
Ask HN: Self-taught or college education? - alinalex
Self-taught or college education?<p>Hey there, I am a self-taught programmer and I want to ask you how many of you learned programming by learning it on your own and how much went to a university and got their CS degree. I&#x27;m asking you this as I was talking with other fellow programmers about the fact that people prefer the university path because being self-taught is a lonely pursuit. Do you agree? Thanks, Alin R.
======
informatimago
Both.

You learn programming by programming, and this is not something you learn ex
cathedra: you have to do it yourself.

On the other hand, it's nice to go to the university to have some human
contact with teachers and students. There are also a few things, some know-how
knowledge that's best learned amongst peers, than by experimenting alone or
from the books.

Then there's yet another option nowadays: MOOCs. There you have almost all the
positive sides: \- you learn alone, \- you have a teacher giving ex cathedra
lectures, \- you have also some contact with other students thru forums.

And for some of the know-how transmission, some programmers post videos on
youtube of their development process; it's not entirely perfect, but it's a
step.

One thing for which it can help to learn in the same room as a teacher and
students, is to debug your learning process, or to detect the errors in know-
how you may have learned: somebody may notice you're doing something wrong and
tell you. With self-learning, or with remote learning (MOOC), it's easy to
check whether the result you obtain is right or wrong, but if you obtain the
result doing the wrong thing, it's harder to detect and to correct. Then it's
up to you to experiment a lot and to hope to find a good local extremum of
know-how.

------
samuellb
I learned to program myself and did some small-scale freelancing as a web
developer while in high school. But after that I went to university because I
felt it would be easier to get a job with an academic education, and also
because it's free in my country.

If I had to pay I'd probably not have applied. IMHO you can learn pretty much
everything by reading Wikipedia and other free sites, as long as you're able
to stay focused. On the other hand, you'll get to know like-minded people in
university, and many people find their first job through their fellow
students. So there's definitely a social aspect to it as you say.

