I have a CS degree but I am mostly self-taught. For success metric; I am working at FAANG and finishing a master’s at a top university, and my manager spoke to me about a promotion 2 months into my job with arguably zero prior experience.
The reason is curiosity and grit. The more you learn the better mental models you have, the better you can do analysis and extrapolate. As for grit, I am looking to find my ceiling.
I have met devs without any curiosity and … it shows.
If you have two degrees and work at a big company, how is it self taught? Seems like you would have learned a lot from both of those things. Genuinely curious.
The degrees served mostly as an outline of the things I needed to learn and the path I needed to follow. Most of the learning however was the outcome of my own curiosity and tenacity / grit.
I entered the university not knowing how to program/code. By the second semester I had built a small game for a project on top of some 2D graphics rendering engine, and then I wanted to add UI on top. Since I wanted it to not get stuck while waiting for user inputs, I used multithreading to decouple everything.
While that isn’t particularly interesting, it’s an example of me going far beyond what was asked only because an idea got stuck in my head.
My studies are full of such examples and projects. I didn’t have the highest grades because I was too busy learning other stuff, working on my own projects and so on.
The reason is curiosity and grit. The more you learn the better mental models you have, the better you can do analysis and extrapolate. As for grit, I am looking to find my ceiling.
I have met devs without any curiosity and … it shows.