the famous sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, had the following reaction after a trip to Germany in the 1930s:

   The Siemens AG factory, in Berlin-Siemensstadt,
   particularly excited him, with a training-and-
   apprenticeship system that he believed could 
   provide the model for American Negro industrial 
   education.[1]

(Yes, that's the same Siemens that Tobias refers to in his post.)

More recently scholars like Katherine Newman and others have looked at such programs as a model policy not for racial uplift but to boost the US's shrinking middle class.[2][3]

With college debt now at $1 trillion and rising, it definitely is not a bad idea to explore alternatives to the way education works in the US.

   [1]: http://chronicle.com/article/WEB-Du-Bois-in-Nazi/1896/
   [2]: http://books.google.com/books?id=1jfAhghdH7MC
   [3]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2272-9_10

phatbyte• 13 years ago

I'm the process of getting a H-1B visa denied because of my lack of degree on IT. I order to get working H-1B visa without a degree one would need to have near 12 years (which I have, but not 12 straight years obviously with a few months lacking here and there) of working verified experience. My company however, seems to find me valuable enough to want me to work for them even if remotely. The US gov does not....go figure....

namank• 13 years ago

Actually the apprenticeship model exists in Canada too. But it`s restricted to trades like electrician and plumber and does not extend to engineering or law.

pascalo2• 13 years ago

Good article, and most of it sounds very familiar. I went through the apprenticeship system in Germany after dropping out of Uni (I guess I wasn't cut out for German literature and philosophy after all).

At the time there was a true disconnect between the real industry and the schooling part of things, mainly due to the fact that unlike baker of carpenter, front-end programming was such a new thing, so it got thrown into the same basket as print publishing, and thus I had to spend my once-weekly days at school memorizing various paper-fold patterns and Colorspace and DPI settings which were highly irrelevant to what I was doing throughout my days building websites at a digital media agency.

Like the OP, I got taken under the wing by a guy called Thomas, who was a pretty decent coder, and to whom I owe a lot.

Germany wasn't doing so well economically at the time, so shortly after I migrated to the UK. My three years of industry-relevant experience gave me a great base to build my career upon, for which I am thankful to this day.

DasIch• 13 years ago

I very much doubt that he "dropped out" of "high school" and was able to get an apprenticeship, this is probably a bad translation.

He probably left a Gymnasium after tenth grade without getting an Abitur or didn't go to a Gymnasium after finishing Haupt- or Realschule. Unlike dropping out of high school in the US, this would still leave him with a diploma which would make getting an apprenticeship as a Fachinformatiker plausible, which is practically impossible to get without some kind of diploma.

btw. you can't just drop out of school as a minor in Germany as not attending school regularly would be illegal.

davidroberts• 13 years ago

God. If only the US had something like this instead of the stupid everybody go to college, everyone spend years studying vapid idiocy after already wasting years doing the same in high school. I'm not anti-college. I'm anti no choice, one size fits all, we don't care if you actually can do anything as long as you were able to put up with enough wasted time to prove you are not the type to buck the system and maybe cause problems.

And by the way, I do have a degree.

zdgman• 13 years ago

Now I love that the company job board conveys the same type of ideals. http://www.shopify.com/careers?posting=ruby-developer. Nothing gets me more than founders saying "I didn't go to college and look how great I did" while requiring their employees to have a CS degree to even get an interview. I know this is more of a filtering tactic but it seems so disingenuous. The biggest take away from the article wasn't dont go to college, it was find an environment that suits your learning style! College isn't right for everyone especially with student loan debt just about to eclipse 1 trillion dollars.

javajosh• 13 years ago

tl;dr The OP is not alone in finding a real problem highly motivational to learn the solution; there is a missing component to computer science education that doesn't address 99% of what application programers do; apprenticeship programs would particularly benefit from certain practical additions to the curriculum.

His learning "disability" is all but universal: teaching style doesn't give students a real problem to solve. That's how science is supposed to be taught. Ask your students: can you build an engine out of a pot of water, a tight-fitting rubber cap that expands, and a small weight that can be attached and detached from a crank at any point in it's motion?

This is how you introduce temperature, heat, pressure, volume, work, etc. And I can't help but think that an apprenticeship basically achieves the same thing: it motivates the learner with real problems that motivate them to find a solution.

This is great in theory, but in practice CS doesn't really answer the problems you have as an application programmer. Much of CS "book learning" is focused on things like compilers, systems programming, or data-structures and algorithms. I don't know about you guys, but I spend very little of my time designing languages, compilers, or systems programming. I don't even spend that much time choosing data-structures. No, I spend most of my time learning the interfaces that other people have built around these things - learning how to parameterize and operate within someone else's higher-level environment (which is also known as a platform).

So what should ordinarily be an exercise in data structures and algorithms becomes a piece of techno-social detective work: nothing less than the determination which library/tool/framework is appropriate for the project, and then to get busy learning that combination to be able to release real software. If there exists, anywhere in the world, a class on how to discover, evaluate, and integrate libraries into an existing project, I don't know of it. In the same way, I doubt there exists a class on comparative application architectures.

sebastianmarr• 13 years ago

I also live in Germany and am currently writing the thesis for my masters degree in CS. In my case, I wished I left college after getting my bachelor. I had a solid foundation of theoretical CS knowledge after 3 years. I continued to study only because I wanted the degree, in case I "need" it later to get a job.

For over a year now I didn't see any lectures, but have been working at a company instead. I had all my exams, the only thing I have left to do is my thesis. It's hard motivating yourself to do scientific work if you know you can get by just fine without it. And all just for a degree that doesn't matter (to me at least).

pascalo2• 13 years ago

What's the cost for a semester these days? Did they introduce fees?

What you're doing would be a very unlikely scenario in systems where studying is setting you back a couple of thousands every term, i.e. Australia, UK or the US.

fallous• 13 years ago

In the US a model akin to this exists in certain trades, such as sheet metal workers, plumbers, etc. The trade unions essentially act as guilds (rather than the more worker vs company model of UAW and the like) that sponsor apprentice programs. The apprentice has to obtain instruction at a trade school for basic skills and then apprentices through the union for an employer or employers. The unions have their own insurance plans that the members pay for themselves, and in essence the group of workers are "contracted" to the companies.

In order for something like this to extend to programming, you'd need someone to establish such a guild structure and trade training capacity.

Whether such a thing ever occurs is doubtful in my mind due to the established interests of those who are already credentialed and in the workplace. Much as becoming a lawyer was once a matter of simply passing the bar (no Juris Doctorate was required) but now has erected barriers built by the ABA to protect its membership, I suspect that there would be resistance by established tech workers and managers. (as an amusing aside, the state of Washington actually still has an apprenticeship program for lawyers but due to the ABA those apprentices can only practice in the state of Washington and will not receive reciprocity with regards to taking and passing the bar in any other state.)

zenbowman• 13 years ago

Apprenticeships are awesome, but a lot of comments here refer to dropping out and just going it on your own, which is a lot different from an apprenticeship, which, for better or worse, we don't have here. I would recommend the apprenticeship route if we had one, but as we don't, a college degree will make your life a lot easier.

And one of the best reasons to go to college for computer science is making friends who share your interests, those are the people you will network with to find great jobs, start new companies, etc. So while the classroom environment might not be thrilling, there is plenty of education to be had outside the classroom. If you are super enthusiastic, you might even get to work on cutting edge research as an undergrad in a university lab.

The Apprentice Programmer

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