<story><title>What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?</title><url>http://www.quora.com/What-skills-do-self-taught-programmers-commonly-lack</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsdalton</author><text>I&apos;m inclined to disagree. The converse -- what skills does a programmer who has never left academia lack? -- strikes me as perfectly valid. And surely there must be &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; benefit to taking four (or more) years out of your productive life to the study of programming?&lt;p&gt;But I say this as a self-taught programmer, so perhaps it&apos;s just that I&apos;m envious of those who&apos;ve had the benefit of a formal CS education.</text></item><item><author>jedsmith</author><text>It&apos;s interesting that this question implied the negative -- not &lt;i&gt;what&apos;s the difference between&lt;/i&gt;, not even &lt;i&gt;what are the strengths and weaknesses of&lt;/i&gt;, but:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; What pieces of the whole are missing?&lt;p&gt;The implication being that without a formal CS education, it is an impossibility to obtain a whole. As if whole matters; how does one obtain &lt;i&gt;whole&lt;/i&gt;, anyway?&lt;p&gt;This is a very loaded question and perspective that betrays a serious bias, in my opinion. That we&apos;re making a generalization out of humanity&apos;s life experiences is futile in itself, but alas, the application of said generalization here is far more interesting to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colomon</author><text>Speaking as someone who was self-taught, spent four years getting a formal CS education, and then has 16 years post-college professional experience, I don&apos;t think you probably missed much.  I think the only really practical thing I learned in school was big-O notation, and you can probably pick up the essentials of that in about one day of moderate studying.  I can&apos;t recall ever learning a data structure more complicated than an AVL tree in school, and I think that was in an extra directed-study class.  (If you&apos;ve not heard of an AVL tree, that&apos;s not because they&apos;re terribly tricky -- it&apos;s because they&apos;re now nearly obsolete.)&lt;p&gt;Mind you, a lot of the stuff I learned studying CS at college was interesting.  It just hasn&apos;t been particularly relevant to my career.  My math classes (I had a double major in CS and math) have actually been much more professionally useful.</text></comment>
<story><title>What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?</title><url>http://www.quora.com/What-skills-do-self-taught-programmers-commonly-lack</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsdalton</author><text>I&apos;m inclined to disagree. The converse -- what skills does a programmer who has never left academia lack? -- strikes me as perfectly valid. And surely there must be &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; benefit to taking four (or more) years out of your productive life to the study of programming?&lt;p&gt;But I say this as a self-taught programmer, so perhaps it&apos;s just that I&apos;m envious of those who&apos;ve had the benefit of a formal CS education.</text></item><item><author>jedsmith</author><text>It&apos;s interesting that this question implied the negative -- not &lt;i&gt;what&apos;s the difference between&lt;/i&gt;, not even &lt;i&gt;what are the strengths and weaknesses of&lt;/i&gt;, but:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; What pieces of the whole are missing?&lt;p&gt;The implication being that without a formal CS education, it is an impossibility to obtain a whole. As if whole matters; how does one obtain &lt;i&gt;whole&lt;/i&gt;, anyway?&lt;p&gt;This is a very loaded question and perspective that betrays a serious bias, in my opinion. That we&apos;re making a generalization out of humanity&apos;s life experiences is futile in itself, but alas, the application of said generalization here is far more interesting to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danilocampos</author><text>I feel the same. Inferiority complexes for the self-taught?</text></comment>