

Getting a programming job without a degree? - RaDeuX

I'm going through school right now, and I HATE it. It's pretty obvious that I've never been a school-type person. I'm not dumb or anything. I've aced all of my programming classes, but barely passed my physics and math classes. It's going to take me a total of four years to finally transfer to a university, only to encounter more tedious schoolwork.<p>I've been told often that my college degree is important, so I suppose I'll push through. However, I am looking for a job so I can get income to start paying for my own rent. I have worked with retail-level customers before as a computer repair technician and I absolutely hated it. I honestly thought I was going to lose my mind and bite a customer's ear off.<p>I have fairly solid knowledge in C (great language, IMO) and have taken a class in Python. I've also messed around with Django at an internship (which didn't turn out very well for several reasons).<p>What I've been told was to start contributing to open source projects. I'm going to start looking for the ones that I'm interested in as soon as I'm done typing this message. From what I've heard, being active in the open source community is a great way to gain experience points, earn reputation, and provides material for my future resumes.<p>I'm a bit overwhelmed at the thought of contributing code to open source projects. I feel that my skills are still lacking even though I haven't even started looking at the source code (which I will shortly).<p>So my main questions are:
-What project should I start contributing towards? (preferably a project with people who are tolerant to newbies trying to contribute their code)
-What other languages should I learn for contribution?
-Some say that a degree is important, but others say that it's not that important in regards to skill/experience. What are your guys' take on this?<p>Thanks for your time.
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mikeleeorg
I'll speak from the perspective of a "former developer turned entrepreneur who
now hires developers."

A degree may help getting your foot in the door of large corporations and on
the desk of recruiting agencies, but startups are going to look at your
demonstrated experience first. So while a degree will give you an edge in some
cases, it's not necessary for getting a job. Demonstrable experience is.

Now how do you demonstrate this experience without a degree? Open source
projects is one great way. Building some of your own apps and publishing them
online is another. Having a blog and talking about programming topics is
another, though that may invite more scrutiny than you want at this stage in
your career.

As for which open source projects with which to contribute - I think others
here may be better able to answer that. My input would be:

Which open source projects excite you? If you're going to contribute to an
open source project, pick one that personally excites you. Otherwise, your
interest will fizzle out in time. Someone who's made substantial contributions
over a meaningful duration of time because he/she really cares about the
project is more impressive than someone who's contributing to multiple
projects just for the sake of contributing (not that there's anything wrong
with that).

As for languages, that could depend on what you like. I'm partial to LAMP and
C/C++. I see a lot of chatter about Python and Ruby. Some love J2EE. Some love
ASP.NET (though it doesn't have as much support in the Silicon Valley area as
in the rest of the US). If you like C and Python, continue with those first -
get better at them - then graduate yourself to C++ and other languages.

I hope this helps. Good luck.

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mbenjaminsmith
I've hired plenty of people but no developers, so take my comments re college
with a grain of salt.

I never, ever look at a person's degree. If someone left one off their resume
I might ask out of curiosity, but I doubt I would think about it beyond that.

I used to run a PR agency. In that kind of work, a person's 'presence' is the
most important thing, so I would just talk to them until I got a feel for
them. If I were to hire a developer, I would ask what projects they had
finished and I would try to establish if 'they code even when they don't have
to'. I really think you need to be addicted to something as complicated as
programming if you're going to be effective.

If I could do it all over again, I would take 1/5 of the money I (and my
parents) spent on a largely worthless 'private school' education and start a
business. Even if you fail, repeatedly, the lessons you learn would be
invaluable.

I actually encourage you to drop out of school. Not so that you can follow
some completely unstructured path down a beery slope or anything, but so that
you truly take your future into your own hands and spend all of your time
becoming what you want to become.

Good luck!

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RaDeuX
Thanks for your responses so far folks. I've decided to scrap my progress with
the iPhone SDK and contribute to the open source community. I'm just a bit
stumped as I'm completely new to this idea. More accurately, I'm still
deciding on which project to work on.

As far as math is concerned, I'm just uninterested in it I suppose. I can
definitely pass my math classes if I put more time in them. Math is just very
bland and boring.

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NickPollard
You certainly don't need a degree if you can show you have good skills. One
thing to be careful of though - you say you've struggled with maths, and maths
is _very_ important for a lot of programming. It definitely depends what
you're doing, and for some cases it's less important, but I definitely
wouldn't neglect maths totally in favour of programming.

~~~
robinduckett
Don't need maths for no PHP stuff innit.

