Ask HN: What skills do self-taught Web Developers commonly lack? - sabbasb
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cblock811
I went down this path and am about 2yrs into the industry. Things I lacked:

1) Computer Science theory and concepts. I might know some buzzwords but I
didnt initially understand things in depth. It took time working on projects
to start grasping them.

2) Perspective on the industry. People get so caught up in language and
framework wars. It's easy to just take someone's opinion and run with it.
After a while you realize that there isn't really a right or wrong and focus
on learning underlying concepts.

3) How to keep cool under sudden pressure. Releasing a bug into prod would
scare the hell out of me. Sure, it's never a good thing, but even Apple
releases bugs. Taking a second to breathe and calm down can make a huge
difference in effectively tackling pop-up issues.

I'm sure I'm missing some but those are the ones that came to mind for me
anyways.

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coderKen
This question comes up a lot, I once saw this asked on Quora, will update this
post once I get the link. IMHO I think most self-taught developers lack the
basic CS concepts, myself being a self-taught developer created a list of
topics that I study every morning -> [https://github.com/nkudo/daily-
study](https://github.com/nkudo/daily-study)

Currently learning algorithms and I've been enjoying it so far, learnt a lot
and some of the knowledge gained helped me in a recent interview where I was
asked what data-structure the HTML DOM used. I am a JavaScript person so I'm
reading this book -> [http://www.amazon.com/Structures-Algorithms-JavaScript-
Micha...](http://www.amazon.com/Structures-Algorithms-JavaScript-Michael-
McMillan/dp/1449364934)

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dassreis
I'm a self-taught web developer. I think every web developer was when I
started out.

I'd like to add a defiant similar question and an answer to go with it.

What do non-self-taught web developers lack?

Experience :)

Tongue in cheek. I still have gaps all over when it comes to CS, paradigms,
patterns, and I'm perpetually at odds with all the tooling around these days.

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twunde
In general, self-taught Web Developers tend to lack some of the computer
science theory. This may show up when you work on a large project and you need
to sort and ingest a million records at a time. There can also be a tendency
to be attracted to the newest trends out there when a more conservative
approach might pay better dividends.

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hex13
\- team work, unless somebody learned this skill in other way

\- SCRUM - it would be hard to teach oneself SCRUM without job environment

\- jargon (I didn't know what "pull request" or "ticket" ment before I went to
the first job)

\- courage, self-assurance (because of lack positive feedback from other
programmers - people who learn programming on jobs are in better situation
than self learners)

\- realism, cynicism (Self taught programmers are sometimes too optimistic or
too pessimistic and dont have sense of reality).

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eecks
Well if you have only worked by yourself previously then the obvious skill you
need to learn is team work. Stuff like work delegation and handling
expectations of others.

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_RPM
general computer architecture like the max size of an integer. High level
languages usually abstract this away. How a whole number is represented at the
hardware level.

~~~
dorfuss
Genuine question - when would you need to know the int size? When do you think
knowing how negative numbers are represented in binary would help a web
developer? Seriously curious.

Edit: sure it's good to know, but that's another question.

~~~
_RPM
If you're building a programming language and you arthimetic operations. You
would need to handle the case of overflow and underflow.

Edit: a Web Developer doesn't need to know it but it's most likely part of a
CD curiculem.

