Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/03/30/dropouts-need-not-apply-silicon-valley-asks-mostly-for-developers-with-degrees/ <comment><USER3> Let me summarize what I believe to be mostly uncontroversial.

1\. All else equal, and looking at the industry as a whole, having a college degree in CS is an advantage in getting hired over being self-taught. Things get more fuzzy if your degree is in math/physics/etc., but those still confer some advantage.

2\. The advantage is very large for entry-level roles but diminishes greatly with experience. The advantage is even larger if you went to an elite school. The advantage is small if the school is mediocre, and negative if it's a diploma mill.

3\. The advantage varies _greatly_ with the company. Google definitely cares more than most startups.

4\. The advantage virtually goes to 0 within a decade but never completely goes away, simply because of effects like your-interviewer-went-to-the-same- school, alumni networks, and the fact that more people irrationally care about CS degrees in senior devs than are irrationally biased against them.

5\. Whether the advantage is _worth the cost_ is a _very complicated_ issue. This advantage is almost certainly not worth it if you have to go 100-250k in debt (private schools). The opportunity cost is also quite large, but this is complicated because what self-taught job you get depends on your own background. Coding bootcamps also complicate things. At a certain point depending on scholarships / parents paying / going to an in-state school, it makes sense.

<comment><USER4> > Google definitely cares more than a startup

According to whom? Multiple Google recruiters have quite explicitly told me that they don't care that I don't have a degree.

<comment><USER5> There was definitely special treatment for MIT grads when I was interviewing at FB/Google. At FB, all of the MIT students were split off to go to the paid sushi restaurant on campus, while everyone else went to the general cafeteria. At Google, I was told that MIT grads generally skip the phone interview and go straight to onsite (and this was the case for my interview with them too). I'm not sure how big the difference is, but they weren't school-blind.

<comment><USER6> MIT (and even more so for CalTech, but they don't have a world class CS program) has substantial math and science requirements that are not part of the required ABET CS curriculum. Per e.g. [http://www.abet.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/05/C001-15-16-CA...](http://www.abet.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/05/C001-15-16-CAC-Criteria-03-10-15.pdf)

 _One year of science and mathematics: 1\. Mathematics: At least one half year that must include discrete mathematics. The additional mathematics might consist of courses in areas such as calculus, linear algebra, numerical methods, probability, statistics, number theory, geometry, or symbolic logic. [CS]

2\. Science: A science component that develops an understanding of the scientific method and provides students with an opportunity to experience this mode of inquiry in courses for science or engineering majors that provide some exposure to laboratory work. [CS]_

The General Institute Requirements for all MIT undergrads include 1 term of the calculus beyond the AP Calculus BC sequence, 1 term each of calculus based mechanics and E&M, and 1 term each of biology and wet or solid state chemistry. There's also a laboratory requirement that's satisfied by the new EECS introductory courses that replaced 6.001-3 (SICP plus EE fundamentals, now it's robotics and communications).

So a MIT (and CalTech) graduate is _guaranteed_ to have more scientific and mathematical maturity than _the generic_ CS degree holder from another school. It's also a degree that grew from its EE department like UC Berkeley and unlike (I think) CMU and Stanford, so there's some required low level EE learning (and last time I checked most in the department get a degree with lots of both).

It's all done at a very fast pace as well, about 13 weeks of learning per se for a term (vs. e.g. the 2-3 terms that seems to be common for covering the AP Calculus sequence), so being able to learn hard stuff fast is an implicit requirement, and officially stated as a virtue, seeing as how quickly so much in so many fields including most especially computers changes so quickly.

NOTE TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: if you want to attend MIT, don't despair. In addition to a new model financial aid system which disdains loans, _the raw odds if MIT judges you can do the work_ are 1 in 3. Best thing you can do besides the usual things is to demonstrate in your application that you can do projects. E.g. do a significant block of programming (FOSS nowadays) work and do a good jobs of writing it up, as I did, in addition to a serious biology project at a NSSF Summer Science Training Program that would have been published if not for later realized reagent contamination.

Disclaimer: I was a MIT undergraduate pursuing a science degree, and interacted a lot with the EECS department (e.g. I lead the infrastructure part of their forced move from Multics to UNIX(TM) when MIT-MULTICS was shutting down due to Honeywell Brain Damage(TM)), and still have ties to the department.

<comment><USER7> You say all those things like other CS degrees skip university-level mathematics and the scientific method. Even if they did (they don't), individuals can certainly take courses, minors, or majors to add those qualifications.

In other words, why fast pass MIT grads but not applicants with MS degrees and published papers?

Maybe Google has some metrics to back up their decision, but I'm skeptical that they can explain why the numbers are what they are.

<comment><USER8> I think it's much more likely that Google has data to back up this decision as opposed to doing it because MIT looks neat on a resume.

<comment><USER7> You misunderstand me. I'll grant that Google has data to back it up. I also think not being able to explain the underlying mechanism (IQ? curriculum? selectivity? exposure to Atlantic seafood?) leads to shallow thinking, false negatives, and possibly false positives.

I can't think of much about MIT that can't be replicated by a dedicated individual. And I think the industry as a whole agrees with that. There seems to be consensus that where a degree is from matters much less as industry experience increases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At one time I was a hiring manager at a largish global tech company. Not having a degree myself, and noticing that a large number of the top devs in the company also either had no degree or had degrees that were not in any way related to CS I pushed back on HR to pull the 'relevant degree' requirement from our job postings. I was told that I was welcome to recruit, interview and hire people without a college degree, but if we posted the job publicly without the requirement, we would not be able to hire any non-American programmers. The government would see the lack of a degree requirement, even for a sr dev or specialized tech position, to mean it was an entry-level position that any American could do and would deny our visa request if the person we liked best happened to be a foreigner.

I don't know how real the risk is, but it is a perception in HR at big companies.

<comment><USER10> Interesting! I hadn't considered this, but it makes sense.

Many of the US work visas, such as TN, H1-B and even the employment-based green card either require a college degree or give preference to a position that requires a college degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A degree is very useful when trying to get your first job in the industry. It provides some comfort for the hiring company that you have some level of training and understanding. It makes you stand out from those without a degree that are also trying to get a start.

Once you have several years experience the degree becomes less important because you will be judged on your actual experience. An employers looks at the languages/platforms you have used and can then easily test you based on those.

After 5 or more years the degree is pretty much irrelevant. Especially when there is a shortage of talent.

<comment><USER12> Some employers do not care much at all about your experience. For example, Google interviews really don't consider this at all beyond the initial screen whether you will get your interview or not. After that it's all hours of testing your responses to problems, etc.

And in reality most industry experience is of little use at Google anyways.

Google does care about school and GPAs, etc. tho. More than most.

<comment><USER13> I believe that has changed.

 _Q. Other insights from the data you've gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.'s and test scores, but we don't anymore, unless you're just a few years out of school. We found that they don't predict anything._

Source: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head- hunting-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big- data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all)

Also, I doubt that external industry experience means little to Google -- for two reasons:

1\. Good engineering practices are good engineering practices. You can pick those up by working at a good firm

2\. Though they hold God-like stature, Google is like any other company. They mostly use the same technology and a lot of the same tools as everybody else.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure that our local hiring committee at my site definitely considers your level of degree and what school.

I don't know anybody else in my office without a degree. A very high % have masters or phds.

<comment><USER14> That's probably a different sort of correlation than a Google-caused one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't see the big surprise...a degree doesn't mean that you're automatically more competent, but competence -- the kind that is valuable to a company with many moving parts -- can't be measured on a single scale. Pure mastery of C and assembly may not outweigh your ability to work within and communicate in a team. A degree implicitly confers a few social milestones:

\- You come from a family well-off/integrated enough in society to afford putting you through college. Or, you know what it's like to be responsible for paying off a large loan.

\- You've been thrown into a melting pot for ~4 years and have managed not to freak out and/or commit a felony.

\- You've been able to commit to and meet arbitrary deadlines (i.e. finals week) and goals.

No, having a college degree doesn't guarantee that you're a fine upstanding person...it's just one useful metric for an employer to have when they have little else to go on.

<comment><USER16> > You come from a family well-off/integrated enough in society to afford > putting you through college.

This is really a metric we want to keep significant? "We'd just feel more comfortable giving our good jobs to people from already well-off families; if you're not from one of those, tough luck..."?

<comment><USER15> Consciously? No. But a lot of it is related to the concept of culture fit. If a company's CEO loves golfing, chances are they are going to find more kinship with someone else who also lived a life that allowed for recreational golfing, whether that manifests itself in the way that the CEO and employee can make easy small talk or even spend time out on the course together. To varying degrees, I think the same applies to other social rites and shared experiences, whether it's going to college, joining the Greek system, playing sports, etc. etc. Hell I admit that I have an instinctive affinity to people who come from my home state of Iowa, even though logically I know that it's not true that people from Iowa are just "better" than those who didn't happen to be born within its borders...but a huge proportion of my best friends in New York were strongly connected to Iowa, whether it was because we grew up together or because " _Oh, you 're from Iowa?_" led to the kind of conversation that help to upgrade a normal big city acquaintanceship into a real friendship. In the same way, I don't think a college degree is necessarily a binary switch/litmus test...it just opens up a lot more possibilities of shared/common experiences. And as CEOs/managers tend to be reside in the higher classes of society, college experience highly correlates with the kinds of things they've lived through.

<comment><USER17> Why doesn't Iowa fall off the map?

<comment><USER18> Same reason Florida doesn't break off and float away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Having worked my way through college working as a full-time Software Engineer in Silicon Valley, many people look down on others who don't have a Computer Science degree.

Pragmatically, after more than a decade I've seen people with PhDs from top schools who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. I've also seen "uneducated" software craftsmen who could write the most elegant and clear code.

There is no silver-bullet in the tech industry--yes, having a Computer Science degree helps, but it doesn't guarantee the person will be a good Software Engineer.

<comment><USER20> So I'm going to ask you a basic question: do you believe there is no correlation, a positive correlation, or a negative correlation, between a candidate having a degree from a good quality institution (I'm deliberately ruling out degree mills) and candidate quality?

That is the only question worth asking.

The rest of your post is just useless anecdote. Yeah of course there's candidates with degrees that suck, and candidates without degrees that are amazing. You've said basically nothing of substance by pointing that out.

What are the averages? It I'm sifting through dozens of resumes for an initial cull, guess what? I'm using heuristics. "Has a degree" is one (of many) of them.

<comment><USER21> > What are the averages? It I'm sifting through dozens of resumes for an > initial cull, guess what? I'm using heuristics. "Has a degree" is one (of > many) of them.

You'd have a much better experience if you threw out that heuristic, and also stopped looking at resumes. Resumes are generally packed full of bullshit and lies anyway, ignore them. Create a simple test problem and require candidates to submit code solutions to the problem. That immediately filters out all the bullshitters who can't code because they won't bother applying for a job that demands code as a resume. What you'll be left with is just a few submissions from people who can actually code, and most of the them will be shitty but functional solutions to the problem. A small few will submit great code to your sample problem, you'll see it right away, you hire those people.

A computer science degree doesn't tell you anything at all about how well a person can program; computer science and software engineering are quite frankly vastly different things and little if any actual computer science is needed by most software engineers. Filtering by it as a heuristic does nothing positive for you, you're just filtering out a bunch of great programmers; it's a terrible heuristic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The reason isn't because everybody wants a college degree, it's because having it in the job ad opens it up to H1 visa holders, which make up a significant part of the silicon valley workforce (not just from one country, there is a crazy international contingent in the SF Bay Area).

Many companies have entire departments that are made up of an H1 workforce and will favor them in hiring - which is a little odd considering that you are supposed to pay over market rate for an H1, but we all know there are ways around that (either changing the job title to a lesser paying job, using a job title that has a below market rate for the same set of duties as another title, paying the "contracting company" the higher rate, but the actual worker gets paid less, etc.).

I've seen a handful of companies actually require a degree, but almost all will waive the requirement based on experience - especially for someone who is the right fit. I've seen some (or some departments) that will only hire high profile school graduates, but that kind of a thing is usually specific to a particular market.

<comment><USER23> It's not odd to favor H1B's. I was talking to a fellow from India yesterday. He's in Minnesota. Why? Because Symantec recently split into two, and one part went to Minnesota. He'd leave tomorrow for another job back in California but won't because he's on an H1B.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You do have to get off the ground first, but at a certain point the countersignaling value of a lack of degree starts to kick in.

It's sad when the most impressive thing about a candidate is that they went to School X.

It's impressive when a candidate has done interesting / difficult things despite a lack of degree.

<comment><USER25> As someone with no degree who's done OK in the software industry, I would hands-down go back and get one if I could turn back the clock. Not because it would necessarily translate to more money, but because I've been giving myself ulcers worrying about it for the last 20 years. YMMV

<comment><USER26> If you've done well, why are you worrying about it?

You've bet on yourself to pull through these past 20 years and you've won. You're going to be fine without it.

<comment><USER27> There are lots of reasons, some of which never go away (peer acceptance, additional scrutiny / skepticism, raise availability and amount.) There's also the specialization problem: you can "be fine" but essentially be limited to what I like to term "survival tech" jobs (CRUD and some other less-than- glamorous roles.) Not going to school, especially one that gives you opportunities to work on really interesting stuff (elite/research schools), means you'll likely never break into things like robotics or Socher-level DL. There are exceptions, but most people will not.

You may also never be fully accepted culturally, since one of the major advantages of going is that you're the "right" sort of person (meaning that you have the correct socio-economic background and understand/speak corporate- derived "elite meritocratic culture") / you're able to build a high-quality network of well-connected peers who themselves are part of the socio-economic elite.

<comment><USER26> In 2015, I had a half million dollar contract.

I went to the University of Nebraska (not an Ivy league). I dropped out.

My clothes are usually wrinkled, my hair is never combed. Some may mistake me for a homeless person on the right day.

But I've done open source work. I've spoken at RailsConf twice. I have a good tract record.

I have no idea who this "socio-economic elite" is that you refer to, but in general, if you want to make money as a software engineer, you don't need a fancy degree.

If you want to make money, you need to learn how to sell yourself and constantly put yourself out there. No university is ever going to teach you this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just because a job ad asks for a degree doesn't mean the person hired actually has one.

<comment><USER29> Yep. I don't think this study really took that into account. I'm a software engineer in SV with no degree and it has literally never even been brought up by interviewers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering and am self-taught programmer from an early age. No one has ever balked at hiring me for a software position without a CompSci degree. (at least not that I know of; I've never been unemployed for longer than a Saturday and Sunday between jobs)

<comment><USER31> The article refers to people with _no_ degree.

<comment><USER14> I wonder how this applies in my case - self taught with a degree... in Literature. I haven't had a hard time finding a job but that's a pretty big selection bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I remember thinking when I graduated high school the college doesn't matter because knowledge is knowledge, so unless it's MIT who cares? How idealistically wrong. Your college affects initial conditions, and life being the chaotic system that it is, has tremendous integral effects over the trajectory. Networking, who you know, peer group...all that stuff I heard from my dad and thought was bullshit and peripheral turns out to be of ultimate consequence. Get into and associate with the most elite groups as early as your ability allows.

</comment><comment><USER33> I experienced this one first hand, which is why I went to the cheapest school in my state and coasted through a bachelor's, knowing that I could easily pay it off once I got a job in the Valley.

Wasn't quite as easily as I hoped as it turns out, but I still managed to pay it off in the same time it took to earn it, so on the overall, it worked out. Honestly can't say my degree is worth much more than the certainty my resume won't get band-rejected by recruiters, but hey.

</comment><comment><USER34> Tech hiring is a such a cluster____. Why are they screening for degrees anyway? They clearly don't respect what a CS/SE/etc degree represents because at the end of the day, regardless of your experience or your credentials, you're going to be subjected to the programming interview nonsense that won't reflect your day to day anyway

Its like requiring a degree in mechanical engineering to be a racecar driver, and being told to assemble an engine during your interview.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder what percentage of the employees in the HR departments have a college degree. My guess it is close to 100% at 100% of top companies.

Even if you do get hired, HR might undermine your career and prospects for promotion if you don't have a college degree. I don't have data but I reluctantly suspect it is true. Hopefully I'll get down votes by someone who knows this isn't the case.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've earned no less than $180k/yr in the past 6 years, as a remote developer without a degree. The only thing that matters in life is what you decide to believe is true.

<comment><USER37> Are you a stand alone contractor, or do you work for someone? How much experience? You'll have to excuse me for bugging you; but I have 10 years experience and I make half that.

<comment><USER36> I'm a contractor. I started learning front end coding in late 2007, and backend software development in late 2008. I didn't get a full time backend software dev contract until 2010 and I read a LOT and started working on my own pet project to learn during that year before, etc. I negotiated hard, and even played hard to get (but also was very humble and nice - hard to get doesn't necessarily mean "you can't afford me!", etc., more like "I'm sorry. I love the team I I think I'm a great fit, but I just can't afford to accept an offer below X"), and that first contract ended up being full-time at $90/hr. That set the precedent in my mind. Once you decide something very solidly, you will find a way to make it happen.

Ask for what you want, and remember, even if it's a pain in the neck and takes a long time, if you can earn double, every year is like 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's a huge elephant in the room for this: IQ testing. Companies get sued if they test for IQ and consider it in their hiring process. On the flip side, IQ is a very good predictor for job performance, especially for programming. This is a good chunk of why companies do whiteboarding - it's not going to get them sued, and it selects for cleverer people.

You know what else selects for cleverer people? SAT scores. Now, companies aren't allowed to ask for SAT scores, but they are allowed to look at what college you went to. So if you know that someone attended MIT or Stanford, you get a pretty gigantic hint about what their IQ is.

<comment><USER39> I think an assertion that large (that IQ test scores correlate strongly with better job performance) needs some sources to back it up. I'm not saying they're not there, but I'd like to see them. There's a lot more to overall job performance than ability to reason about complex programming problems.

As a counterpoint, a Google HR SVP says in an article referenced elsewhere in the comments [0] that they don't ask for G.P.A's and test scores anymore because they're "worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation".

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head- hunting-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big- data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html)

<comment><USER38> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_perf...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_performance)

I don't have access to the works that Wikipedia cites, but the correlation is positive and between 0.2 and 0.6 for every job studied.

And I agree, there are a lot more things that influence job performance. IQ probably isn't the most important thing - a malicious programmer can cause millions of dollars worth of damage, so probably the most important thing is trustworthiness. That said, learning about someone's IQ helps you predict their future job performance, basically regardless of what job you are talking about.

<comment><USER39> Very interesting, thanks for the cite. I think it's important to note that those figures are for "hiring employees without previous experience in the job" because "It is largely through the quicker acquisition of job-relevant knowledge that higher IQ mediates job performance." So you'll acquire new skills more quickly if you have a higher IQ, which makes sense, but if you have two people at the same apparent skill level applying for a non-entry- level position, IQ may well not be (or may well be) a valid means of deciding between the two. This jives fairly well with the quote from Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> B.S. I've never worked for a place that cared. I'm self taught. Req's always say degree or _equivalent_.

<comment><USER41> At some places, x years of experience can be considered equivalent, but bootstrapping to the equivalency is non-trivial without a degree (chicken-and- egg).

<comment><USER42> This is where fake it till you make can really come into effect. My first paying programming gig was a gambling system for a really cheap dominican/canadian outfit. Pulled it off, made some really good design decision and then bailed when it was obvious the owners were trying to rip off their investors.

It still gave me experience and I used that experience and stories for the next 2 jobs. Hopefully it keeps working because I am way better than I was on that casino job.

I don't think you can become a great programmer until you overcome The Fear. And you won't be able to do that until you have the stress of doing it professionally for someone else. And being able to successfully come out the other side of the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wonder how they're counting ads that say "BS or MS in Compsci or Equivalent Experience" or something to that effect. I understand that this could deter some applicants, but I think that it's pretty clearly a go-ahead for applicants who don't have the degrees but think they could do the job (though presumably applicants with the relevant degrees would in aggregate fare better etc). I wonder this explicitly because last time I looked I did not see many mentions of degrees that weren't explicitly accompanied by the OR.

<comment><USER25> Supposedly there's actually an industry standard translation of work experience to years of college. I think it's 4:1, so 16 years of experience is worth a bachelors degree.

<comment><USER44> That seems a little high. In the real world it seems that 4 years of hands on experience is often worth more than 4 years of school. For certain things anyway. I have a degree. I'm not sure the education was really worth the money but it has opened some doors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> For people who don't have a degree, have you ever been rejected from not having a degree? The requirement might say it but I doubt it matters practically.

I imagine for junior positions this matters more.

Anecdotally, I know at least one friend without a degree who gets the same amount or more recruiter emails sans any degree on his profile

<comment><USER46> I get a lot of recruiter and founder interest but I often do not make it past an HR screener's eye into a candidate pool due to lack of degree.

If I can bypass that step and talk to a dev or experienced manager I get at least one interview every time. For companies using software like Greenhouse in their recruiting pipeline, I _never_ make it through to even a phone screen without an internal shove by someone.

Almost everywhere I've ever worked, I've been considered a strong hire. Mid- level dev.

<comment><USER47> We looked at a degree as an indicator that this person can stick at something for 3-4 years.

For some jobs this was a good thing, for other jobs it didn't matter.

I've had jobs where my manager didn't have a CS degree, one of them I had to sit him down and explain why his ad-hoc database made out of .txt files and thousands of lines of C# code wasn't a good idea. A CS degree forces you to know about a broad range of ideas and tools (e.g. databases). This is useful. Employing someone with out that means they may have holes in their knowledge that you aren't expecting to be there. But give this person some motivation and a week and they'll get up to speed.

<comment><USER46> I had another skilled tech career with 15 years experience before switching to software and all of my employment has been in the 1-5 year range, more towards the latter.

Despite my lack of degree, I tend to be one of the more CS-oriented people on the teams I join. I put this upfront in my portfolio & github with the projects I show off, namely that I've written an ORM, a Web Server, games with AI using game trees and behavior trees, contributed to some popular OSS, etc...even some random odd stuff like emulators, disassembler scripts, pentest tools, etc.,

I guess I do have some gaps but I'm constantly trying to fill them and I'm not satisfied to rest on that knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> My undergrad advisor gave one of the best advices about why diploma is important. A college education is a social institution where you work with dozens of students, teachers and staffs across disciplines. Ideally, culminating with a diploma. That diploma doesn't tell others how good you are or you can be. It tells others that you can be part of a social institution and get some things done.

Greatness is independent of school or diploma. Some of the best minds of the world never set foot in a school campus.

<comment><USER49> This is excellent. I'm stealing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's worth pointing out that they came to this conclusion by looking at job postings.

If a company is large enough to have some HR person creating job postings, then they're going to come from this mindset that education acts as a convenient filter for separating "the wheat from the chaff". It can sound dumb as all hell, but it's the best broken solution they can come up with because it's easy to glance at a resume, see the letters "MIT" and put it in a different pile from the people who came from New Mexico State (or some other generic university in a predominantly rural area).

I don't agree a degree, and I've done pretty well for myself, but it's worth pointing out that I've never applied for a formal job ad. I've relied on friends and I've relied on networking events where I showed off some cool thing I made and found out after the fact that the person I showed it off to was an influencer when it came to hiring at their company.

So to sum things up, I think it's safe to say that companies hire by degrees because that process scales pretty well, whereas hiring by portfolio really doesn't. Nonetheless, if a dropout can prove themselves even modestly well, then they've got a job.

</comment><comment><USER51> The best hackers I've worked with didn't have degrees. The best software engineers did. You need both.

On the hacker front, I noticed a lot of patterns--they had a lot of drive, were self-taught (obviously), and had other things about them that were remarkable. One can play any song on the piano that he's heard just once before. Another is a multiple-time CTF champion. Another is the best performance engineer I've ever met, and who can diagnose and fix site outages 10x faster than anyone else.

There's a difference between hackers and engineers though. I found that the engineers were good at breaking projects into milestones and driving their teams toward them, e.g. steady state development when conditions are good. And I found that the hackers excelled at exceptional or emergency situations like debugging complicated multithreaded code on the fly or figuring out which switch in a datacenter was corrupting packets for production traffic. There were exceptions in both directions (hackers who were great technical leads and engineers who were great detectives), but this was a pretty general rule I saw over the years.

I also worked with a number of people without degrees that weren't very good, so it's not like the lack of a degree makes you a hacker or makes you good at your job. You have to be very driven when you're self-taught and sometimes have to work harder than your peers who have a more evenly balanced education.

I ended up being a bit of a wildcard myself--I'm a self-taught hacker and did lots of cool debugging and detective work for 14 years, and then I was a manager for 5 years. I think hackers can make interesting managers since they are willing to upend traditions and try new things with their teams. I did a lot of that.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've been developing professionally for nearly 20 years now. Though, since some of that time was as a high school teacher, it isn't all, super high end stuff, but even there was value in learning how non-programmers think about computers... (One darling example was "what do you mean by file->menu? Menus are for food"

With that 20 years experience (and two non-cs bachelor's degrees) I've now managed to fail interviews at both Facebook and Amazon.

While the Facebook one was (in my opinion) pretty deeply flawed, the Amazon one, the 4 hour version, gave me virtually every opportunity "get it right" and I felt like interviewers were all "on my side"

In the end though, I really felt like if I'd had the full CS experience in university, I'd have had the edge I needed.

Specifically there were portions of technical nomenclature that I fell short on in the object oriented design portion. "What is the word for that thing you're doing there?"

and the dozens of hours spent discussing various efficiencies of search and sort algorithms would have made the extra steps in the optimization portion feel more like second nature.

With all that said, I have recently been doing my research into how and where I might be able to go back to school for the stuff I've missed out on.

U of T or a Waterloo masters? Perhaps Harvard extension schools? (the online version of the school which apparently real Harvard grads sneer at but still has Harvard in the name)... Or maybe there is enough in iTunes U to get what I need.

Whatever I go with, after 20 years programming, I've decided that I may as well take this programming thing seriously. I suspect there is a future in it.

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't live in Silicon Valley, but I've found that the "requirement" for a degree is more of a suggestion than law. I don't have a degree, and I still usually apply to jobs that have that requirement.

I don't always get an interview, of course, but I get them often enough to where I kind of feel like they're on the description as a formality more than anything.

</comment><comment><USER54> So, I'm a college dropout, and for me not having a degree was an issue until I hit the 10-15 years of experience mark and was up for executive positions. Then not only was it not an issue, no one ever asked.

<comment><USER55> It's weird because a couple of answers here say that it's harder getting into higher positions without a degree.

<comment><USER54> Yeah, I think there's probably a middle management trap in a lot of organizations where they want you to have an MBA for a director of product management role, but for a vp of product or cpo job they're actively recruiting the exact people they want usually based on job experience or prior success.

I think I skipped over that because I got acquired into the middle management role, no resume or job spec required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Articles like this throw fuel onto those suffering from imposter syndrome

</comment><comment><USER57> I've regularly seen just about every method used to pick candidates bashed here and denigrated as unfair, useless, etc.: degrees, GPAs, SATs, IQs, phone interviews, in person interviews, whiteboarding, tests, puzzles, experience, etc.

Reminds me of the hoary cliché that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.

</comment><comment><USER58> Employers use degrees as a proxy for intelligence now that it's legally perilous to give IQ tests. They don't want you because they think MIT taught you something people can't learn on their own. They want you because you were smart enough to get accepted at MIT.

</comment><comment><USER59> If you dig in with employers to understand those job listings, there's a big difference between what they ask for and what they settle for in terms of qualifications.

Another significant percentage of those job listings are designed to game the H1B system as well. So, are basically fictitious.

</comment><comment><USER60> _" Self-taught developers dominate technology: 69% of the developers who responded to the survey are at least partly self-taught, and fewer than half hold a formal degree in computer science."_

It's fascinating to read this article on SV wanting devs with degrees, then compare it to this article [0] on the annual StackOverflow developer survey. SV requires a very narrow skill set compared to the rest of the world.

[0] _" Two out of three developers are self-taught, and other trends from a survey of 56,033 coders"_ ~ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395207](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395207)

</comment><comment><USER61> Depends on what you want to work on. Computer Science != Software Engineering

<comment><USER46> How many Valley startups are doing Computer Science!?

..or even Software Engineering!

<comment><USER62> We should really just start calling it software implementing..

<comment><USER63> We already have two terms for that - coder and programmer.

<comment><USER64> Really ? I always thought them as synonyms and "Software Engineer" as a more "upscale" title (which is kind of stupid, IMHO).

From Wikipedia:

"The term programmer has often been used as a pejorative term to refer to those without the tools, skills, education, or ethics to write good quality software. In response, many practitioners called themselves software engineers to escape the stigma attached to the word programmer. In many companies, the titles programmer and software developer were changed to software engineer, for many categories of programmers."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I haven't needed a degree, in my 40 years of programming.

</comment><comment><USER66> I recently got thrust back into the job market here in Austin, and I've not gotten the response I was hoping for. I've only gotten two on site interviews, both of which ended with a No from the company in question. Even if I do get through the recruiter phase and get brought in, I'll get thrown algorithmic questions I haven't had to deal with since I left school. Even though I'm a capable dev with some team lead experience I can't help but think I am being passed over (in part) because I never finished college.

I've even considered going back, but due to the length of time I've been out it seems my credits have expired (even though I'm still paying the student loans). On top of that, I left school for a reason and it hasn't changed - <USER2> hated every waking second of my life while I was there.

But now I have no income and a wife and house to support. Maybe I'm just looking for a scapegoat. Everyone I talk to (outside the industry, I have only a few contacts within it) just say "Don't worry, everyone wants to hire smart nerds like you!".

<comment><USER67> You're competing with UT grads and everyone else who moved to the area for tech.

Not having a degree in Austin puts you at a significant disadvantage when it comes to getting recruited. I had the same problem when I lived there and I, too, do not have a degree.

<comment><USER66> I hadn't thought of that, what with UT being right here. I was able to get hired with relocation 5 years ago. Since then I figured it'd be a good town to put down roots so I bought a house. And now here I am seemingly unable to find work.

Damn. Maybe I'll have to look to other cities. I put my resume into the big corps and either got nothing or had some asinine HackerRank test that lost my progress 1:45 in and then heard nothing more.

<comment><USER67> Well, you can relocate to the Bay Area, as expensive as it is. I did so, as well as a huge mob of Texans. Californians did the opposite: moved to Texas for cheaper housing/lower taxes.

The upside is they pay you more to offset the cost of living. The downside is that roughly 50% of my income before rent goes to taxes, and half of that goes to rent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Bigger firms yeah, smaller firms care more about passion and knowledge. Both of which are usually attained outside of your degree (if you even have one). Degrees are good more for providing baseline mathematics and theoretical background for jobs that need more of that.

That said I think a degree is probably the least relevant aspect of hiring for 99% of developers.

</comment><comment><USER69> There is a larger issue here than just what recruiters at the GOOG are looking for.

Historically, the difference maker between SV and Boston was the willingness of the former to take dropouts, divorced people, dreamers with gaps between jobs, and for the latter to actively filter out those people.

Remember, "disruptive innovation" occurs first in the low-cost product segment before working its way up into the the more recognized and lucrative markets. Given the rapid progress going into both:

\- Alternative Learning Models: bootcamps, MOOC's, K-12 coding education, etc

\- Dev Tools: StackOverflow replacing book learning, github/npm creating code of a thousand dependencies, etc

I would worry that forcing your entire company to be made of candidates of the most traditional and elite background sets you up to miss the next trend in how to profit from People->Software.

</comment><comment><USER70> I do lots of recruiting / hiring at my job. I use a sliding scale. If you have no CS degree: have you written applications from scratch? Is your experience diverse or have you spent 5 years repeatedly writing the same Rails app?

On the other side, if you do have a CS degree, have you written application code before? If not, I want to see that you can apply your CS fundamentals to practical business problems.

Of course there are people without a degree who are phenomenal programmers, and people with one who can't write FizzBuzz! Is anyone arguing against this? When we're screening people we need some way of gauging your skill level. A degree is one indicator, practical experience is another.

</comment><comment><USER71> Well, since software engineering is a field where the government is not able to settle the matter just by slapping the obligation to have a particular degree or certification just to be admitted to the job, employers are allowed to choose. If you have an aptitude for programming, you will be better off just programming for 4 years. Going to college and reading books about programming will turn out to be only marginally useful, and actually quite costly. Instead of learning, and making quite good money, you will be digging yourself into a debt hole, while you will still need to pick up the real skills afterwards, at the expense of an ever more skeptical employer.

</comment><comment><USER72> The best programmers with whom I've ever had the privilege to work have had their degrees in mathematics, not CS, and I think that math majors have tended to be better hires, in my experience. Physics and astronomy students can also be great.

</comment><comment><USER73> This is why many companies in Silicon Valley require a degree [http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa- Sponsor/Facebook/189973.htm](http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa- Sponsor/Facebook/189973.htm)

For every year of school a person has to have a 3 years of experience to be considered for H1-B. FB hired 3k people in 2015 ([http://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of- facebook...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook- employees/)) of which 900 were foreigners hired thanks to H1-B.

</comment><comment><USER74> Article is looking at job ads, not actual employment.

Every job I've applied to had a degree requirement. Ive had offers from every place I've interviewed with no degree. Just because they ask for it doesn't make it a hard requirement.

</comment><comment><USER75> The WSJ is often out of touch with reality and this article is no exception. They collected the data from job postings and stopped investigating. If they'd done any real investigation (like, polled working developers and correlated their work history with their education) they'd realize their reporting doesn't support their (sensationalizing) headline.

(I used to work at Hired; I have a decent sense of what gets noticed on an engineer's resume. And I've personally interviewed hundreds of developers.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Degrees are a form of legit experience. They aren't the only form, but I can't fault a company for short-cutting their own process by requiring a degree. I think it should be their choice, even though I disagree with it from a effective-business perspective.

Personally, I might filter for someone with particular training or tool experience, and I see outsourcing your decision process to a college/university in a similar light. We can't investigate every competency, so we use proxies.

</comment><comment><USER76> As anecdata from personal experience: It is possible to both get a job in Silicon Valley without a degree _and_ an O-1 visa.

I'm just one data point, but I think having gone to college for a few years is the important advantage, not the degree itself. I did the former, never ended up having time for the latter. Too busy solving people's real world business problems in return for cold hard cash.

But I also started coding when I was 9 and started coding for money when I was 16 and still in high school. Your mileage may vary.

</comment><comment><USER77> While likelihood of being hired and the expense of college are factors in deciding whether to attend, they should definitely not be the only ones, and maybe not even a major factor in your decision. To view things this way is to take an extremely narrow view of the benefits of attending a good university. It's not for everyone, but I personally took so much more out of the experience than just a notch on my belt for getting a job.

</comment><comment><USER78> I heavily heavily avoid recent MBAs and really couldn't give two shits if you have a comp sci degree provided you're a good engineer and a good human.

<comment><USER46> I'd love to hear some of your reasoning, but my impression is that the writing has been on the wall for MBAs for 10+ years and that anyone with a recent MBA shifting into tech is someone looking for a buck but doesn't have a clue.

<comment><USER78> I generally find that real world experience trumps what is being taught in MBA programs these days unless you're going into consulting or the like. It's not particularly hard to find someone who has built something instead of their MBA, and I'd much rather them around a few sage folks than some fresh faced textbook jockeys. Also: anyone with a recent MBA shifting into tech is someone looking for a buck but doesn't have a clue. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I work for a university (not in SV), and the min quals for software engineers usually go something like:

(Bachelors of Science degree AND three years of development experience) OR (Five years systems development experience) OR (Any equivalent combination of experience, training and/or education)

In personal experience, once I hit about 10 years of experience, whether I had a degree seemed be only of passing interest to interviewers.

</comment><comment><USER80> As someone with a journalism degree I've never had a hard time getting interviews anywhere, large, small, whatever.

I think it more matters that you have a degree at all and a decent sum of experience than strictly a CS degree. For instance, I can now lean on my professional experience more where before I had to have a portfolio of projects.

</comment><comment><USER81> I don't think degrees matter that much. After the first internship/job, the prestige of the companies on your resume basically "becomes" your degree. I go to a mediocre school and the responses were night and day before and after getting an internship at a trendy company.

<comment><USER82> amen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> This is Silicon Valley. Don't have a degree, can't get a unicorn job? Start something!

</comment><comment><USER84> Someone once told me that school is such bullshit that if you can though it out for 4 whole years that means a lot about determination.. Of course real life is more nuanced but I thought it had a little bit of truth to it.

</comment><comment><USER85> How many of those enforce their requirement?

I have previously applied and gotten job postings that mention they want a CS degree, in fact no one has ever made a fuss about the lack of it in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER86> This seems to be about job ads. Job ads almost always list a bachelor's degree as a requirement, but I don't think it's a hard and fast rule for most places.

</comment><comment><USER87> Another way to look at this is that Colleges and Universities are now better- aligned with the industry than they were before.

</comment><comment><USER88> "There's a long-lived myth that Silicon Valley and the technology industry are meritocracies where all that matters is the caliber of your code."

Maybe because applicants with degrees are, statistically speaking, better than those without?

I've always said that getting a job takes two things:

1) Be good

2) Prove you're good

A degree achieves neither. But it helps a lot. Not having a degree doesn't preclude either. But it doesn't help at all.

<comment><USER89> By a similar philosophy, all you really need to do is this:

1) Persuade people you're good. Or, in other words, get people to believe you add value.

Being able to add value doesn't achieve this by itself. But it helps a lot. Not being able to add value doesn't preclude you from doing this. But it doesn't help.

(My comment is a _somewhat_ winking... but I suspect some readers will recognize some uncomfortable truth.)

<comment><USER88> Oh sure. Some people are so good at it they can make a career out of it. Not many though. Odds are it will catch up to you.

I don't understand downvotes on my initial comment. HN is such a fickle beast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Here the keyword Harvard dwarfs dropped out.

</comment><comment> m_-_-_d Title should be "Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees. Mostly."

</comment><comment><USER90> Surprised no one has mentioned the degrees also need to be from accredited programs.

</comment><comment><USER91> You can get a CS degree for $10k in Silicon valley. No big deal.

</comment><comment><USER92> Can someone tell me where I can get a B.S in Javascript?

</comment><comment><USER62> It's ok I'm about to get my philosophy degree.

</comment><comment><USER93> I don't understand why considering degree and reputation of the university when hiring so frowned upon ? It seems perfectly logical to me. Afterall, when you have 1000s of resume a day to sift through (not unusual for big companies like Google, etc), what criteria should you use to filter the candidates ? It's easy to fill a resume with lot of crap which is often fake or exaggerated. A degree and university reputation is a very objective measure that can used to quickly identify a potential good set of candidates, and then use actual interview to find bad apples from them. This approach optimizes toward having as few False positives as possible when hiring (False negatives on the other hand are plenty, and that's fine) - which is a stated goal of hiring for all big companies (Google, FB, etc), who are at luxury of having more candidates than they need, hence don't care much about False negatives.

Is it fair to people without degrees, esp, for cases where the only reason was that they couldn't afford it (considering how damn expensive higher education is in US) ? No, of course it is __not __, but then who said life has to be fair ? And of all things, why should we expect for-profit (and I use that word with respect, not derision) companies to hurt themselves to "just" try and make it fair to everyone ?

IMHO, education (both degree, and even more importantly the selectiveness of the university) serve as a very good proxy measure for how likely a candidate will be good. This is similar to say work-experience at a very reputable company, which is known for its selectivity. In both (university or top company) the scenarios you know that candidate had been filtered among a very large pool of candidates in past, so very likely to be bright.

As an example say, you want to select a dream team to attack the "Riemann Hypothesis" problem. Will you consider a candidate's credential (like education, university they are working at) as one of the big factors, or will you be just trying to interview anyone who applies, even if they don't have any exposure to higher math ? Say you get 100k applications, and can only interview at most 100 of them, does your answer change ? I know, that I will look at credentials, past work (which all correlate insanely with education & university affiliation) as the first measure to filter things out. Of course their will be outliers, and there will be exceptional people who are very good at Math without any degree (like Ramanujan), but there is no scalable way to find them in this scenario.

Similar example: What is the probability of some random dude on internet claiming he has a proof of P != NP being right vs say it coming from a reputed researcher (for the sake of argument say "Richard Karp") ? Whose proof are you going to read more carefully ? I guess the answer is obvious is this case. Now let's say it is between a random no-credential dude vs a PhD student of Richard Karp's (at Berkley) - who are you going to take more seriously ? Is it fair, probably not ? But statistically you will be much better with having these conscious & unconscious biases (backed up by data of course), then sampling uniformly from the world.

</comment><comment><USER94> Slow news day at the WSJ.</comment>


Ask HN: Any good Angular open source projects for looking at their code? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for projects that are based on Angular and have good practices, follow guidelines, etc. A project where it can be educational to look at their Angular code. <comment><USER2> For beginning structures, and if you're comfortable with java/spring, jhipster sets up working angular apps (consuming web service backends) with what they believe are best practices.

[https://jhipster.github.io](https://jhipster.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER3> While not the largest project, TodoMVC was written just for that:

[http://todomvc.com/examples/angularjs/#/](http://todomvc.com/examples/angularjs/#/)

</comment><comment><USER4> hardcore angular user here- the best combo i've found is reading this:

[https://github.com/johnpapa/angular- styleguide](https://github.com/johnpapa/angular-styleguide)

and using this:

[https://github.com/Swiip/generator-gulp- angular](https://github.com/Swiip/generator-gulp-angular)

<comment><USER5> I would second on John Papa's style guide. And would add that he has excellent ng-demoes: [https://github.com/johnpapa/ng- demos](https://github.com/johnpapa/ng-demos)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> While mentioning John Papa's style guide its worth mentioning Todd Motto's one that has some similarities and is as good. Worth reading both.[https://github.com/toddmotto/angularjs- styleguide](https://github.com/toddmotto/angularjs-styleguide)

</comment><comment><USER7> Taiga is Project Management app based on Django and Angular. [https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-back](https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-back)

</comment><comment><USER8> I really liked this style guide. [https://github.com/johnpapa/angular- styleguide](https://github.com/johnpapa/angular-styleguide)

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://github.com/angular/material](https://github.com/angular/material)

Google's implementation of Material Design in Angular. Excellent examples of complex, accessible and well-documented components implemented on top of Angular 1.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some ideas here:

[https://www.madewithangular.com/](https://www.madewithangular.com/)

[https://github.com/gianarb/awesome- angularjs](https://github.com/gianarb/awesome-angularjs)

<comment><USER11> > [https://www.madewithangular.com/](https://www.madewithangular.com/)

AFAIK none of them are opensource.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Take a look at the Ionic framework source:

[https://github.com/driftyco/ionic](https://github.com/driftyco/ionic)

<comment><USER13> The Ionic framework is not a good source base to look at for regular apps.

I'm a huge fan of the Ionic framework, but it's sourcecode is a mess and even the good parts are usually complex implementations of things you would definitely not be doing (such as keeping view state live, overriding default elements etc...)

<comment><USER12> Overriding default elements and managing view state both seem pretty common in non-trivial applications.

<comment><USER13> Overriding default elements isn't very common, I think. Most apps just need to style elements not provide different functionality (which can usually be gained by simply creating a new directive).

In regards to managing view states, then yes it's very common,but you don't usually write those yourself, you use things like Ionic (or ui-router).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related - I'm working on learning better Angular for my new job, where we're using it heavily. I'm a little surprised how few open-source projects using it are out there, considering how popular it seems to be. Does anybody have any idea why? It is mostly popular for internal corporate apps or something?

</comment><comment><USER15> Check out loopback-angular-admin, which creates an admin interface on a Loopback 2.x API, nicely splitting the Angular parts into controllers, services and directives:

[https://github.com/beeman/loopback-angular- admin](https://github.com/beeman/loopback-angular-admin)

</comment><comment><USER16> you can try AngJobs, which is a job board for angularjs developers written in angular and C#

[https://github.com/victorantos/AngJobs](https://github.com/victorantos/AngJobs)

</comment><comment><USER11> Obviously :

[http://plnkr.co/](http://plnkr.co/)

[https://github.com/filearts/plunker_www](https://github.com/filearts/plunker_www)

<comment><USER4> this is not a very well organized angular app imo

<comment><USER17> Such is often the case with apps that actually need to and/or get released.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> if your looking to implement token based authentication then take a look at [https://github.com/Leo-g/Flask-Angularjs-JSON- Auth/tree/mast...](https://github.com/Leo-g/Flask-Angularjs-JSON- Auth/tree/master/angularjs-frontend/js), tutorial at [http://techarena51.com/index.php/json-web-token- authenticati...](http://techarena51.com/index.php/json-web-token- authentication-with-flask-and-angularjs/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Take a look at telegram's web interface: [https://github.com/zhukov/webogram](https://github.com/zhukov/webogram)

</comment><comment><USER20> Neo4j graph database frontend is in angular. [https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j](https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j)

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://github.com/CosmoCMS/Cosmo](https://github.com/CosmoCMS/Cosmo)</comment>


How to enable the Linux / Bash subsystem in Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=6187 <comment><USER2> It isn't really ready for general use yet. It can't even run something as simple as an irc client without failing. [https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/262](https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/262)

I uninstalled it and went back to cygwin, which is the only real option for now besides running a VM.

<comment><USER3> Fwiw I wouldn't consider something like irssi / weechat "simple", especially if it's doing something like drawing a ui. Something like curl, jq, awk, grep, sed etc would be useful to have on Windows and should be more compatible from the shell standpoint. Not sure where they're at in terms of xterm compatibility or similar but I'm guessing that's further down the line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a video at the bottom of a blog post that was linked to from this article that does a pretty great job of explaining the subsystem for Linux: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/04/22/windows- subs...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/04/22/windows-subsystem- for-linux-overview/)

</comment><comment><USER5> You can also use other Unix shells if that's your thing. I personally use zsh and it works great.</comment>


IGN acquires Humble Bundle - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/ign-acquires-pay-what-you-want-game-shop-humble-bundle/ <comment><USER3> My gut reaction any time a beloved company/product is bought by a "big" or "old" company, particularly in gaming or media or tech, is "oh no, they sold out" or "uh oh, that's the beginning of the end." This type of reaction seems to be the dominant "hot take" in online communities as well. I don't think this is necessarily a reasonable reflex, but I confess I feel it here, even when the buyer (IGN) is a company I trusted and enjoyed for _many_ years for video game reviews and news (in this case, from about 2002-2012).

I welcome interesting arguments for why my reaction is inappropriate, or for that matter, appropriate. It's pretty easy to enumerate acquisitions that went well and others that went poorly, but I certainly wouldn't claim to have sufficient data to make a reasoned prediction about how this will go.

<comment><USER4> The humble bundle concept sold out a long time ago. The first incarnation was "The Humble Indie Bundle" \- which raised an unexpectedly large amount of money for independent game developers (in a time long before 'indie games' was a valid genre).

After seeing that this was a successful formula, they went on to raise funding in 2011 and pushed for larger publishers / developers to target with their acquired audience of heavily engaged gaming fans (mostly indie people). There was quite a strong note of sourness at the commercial interests being spun out of what was originally a charity + grassroots initiative.

Now, as many other people have mentioned in this thread, they've largely fallen into another same again steam sale outlet.

My attitude is more of indifference - they sold out long before being acquired by some big old company. I feel they put too much emphasis on aggressively acquiring new sales at the expense of their old customers.

<comment><USER5> Uh, they sell games. They continue selling games. That's the value proposition. I fail to see how they are not serving their old customers.

<comment><USER6> Most gamers distinguish games made by a small indie team and those made by Ubisoft, THQ, etc. Had the Ubisoft bundle been Humble Bundle's first ever bundle, they would have came across as a very different organization.

<comment><USER7> The Humble Indie Bundle also once only included cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and DRM-free games. It was a huge impetus for a lot of Linux ports of indie games.

<comment><USER8> Every game in the latest Indie bundle had Linux support.

[http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/05/humble-indie- bundle-18](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/05/humble-indie-bundle-18)

<comment><USER9> The Indie Bundles sure, but most of their bundles now are strictly not cross- platform.

<comment><USER10> So they still do indie bundles, they still do pay what you want pricing, they still do DRM free, they still have support for charities.

But on top of that they've added a lot of sales that breaks any of those principles.

I think they did well to keep the core of the platform there but at the same time offering other things less noble that keeps them afloat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have purchased a fair amount from Humble bundle, and have been a subscriber to the humble monthly bundle since it's inception. Suffice it to say, I have a great appreciation and admiration for the way Humble Bundle works (worked?).

Meanwhile, IGN has been around a lot longer, and has earned a terrible reputation for selling reviews and generally being shameless. I lost all respect for IGN long ago, and I absolutely refuse to contribute to it in any way, so I've cancelled my humble bundle monthly subscription.

Is there a name for the feeling you feel when you're watching a movie and the bad guy wins? That's what I feel now.

<comment><USER12> _> has earned a terrible reputation for selling reviews_

IGN editorial is separated from the rest of the company like just about every other media outlet and those extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. One or two anonymous allegations does not a "reputation" make. When someone puts their name to it and brings evidence to back it up, we'll talk. As-is, this is just a meme among the angrier gamer community.

(n.b.: I don't read IGN or care about the company, but I do care about mendacity a little bit.)

<comment><USER13> Its got the reputation, calling that reputation a meme is you going out of your way to use a term other than reputation. Whether or not its true is a separate thing.

<comment><USER12> I think that you failed to pick up what I was putting down, and that is that the important bit of that sentence is not _meme_ , but rather the _angrier gamer community_ \--the side of the community that is so very worried about ethics in games journalism except only when women or black people are involved and who are so very mad at Bethesda for making a game about shooting Nazis-- who are the source of that _meme_.

It is not credible and it should be roundly shot through when it pops up because of that incredibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's worth noting that Humble Bundle is YC W11 and raised $4.7M in venture capital in 2011.

I am assuming this is not a 10x exit.

<comment><USER15> That's a curious way to phrase "Congratulations on making a company which has sold several hundred million dollars of software."

I don't get why HN, of all the places in the world, would seek to tear down software companies, literally started on HN, which produce a service that people love and which achieve a successful outcome for all concerned.

I also don't think we should teach people that a middlebrow dismissal passes for financial analysis, so some toy math using their public data: they report ~$106 million in charity. Their users probably don't alter their split materially, so if one models their bundles as their main revenue source (which, knowing nothing about the internals of the business, I would), that implies $106M / .15 = $700M in gross sales. Their cut of that is 20%, or ~$140M over the lifetime of the company. I model them as being a rather briskly growing business, so I'd estimate last year's revenues in the ~$30 million range. I'd also estimate probably ~60% margins.

You want the lower on a $47 million acquisition price on a quickly growing software company with $30 million a year in revenue? Yeah, I'll take the upper. Not a hard call. This was clearly a _very successful outcome_ for all concerned.

[Edit to add: Above paragraph is incorrect because I misread the parent as raising at a valuation of $4.7M. If they raised $4.7 million the valuation was probably ~$20M. Do I still think 10x is plausible on that? Plausible, not nearly a given.]

Disclaimers: no non-public information used above, no commercial relationship, although I did pitch them on a consulting gig once. I have paid them a few hundred dollars over the years for video games.

<comment><USER16> I didn't read GP's comment as tearing down. Also, I learned something new - didn't realize HB went through YC, or that it even was VC-funded.

> _I don 't get why HN, of all the places in the world, would seek to tear > down software companies, literally started on HN, which produce a service > that people love and which achieve a successful outcome for all concerned._

Well, the company got bought by a third party with dubious reputation, which will most likely lead to "service that people love" deteriorating and possibly getting cancelled. This is _not_ a good news for people who were fans of the service. It definitely doesn't look like a success for _all_ concerned.

Basically, HB is seen by many (myself included) as a great service to have, not as a great trick for some people to get rich.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To be honest, I haven't cared for Humble Bundle for a very long time. The first few were amazing: all cross platform, great stuff. Since then they've branched out... Into becoming a glorified Steam sale. It may be a viable business model, but I don't find it terribly enticing.

<comment><USER18> Same here.

They've not been humble, indie, or a bundle for a long time.

Par for the course. Similar disingenuous commercialization is rampant through the games industry: see what Valve has done to Steam, and what major publishers have done to their titles vis monetization.

Unfortunately the games industry is floating in too much money for another crash to clean house.

<comment> psy-q I think that's not really fair, only a few bundles a year are actually labeled "Humble Indie Bundle", and those do usually fit the bill and check all three boxes.

There were 13 Humble Indie Bundles since 2010 and 94 other types of bundles (not counting the Weekly Bundles). And those other types often include audiobooks, ebooks, comics etc. that one could claim are at least indie, or some indie games sprinkled in with the AAA titles.

There was also extremely commercial stuff such as the 2K bundles, but hey, it's always labeled as such.

<comment><USER16> I think this feeling is due to evolution. Humble Bundle _started_ as Humble Indie Bundle, only later it turned into a brand.

It's kind of similar as with GOG, on which games are neither exclusively Good nor Old anymore ;).

<comment><USER19> As long as GOG keeps it DRM free, they will remain the only distributor that gets any more of my money, aside from direct, DRM-free sales by creators. Steam destroyed all rationalization I was using to be ok with DRM by locking my account for 3 weeks shortly after I opened an account.

<comment><USER20> I still don't really trust GOG after the whole "we're shutting down, too bad" PR stunt several years ago, but it's true they're a reliable distributor of DRM-free games which you can simply download and keep forever.

<comment><USER21> What happend with that PR stunt?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> N.B. Humble has been as much a traditional retailer as it has been a charity focused pwyw shop for quite a while.

As well as no longer caring if games are cross platform.

I mean I still shop there because it's as good a retailer as any but they are no longer significantantly different than GOG or Steam.

<comment><USER23> > As well as no longer caring if games are cross platform.

As a Linux gamer, the fact that some of the non-Humble Indie Bundles contain games I can't run is annoying (I am fine with these being offered, just don't mail me about them unless I can run them), but the _Humble Indie Bundles_ tend to contain exclusively or nearly exclusively cross-platform games, like they always have.

<comment><USER24> Steam too annoys me in this respect, would be nice to have the option to hide all promotions (and indeed content) about games one can't run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did Humble Bundle let IGN name their own price?

<comment><USER16> Better question: how much of that did IGN decide to give to charities?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The official blog post from Humble Bundle is here: [http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/166366386976/humble- bundle...](http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/166366386976/humble-bundle-is- joining-forces-with-ign)

It was posted earlier today but didn't get much attention (possibly because the title didn't make it clear it was an acquisition): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468583](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468583)

<comment><USER14> That HN submission was softkilled almost immediately (it fell of the front page near immediately, presumably by flags by people who aren't interested in random gamer stuff). And now the story is #1 on Hacker News.

This is a case where HN's rule of original titles can be somewhat annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Whats the actual strategic thinking behind this? IGN expanding into retail? Why? They're effectively media company. I dont see any sense in this acquisition. And that worries me. Do they understand what made HB so successful, are they going to give it managerial autonomy, what are their plans?

</comment><comment><USER28> Does this mean that they will only stick to game bundles? I really like the e-book bundles they do.

<comment><USER14> IGN covers a lot more than just games nowadays. (Movies, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Damn, I hope they won't close the section that lets you buy (most) Steam games all year round. Unlike regular Steam, it doesn't have the frustrating "geolocation-locked" limitation the Steam store has in Germany (which is very frustrating when you're not German, just an expat).

At least Apple's AppStore lets you buy from your own country's store instead of assuming the country from geolocation.

</comment><comment><USER30> This makes me apprehensive, but as long as I can still move that slider to 100% charity, it's probably not too big of a deal.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there any possible way to make all my Humble Bundle e-mail and information not be shared with IGN database ?

</comment><comment><USER32> I bought several indie game bundles when they were for Linux and/or DRM free. Sadly I had trouble getting most of the Linux games running, at least on Debian (thanks multiarch). I have also bought a few titles off their web store, all you get there is a Steam key. However, I have bought games from the store specificaly hoping that Valve gets less of the cut (PUBG being the latest).

However, I just bought two book bundles over the past month. They are still fantastic. 10-15 books DRM free for about dollar or so each, and a portion of that money I specified to be donated to FSF.

Hopefully post IGN aquisition the book bundles will continue.

PS. I bought Cuphead week of release on GOG to show my support. It may be Windows only but it was DRM free at launch.

<comment><USER33> Valve get nothing when you purchase a steam key from another sales platform. They allow the free use of their drm and content delivery platform to acquire new customers, and keep existing customers locked in.

<comment><USER32> Interesting. This is the closest source I found with a quick search: [https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys)

Phil Fish who created the indie game Fez (which I also purchased) stated Steam & GOG take a 30% cut whereas Humble only took 5%. [http://www.pcgamer.com/steam-and-gog-take-30-revenue-cut- sug...](http://www.pcgamer.com/steam-and-gog-take-30-revenue-cut-suggests-fez- creator-phil-fish/)

Personally DRM free takes precident. I haven't bought a AAA game through steam since Portal 2. I buy games through GOG to get a DRM version - for example I bought Firewatch from GOG and played it in Linux. DRM free Humble Bundles next. Humble store steam keys as a last resort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder how much of this is IGN wanting to get into a SaaS business and see this as a way to acquire there way there, and take on Steam?

That could add a nice revenue stream and help let them diversify from the advertising model which is increasingly facing downward pressure on RPMs from companies like FB and Google.

Interestingly enough, if built up sufficiently, it lets them better align their interests with their users. Instead of making the experience slower and more cluttered with additional display ads, they can focus on creating an awesome UX (if you become a subscriber of course).

As a gamer, I have my doubts about this happening given IGNs history, but one can always be hopeful.

</comment><comment><USER35> In the words of Adam Jensen - what a shame.

Though HB says: "We will stay the same", I'm sure practically everyone knows that that won't be the case. IGN, the go-to place to get sponsored reviews of AAA games.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm a monthly bundle subscriber since inception. I don't check the monthly bundles regularly (more like two-three-four times a year), but always find games that I enjoy and wouldn't have discovered otherwise. For $150/year, that's a pretty good value for a very casual gamer like me, i.e. someone who doesn't follow the gaming industry and just spontaneously decides to play something from time to time.

Best of luck to them.

</comment><comment><USER37> Actually, over the pas month I was hoping Humble would return to the old days, not in terms of qantity but in therms of quality. The first bundles had some great titles like Braid and World of Goo, but later on there were some gems (like Stardew Valley), but in general there were a lot more mediocre games.

Sadly, I doubt that IGN has increasing the quality as the prime target in mind.

</comment><comment><USER38> I just bought their crypto book humble bundle - first for a long time - <USER2> price for 11 ebooks... about 1.50 each if you want all 11.

</comment><comment><USER39> I can't wait for IGN to put their name all over stuff like they own it, like they did with almost everybody's cheat codes submitted to the old cheat codes site that they bought, including codes I had submitted. Any they've never bothered to fix them even after notification, either.

Just wait and see. The garbage self-marketing begins now.

</comment><comment><USER40> I doubt this will be good for the little guys. Personal experience in the games industry here. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe.

</comment><comment><USER41> I collect my bargain-basement digital library, $1 at a time.

Wish I could pay for multiple bundles at once.

</comment><comment><USER37> If someone wants to create a new bundle store:

How about bundeling every Feral Interactive release (AAA cross platform) with about 5 indie cross platform titles?

</comment><comment><USER42> well it was a good run.

for a while it will be ok due to them wanting to have good pr.

but slowly over time it will get worse and crappier. eventually paid placement, advertising, spin and death by blandness.

</comment><comment><USER43> I guess we can say goodbye to any kind of Linux support then.

</comment><comment><USER44> a (imo sketchy) media company that reviews games will now own a retail outlet that sells them. i wonder how that will impact their behavior.

</comment><comment><USER45> Wasn't IGN almost Steam in a previous life?

<comment><USER46> You mean GameSpy? Yes, that merged with IGN and subsequently went into oblivion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> It was good while it lasted.

</comment><comment><USER48> GG

</comment><comment><USER49> "Pay-what-you-want" isn't exactly how I'd describe "pay what you want, but unless it's at least X, we won't give you the merchandise". That's more "ordinary commercial transactions".

<comment><USER50> IIRC, it's always pay what you want (even a penny) in the bundles, but paying more gets you more games.

<comment><USER51> They had to add a dollar minimum because of abuse.

<comment><USER52> The OP may be talking about the bundles that have "pay what you want, get 3 titles, pay more than the average, get 3 more etc".

Which is not exactly pay what you want. Especially since "pay more than the average" will actually bring the average up across the life of the bundle.

I used to pay significantly more than the average for a bundle when they were new and truly pay what you want. Now I happily get the lower tier of games for $1. If I bother.

<comment><USER53> So, if you can get a bunch of games for $1 you'll happily pay $5, but if you can get a bunch of games for $1 and even more games for $5, you'll pay $1 and gripe about it?

I'm not sure I follow your logic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Definitive Guide to Syntax Highlighting - <AUTHOR> http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2014/09/27/the-definitive-guide-to-syntax-highlighting/ <comment><USER2> Whenever syntax highlighing is being discussed, I like to plug Linus Åkesson's _' A Case Against Syntax Highlighting'_: [http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/](http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/)

Personally, I _do_ find syntax highlighting to be useful, but I think it is an interesting dissenting opinion that is worth mentioning. OP's article mentions that Acme doesn't have syntax highlighting, but doesn't really expand on that.

<comment><USER3> I'm with Linus' side on this - I started writing code without syntax highlighting, and never had any problems doing so. In fact many times I use paper or a whiteboard to prototype some code I'm writing, to mentally step through it and verify that it does what I want it to.

I think much of it has to do with your attitude towards programming languages and source code: do you view them as being intrinsically difficult and thus requiring special tools to handle, or think that they're not any harder than human languages to work with (after having learned and used them extensively) so it feels completely natural to read un-highlighted code like you would text in a human language?

Looking at the rest of his site, you'll find that he has done an incredible amount of other interesting things too, which does increase the credibility of his argument - he doesn't use syntax highlighting, because he doesn't need it to understand his code.

<comment><USER4> Syntax highlighting is just a tool to eke out a few points of productivity in reading code. I know many people prefer plain text, notepad-style, but some of us like reading typeset documents where formatting (bolding, color, lines) is applied to make the document structure more pronounced.

I think much of it has to do with your attitude toward typography: do you view it as being utterly pointless and devoid of value, or do you like things that don't look like featureless crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is interesting to implement syntax highlighters- to solve the problem of making them fast and efficient. In JOE, I save the continuation of the syntax highlighter parser for the beginning of each line. When the user changes the file, the file is re-parsed beginning with the continuation at the start of the line. Parsing stops early if the resulting continuation at the beginning of some subsequent line matches the saved value.

JOE's highlighter supports recursive calls: for example to switch syntax to a scripting language embedded in HTML. Originally I implemented this with template instantiation of the sub-syntax. Recursion is allowed, but to a limited depth: the advantage is that the state can still be represented as a single number.

Later, this was replaced with a real call stack. It turns out that the call stacks of the saved continuations are often identical (stated another way- there is already an identical continuation, so when there is a call, we search for and reuse it if found).

The continuation also includes a buffer for saved data (for example for here document delimiters). The continuation ends up being 32 bytes on 32-bit machines:

      struct highlight_state {
              struct high_frame *stack; /* Closure */
              int state; /* Program counter */
              unsigned char saved_s[24]; /* Local data */
      };

Anyway, it's at least conceptually straightforward to extend this to have any kind of state. Also, it should be possible to compile the syntax parser to the native machine code. Even so, the interpreted implementation is quite fast. Fast enough that there has not been a need to try to run it asynchronously or after a delay as in some other editors.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article doesn't mention highlighting the declarations/definitions of types & variables. I find it far less obtrusive, and more useful, than lexical highlighting. It's surprisingly easy to do in Emacs, and it works reasonably well across most language modes. Example screenshots: [http://david.rothlis.net/code_presentation/distracting_synta...](http://david.rothlis.net/code_presentation/distracting_syntax_highlighting/)

</comment><comment><USER7> An interesting and very clear article.

As someone who started in an era when syntax highlighting didn't exist (at least on the machines and tools I was using at the time) I personally like it a great deal.

I found something the other day in the intellij ide's that I really liked (and had not seen before though I may have missed it) which was the ability to highlight the variable under cursor contextually (different for reads and writes).

Like so [http://i.imgur.com/u9UkXPN.png](http://i.imgur.com/u9UkXPN.png)

It was a small change but when running through code you've not used/seen before I've found it a nice little touch at getting a good grasp of whats going on with variables.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've seen more than one talk where the presenter lamented a lack of highlighting based on highly nested structures. So, for example, changing the color based on the closure that one is in. Or, changing the color based on the execution context one is in (so one can make sure they are modifying the variable in the appropriate context).

This would be useful in langues that make heavy use of callbacks such as javascript or scala.

Not sure how hard it would be to implement though - it might require a full parse or compiler pass.

<comment><USER9> There are actually a few implementations of this for JS, it is an approach that Crockford has championed quite a bit (e.g [https://plus.google.com/+DouglasCrockfordEsq/posts/XXkzgJEoE...](https://plus.google.com/+DouglasCrockfordEsq/posts/XXkzgJEoE9v)).

Some implementations that I'm aware of, there may be others:

* [http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4748](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4748)

* [https://github.com/mazurov/sublime-levels](https://github.com/mazurov/sublime-levels)

* [https://github.com/daniellmb/JavaScript-Scope-Context-Colori...](https://github.com/daniellmb/JavaScript-Scope-Context-Coloring)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a really great mode [0] for haskell that does the same thing as hl- sexp-mode. Oh and did I mention it fully supports structured editing? These kind of modes really make me question why programs are still written in text instead of ADTs... We don't need to run lexers and parsers to do our syntax highlighting and other fancy stuff... it would be awesome.

[0] [https://github.com/chrisdone/structured-haskell- mode](https://github.com/chrisdone/structured-haskell-mode)

</comment><comment><USER11> This made me think that it would be useful to have different, easily switchable highlighting modes: syntax and symbols when I'm writing, structure when I'm reading code.

Or maybe syntax highlighting for the scope I'm in and structure for the rest.

I often use the folding/nesting indicators when reading code, it would be an extension of that.

<comment><USER12> I've been using (and loving) something similar to this while switching modes between code and prose in vim [0]. In addition to changing how syntax highlighting, spellchecking and line breaks happen, there are some other interesting bits specific to prose; like formatting text for pasting into word processors, &c.

[0] [http://alols.github.io/2012/11/07/writing-prose-with- vim/](http://alols.github.io/2012/11/07/writing-prose-with-vim/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does this exist in Sublime Text too? ... color-identifiers-mode, rainbow- delimeters and highlight-parentheses-mode

<comment><USER14> I believe that Sublime Text is a descendant from Textmate, and therefore uses a single table of recursive regular expressions for syntax highlighting.

It therefore can not distinguish multiple instances of the same thing (different variables) or overlay different highlighting modes on top of one another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> on this note, does anyone know of a way to highlight stuff in #ifdef blocks appropriately within emacs? at the very least if a block of code is within #if 0 ... #endif, it should be grayed out...

</comment><comment><USER16> The best highlighting is no highlighting at all. Think about it.

You've read that the best programs read like a book. Now picture a book you are reading where the title, subject, nouns and verbs were all colored in some way. Try and read smoothly through that forest and think about highlighting some more.

There are a number of articles about reading on the web and how you highlight links without interrupting the flow of the reader. Should you underline links, or make the word a different color or give it a background? No matter what is done, it's said, you will interrupt the reader's flow and train of thought. Here, though, people exclaim highlighting is beneficial because function names, variables, values, and so on are highlighted and this is good!

Now someone will claim highlighting helps them find a particular value, say a function name but isn't that what indenting is supposed to do? Others will now say it helps with arguments but isn't that parentheses are for?

If you look at most multi-colored, highlighted page of code it looks like a candy store, all of it begging for your attention which is exactly what you don't want. Those with muted colors and grays are no different when you're trying to pick out one slight variation over another and trying to determine if it's a function or something else.

When I read a book, I want paragraphs with indentation and I can read pretty fast that way. So can you. When you read code, you need blocks and indentation (and parenthese/brackets/semicolons). Little else. Maybe nothing else.

<comment> qu4z-2 I like to think of syntax highlighting as a quick draft-parse. It lets you know how the computer is parsing the code structure. I know, "Code is written for humans to read and only incidentally for computers to execute", but you'd be quite put out if the computer didn't execute your code.

If human languages were written for one more-or-less uniform reader, I'd love a feature that showed how people would resolve pronouns ("Mary gave Sue her laptop.") or ambiguous attachment in general. Granted that's semantic, and probably closer to the feature in some editors where other instances of the same variable are highlighted on hovering, but they are both a form of visual feedback as to how the input token stream will be interpreted. I'd also say it's more important to get that information with a computer, because humans are pretty good at error recovery, and can often resolve syntax errors at the semantic level ("This sentence doesn't make sense; presumably it's a typo and <x> was meant, because that makes sense in context.")

In fairness, I dislike most highlighting schemes, but they definitely have a certain value.</comment></comment>


If I can do it, you can do it - <AUTHOR> http://braythwayt.com/2014/01/27/you-can-do-it.html

<comment><USER2> For every story like this, there's 50 stories of a lower-class kid who started plugging away at a computer in school or at a friends house and ended up being a programmer or sysadmin.

Plenty of people now would love to thank their aunt or grandmother for buying that obsolete-but-still-very-usable Amiga or Atari at a yard sale, or that math teacher who had a Mac in the back of the classroom, or the librarian who let them in an hour before school started to play Arkanoid and read the BASIC books.

<comment><USER3> I fit into that "50 stories" category in that I was from a broken-home single- mom, mother of 3 family with no computer-using roles models. My mom scraped up enough to buy me a Commodore 64 when I was 10 and that lead me to getting into completely self-taught (out of magazines and books) programming, first on the C64 and then on local mainframes and workstations that I would hack into (sorry!) to be able to reasonably do things like program in C -- over a 300 baud modem with no error correction, using a crappy old 13" CRT television as a display.

These days, of course, you can (and should, since it is considered a much more serious offense) skip the hacking part thanks to the internet and the fact that you can run Linux on a cheap $200 system.

In spite of that experience (or I guess in some degree because of it), I do appreciate the point he is trying to make and I see people making the same mistake he is satirizing on smaller scales all the time.

As poor as we were in the early 80s (this improved over time because my mom went back to school, became an RN and is still working in the medical field despite being a bit over 65), we were US-poor, which is quite different from being third-world poor, but wouldn't be if the ultra-libertarians succeed in killing off every social safety net we have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love your story. I'm smart and work hard and am successful. It would be easy to wag my fingers at others, saying "If I can do it . . ." Then I remember my brains are the gift of heredity. My work habits were crafted in a privileged childhood environment. And family connections have opened all sorts of doors. Good on those who succeed without these advantages, but I wouldn't want to try it.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is satire, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reminder: The plural of anecdote is not "data."

<comment><USER6> weeeeelllllllll...

[http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of- an...](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is- data-after-all.html)

whether it is or isn't, great post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know this story is satirical anecdotal but I wonder what weight your parents' programming jobs has in your decision to be a programmer, at least compared to other professions? My parents were both COBOLers and that never at all interested me, yet we had a computer at home early on and my dad bought BASIC books for me to use.

Anecdotally, it seems most of my academic friends also have parents in academia. Chasing tenure track seems insane to me but if you grew up in a professor's household, it may seem less strange

<comment><USER8> Well, my parents are a lawyer and court reporter so clearly not everything

<comment><USER9> Mine, farmer and homemaker

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sarcasm?

</comment><comment><USER11> \s</comment>


Life sucks then come here and put it in writing - <AUTHOR> http://www.lifestrand.net/blog/show/Life_sucks_then_come_here_and_put_it_in_writing

<comment><USER2> Interesting... only thing is... it's mid-summer over here :) (Uruguay).

BTW you can be depressed in midsummer too :P

</comment><comment><USER3> Go live in Australia mate.

<comment><USER2> He could live 6 months in the Northern Hemisphere and 6 months in the Southern :) (Australia, Uruguay, wherever :) ).

That solves the Winter thing.</comment></comment>