Two out of three developers are self-taught, and other trends from a survey
I started programming when I was 10 or 11 and continued on to get a CS degree. One thing I did notice was that a lot of people in some of my classes seemed to have just woken up one day and decided they wanted to get a degree in computer science. And all throughout my years in school, those are the people who never ventured out of the curriculum (which was java based) to explore and learn other things. Which just seems to set you up for a life in boring corporate java desktop app development (unless you like that kind of development).<p>An example is my upper level elective class on database systems and design. For the final project of the class you were to take everything you&#x27;ve learned about relational databases and design your own schema, get all of the data properly normalized, and make an app that uses it. Other than that, the sky was the limit. You could use whatever programming language, framework, and database that you wanted, and the app could literally do anything. There was nothing limiting you to building a desktop Java app coupled with MySQL, yet 95%+ of the class did just that. I ventured off and used Postgres + Node.js and made a single page web app for my project, using skills I learned outside of school, on my own time, learning these things (I longed for a friend that knew what a promise was or that bluebird wasn&#x27;t about a damn live animal).<p>Now to get to my point. I&#x27;m not going to say that self taught developers are strictly better, but I feel like they are the other 5% like myself that see what we do as more than just a class, grade, job, or paycheck. They are the ones that spend the time to learn new emerging things in the software development realm and do it on their own regard. I would much rather work with someone who is not an uncustomized, straight from the java CS degree factory college&#x2F;university. Someone that ventures outside of the path they are guided on in their career and skill sets and takes the time to learn on their own, and learn the things they want to learn just because.<p>I&#x27;m lucky enough to have my first job be somewhere where I get to dive right into Node.js, Angular, etc. which is what I want to do at this time. Maybe the other 95% feel this way about their first jobs which probably are making internal business Java applications, but I really can&#x27;t believe that.