

How I got a dev job at Khan Academy without a CS degree or dev work experience - stchangg
http://www.stchangg.com/blog/khan-academy-job/

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system_32
Slightly misleading title: "w/o a CS degree" yet has a ECE degree. I went
through the same ECE program at a different school and from the experience of
my peers and myself, an ECE degree is treated just like a CS degree (but not
the other way around). Also, she already has experience working as a PM at
Microsoft.

If this was coming from some random X school with a completely unrelated
degree or big name company on the resume, I would agree with title, otherwise,
no.

~~~
stchangg
Thanks for the comment! Hm, I'm not sure what school you went to, but an ECE
degree at Duke is not like an EECS degree at MIT. It leans much more towards
the electrical engineering side of things, and very, very few of my peers (in
fact, I can't think of any who didn't get a joint CS degree) became
programmers afterwards. You can check out the curriculum here:
[http://www.ee.duke.edu/undergrad/bse-degree-
planning](http://www.ee.duke.edu/undergrad/bse-degree-planning).

Edit:

I'd like to also add this point from my blogpost, which can perhaps give a
better sense of my ability before I applied:

> Unlike many software developers, I didn’t start programming when I was 10. I
> started in college at the ripe age of 18 and took a grand total of 4
> programming courses during my 4 years there. I was not a stand-out student
> in any of my programming or engineering courses. No teacher saw promise in
> me, took me under their wing, or mentored me to greatness.

~~~
dotrob
I liked your article -- I appreciated the different perspective it presents
(kind of outside-looking-in on the coding/startup job).

The article also led me on to "Invisible Burden" and "Why Stories Are So
Important" \-- great stuff. Thanks for writing those.

~~~
stchangg
Thanks! That means a lot to me.

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tricaldude
I am EE graduate myself. But I majored in Electrical engineering aspect
(electricity generation/transmission, power supply etc.), but not nothing to
do with hardware/chips design. I started programming at 25.

I have found that my biggest weakness is not programming, but the interviews
where they grill you on CS fundamentals. Did you have to prepare for that?

~~~
draker
> grill you on CS fundamentals

Could you provide some examples of questions you were asked?

I majored in entrepreneurship so my idea of "CS fundamentals" may be different
from yours, but I took Harvard's CS50 class and felt that it provided a very
good introduction to CS.

~~~
tricaldude
By CS fundamentals, I refer to data structures, algorithms, and their
implementations, distributed systems, OS etc.

------
WWLink
So this is the kind of passion they're looking for, and even then they took 3
months!

~~~
stchangg
Yipes, I don't want to discourage anyone from applying. I think I was a
special case of desperate/underqualified. That's why the process took me so
long - I had to catch up big-time, and was extra paranoid about giving this my
best shot (crossing my t's and dotting my i's). That meant spacing out my
interviews so I had more time to prepare and improve between them.

Also, just wanted to note that the interview process has been greatly improved
since we were able to allocate a person full-time to handling recruiting,
scheduling interviews, etc. I don't know stats on our current turnaround time
from application submission to offer, but I'm pretty sure it's much better
(maybe a couple weeks to a month).

