[stuven]

Anecdata, but I have known quite a few excellent developers from bootcamp/self-taught backgrounds. I'm a bootcamp grad myself, and have done very well.

I'm curious what skills engineers use on the job that are taught well in university but are hard to pick up from experience?

[908B64B197]

> Anecdata, but I have known quite a few excellent developers from bootcamp/self-taught backgrounds. I'm a bootcamp grad myself, and have done very well.

Every time Lambda is on the front-page there seems to be a new influx of accounts on the site.

> I'm curious what skills engineers use on the job that are taught well in university but are hard to pick up from experience?

Algorithmic complexity. "Don't roll out your own data structures" and "just use a library" works until it doesn't. Operating System fundamentals is another one.

It seems a lot of bootcamps teach with rote, rather than by looking at the underlying concepts. My favorite example is git. I've seen bootcamp grads claim they can use git, but what it really meant is that they memorized a few git commands and as long as they don't stray too fart from those they can sort of work using git. But cherry-picking, rebase, proper branching forget it.

[stuven]

They don't teach time/space complexity in Bootcamps, true.

I remember the first time I ran into O(1) vs O(n), I was building a toy Game of Life simulation and trying to lookup cells by finding them in an array. Took me a minute to realize I should use an object instead to index the cells!

And then there was the first time I read through the examples in Cracking the Coding Interview. It filled in a lot of gaps.

Nowadays I work on distributed systems that receive 100M requests/hr with other devs who similarly lack a college education but somehow manage

Hope this helps you feel less frustrated next time you're paired with a colleague who has a different background than you do!

[908B64B197]

> And then there was the first time I read through the examples in Cracking the Coding Interview. It filled in a lot of gaps.

The issue is, the book approaches algorithms and data structure as something to "crack" and rote memorize instead of a new way of thinking. And it's easy to spot if you ask an interview question that looks a lot like one from the book but different enough that there's another data structure better suited for it.

> Nowadays I work on distributed systems that receive 100M requests/hr with other devs who similarly lack a college education but somehow manage

That's 12x what Stack Overflow does [0], so that's quite impressive!

> Hope this helps you feel less frustrated next time you're paired with a colleague who has a different background than you do!

Since your account is brand new, you might want to get familiar with the rules and guidelines of this community [1].

[0] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[stuven]

> that's quite impressive!

I think so too!

[908B64B197]

Which site, if I may ask?

[pjmlp]

Not every problem is solved with an array, list or linear search.

Another one, distributed systems are hard to get right.