
Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night - ra5cal
http://thenextweb.com/2012/04/10/instagrams-ceo-had-no-formal-programming-training-hes-a-marketer-who-learned-to-code-by-night/
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louhong
This is very misleading - his Quora answer (below) means that been involved
(if at a limited capacity) with coding since he was very young.

"Depends what you mean by coding. I've been programming here and there since I
was in middle school. In high school I was excused from my foreign language
requirement so I could take more computer science classes. The first real
class I took was in Pascal, and then later in c++. Independently I started
playing with MySQL and PHP, but never did anything significant.

My freshman year at Stanford I took CS106X which was the first year's worth of
CS in 1 quarter (it's usually two). I wouldn't say I did so well... I looked
around and saw so many fantastically smart folks in that class and decided I
was better off majoring in something like business. Looking back I wish I had
stuck with it. It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a
startup -- you learn most of it as you do it."

Source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-kevin-systrom-a-qa-
the-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-kevin-systrom-a-qa-the-28-year-
old-who-just-sold-his-startup-to-facebook-for-1-billion-2012-4#ixzz1rekicv2z)

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dmk23
This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is
determination and focus, not any specific training.

If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills
(coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it.

Something to keep in mind when hiring.

~~~
melling
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is
full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are
omnipotent. The slogan Press On, has solved and will always solve the problems
of the human race."

Calvin Coolidge

"If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need
millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to
stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go
through with it."

John Carmack

~~~
villagefool
Is it still true? can you actually do much nowdays (in that scale) on a cheap
PC? it seems like heavy machines/cloud access is crucial

~~~
matwood
A cheap PC today is way more powerful than PCs of just a couple years ago.
Server rooms have shrunk not just because of the cloud, but because the same
amount of work can get done with less machine.

John Carmacks quote becomes more pertinent as time goes on because computing
power is only becoming cheaper. And to directly address your point, the common
person now has access to more computing power than ever before at a cost lower
than ever in history because of the cloud.

If anything the barriers to entry continue to drop leaving only our lack of
persistence as what stands between us and success.

~~~
ceph_
>Server rooms have shrunk not just because of the cloud, but because the same
amount of work can get done with less machine.

The demand for servers and compute power has increased because of the cloud.
Just because server rooms have turned into datacenters does not mean they
"shrunk", quite the opposite.

~~~
matwood
When I started at my previous company we had a server room that was full of
computers. When I left we had consolidated to a single rack, and nothing had
been moved to the cloud. While the companies demand for compute power went up
during the time I worked there, the compute power available in a single
machine went up faster than the demand.

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simondlr
Not entirely true though. He's been coding for a long time. He studied
management science and engineering. It's not as if he wasn't technical before
he started with instagram.

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hej
Today, nearly everyone has been coding for a long time. Everyone learns the
basics in school. At college or university many will have a lot of further
contact with many computer science concepts. It’s a lot like math, really:
everyone knows the basics (or has at least heard them once and promptly
forgotten them), but that doesn’t make everyone a mathatician.

(My dad, a construction engineer, learnt programming at college in the
freaking late 70s. He never needed it during his long and successful career as
a construction engineer, though, and has forgotten all about it. Today, anyone
who studies anything to do with social sciences – for example – needs to have
some coding skills if they want to do effective statistical analysis.)

There is a difference between that and building your own app.

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disgruntledphd2
I'm sorry but as a graduate trained social scientist (psychologist), this is
simply not true (for the social sciences at least).

I do know how to program (R mostly, some python and java) but I am an extreme
outlier with my field. In fact, people are ridiculously impressed at my use of
awk and regex to extract relevant articles from a CSV file.

I would agree that everyone who studies the social sciences should have some
familiarity with coding, but SPSS refutes your claim that it is a necessity.
In addition, I had never coded a line before the age of 28 (I'm almost 31
now).

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randomdata
I'm 30 and I remember being taught the basics (in BASIC, no less) of
programming in elementary school. My father talks about programming on punch
cards when he was in high school. We both went to the same small rural
schools, not even big city institutions.

Given that, I'm with the parent. It does seem kind of amazing that virtually
anyone in the workforce today in North America didn't have at least some
programming training. Whether they still remember is another matter, but I
guess everyone comes from a different background.

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blackysky
I find the story misleading .... it is one thing to build a prototype and
another thing to create an app to support millions of people and their
pictures.. on top of that he has great connection and a great environment ....
you must check the big picture and not just take one element to create that
cinderella story.... by the way his co founder is a real CS genius .... let's
face it ...it is easy to raise money right now in this crazy environment...I
don't take away his hard work and talent but just check the picture too....

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griperson
It is good to know that there are GOOD marketers-turned-programmers in the
world. I work with someone who bills himself as a programmer, in fact was
hired to be "senior developer." This "senior developer" isn't. Instead, he's a
marketer and bullshitter who lied his way into his position. He's not coded a
single thing in the 8 months of his employ. Instead he has had his position
changed to "marketing director" because "that's his niche."

I wonder what impact being around world-class engineers are Google had on
Systrom's path.

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sayemm
Regardless of how experienced he was technically, think this is another case,
among many, that demonstrate just how important it is to have sharp marketing
instincts.

Behind every internet hit was a lot of clever marketing and positioning that
really made it (facebook, zynga, groupon, mint, plentyoffish, hotornot, the
list goes on).

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plant42
Fair play to him. He's achieved to what many here aspire. I cannot begrudge
him the success because he's NOT a developer.

If he was a developer and not a marketer, would the community be judging or
discussing him in the same way?

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whatmypassword
So I'm curious...what programming language did he learn and use for instagram?

~~~
ojbyrne
The way I parse it is he built something in html5, and showed it at a party.

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dpritchett
Owen, this is clearly a situation in which your insight is more valuable than
most other people's. Care to elaborate on the Digg parallels?

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ojbyrne
I don't really want to draw parallels, because I don't know anyone at
Instagram, but this really feels like a standard Silicon Valley puff piece to
make the newly wealthy insiderish person look like a renaissance man. I'm
going to guess that along with the $500k came the admonition to hire real
engineers stat.

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zdgman
I would like to believe that his skill at coding had less to do with it versus
the connections he had and the people he surrounded himself with.

As quite a few people have pointed out here going to Stanford in any capacity
and graduating gives you a huge leg up in terms of the potential Alumni you
can now reach out to.

Right place/Right Time/Right Product is what this boils down to. I am also
assuming that he did not write most of what is the current Instagram code.
Funny that no one mentions that Mike Krieger as his Cofounder in addition to
the other engineers on the team.

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zdgman
I am going to reply to my own comment and also note that their first
engineering hire, Shayne Sweeney also didn't go to college for programming.

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EXPERT_Coder
What's so hard to believe about that? Are there any programmers who aren't
self taught these days . . .

~~~
rhizome
Tons. Most.

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denysonique
I thought that most tech entrepreneurs have learned to code by themselves.

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zerostar07
Is that true about Codeacademy?

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tila
another big dollar sign, another over'night' myth.

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StCroix
From the article:

Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, the man responsible for acquiring the popular photo
sharing app for $1 billion, Systrom received no formal engineering training.

From Systrom's bio on Instagram:

Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management
Science & Engineering—he got his first taste of the startup world when he was
an intern at Odeo that later became Twitter. He spent two years at Google—the
first of which was working on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products...

Gotta love the spin.

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capdiz
Spin aside. His story would be really inspiring for folks i have met who think
that for one to learn how to program, they need to go to Uni and apply for a
cs degree which is bullshit.

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pagekalisedown
The problem is that a lot of HR departments won't consider people without
degrees. A Stanford degree opens a lot of doors.

This is one of the reasons I have a lot of hope in online education. When it
becomes mainstream, HR departments won't be able to ignore it.

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mikecane
>>>The problem is that a lot of HR departments won't consider people without
degrees.

Aren't people who are motivated to teach themselves coding the very kind of
people who would want to _avoid_ dealing with Suit HR departments? Wouldn't
they be more interested in working at a smaller firm, especially a startup, if
they had to work for someone else at all?

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dpritchett
Sure, but the fewer alternatives you have available to you the less control
you have over your market rate. Ideally you'd like to be eminently qualified
and command a bigco salary at a strong small firm.

