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The reactive ingredient is passion, not the learning modality. Low motivation is really limiting, no matter how you like to learn. Of course, this topic is hard

The reactive ingredient is passion, not the learning modality. Low motivation is really limiting, no matter how you like to learn. Of course, this topic is hard to discuss in a quantitative way because the number of engineers you come across in your career is a minuscule fraction of the total. Hard to draw broad conclusions like this, but here are a few: - Formal education is great for foundational concepts (math, hardware, operating systems, compilers, graphics, etc.). Self-taught approaches tend to be goal oriented (I'm learning X because I want to do Y), which can overlook fundamentals that are important. When you don't know what you don't know, having someone to efficiently guide you can save a ton of time, and for some topics, that mentor is a great textbook or teacher. - Most engineers I know would consider themselves a mixture of formal and informal/self-taught. Again, if you have passion for engineering then you probably like to learn and build, which means you're complementing any formal training with your own tinkering. I've met and worked closely with amazing engineers and have never found their education style a distinguishing factor. Their passion however, was obvious. Also, the examples given in the post (Linus, Margaret) were incredibly academic :-)

bevr1337 1y ago
> When you don't know what you don't know, having someone to efficiently guide you can save a ton of time, and for some topics, that mentor is a great textbook or teacher. A bit of a self insert, but I think you described the reality so well that I wanted to offer my own anecdote. I'm somewhere between formally educated and self-taught. I did not complete higher level undergrad maths like discrete or linear. Because of this, my vocabulary is lacking. I don't even know what to google, even if I could teach myself! Some subjects really benefit from instruction and direction. It's actually hard to find a math tutor to proof your vector math program in your late 30s. My colleagues either forgot or are using that energy elsewhere.
- edwardbernays 1y ago
  Have you considered trying to acquire the language by reading a textbook alongside a lecture series?
  - bevr1337 1y ago
    Quite a bit! MIT and Harvard open courses are great for aligning self-guided learning and finding vetted resources. My regex compiler would not be functional without those lecture series.
- asgraham 1y ago
  > It's actually hard to find a math tutor to proof your vector math program in your late 30s. They exist, if you know where to look and are willing to pay (source: me, or generally and probably more affordably wyzant.com)
  - bevr1337 1y ago
    It was nice in my 20s when we traded labor for beer and weed. A style of collaboration and exchange is what I aimed to describe. Now, all my peers have wisened up and can get the big bucks elsewhere. So definitely, if a student of any age has the money, they can get a tutor. But it's nice to find a young tutor who would gladly proof your work in exchange for tacos or help on their CS homework
- harulf 1y ago
  As another commenter proposed, try getting a course book and going through it at your own pace. With your newfound determination and interest it wouldn't surprise me if you stuck with it this time. Alternatively, if you prefer putting vector math into immediate practice, fields like graphics and game dev use it a LOT.
  - bevr1337 1y ago
    I've got them under my thumb now, and thank you! I've managed to muddle through linear and develop an ECS and prove it's in linear space and enough discrete to be pleasantly surprised by Noam Chomsky's many lives. I used them as examples of when I transitioned back to CS and had to learn what to learn before I could learn. So to speak. Anything on your own learning journey you'd like to share?
louthy 1y ago
> The reactive ingredient is passion, not the learning modality. As a self-taught programmer I agree with this. I started teaching myself on 8 bit computers in the mid-80s and didn't go to university. By the time I got my first full-time programming job, at the age of 19, I'd already been programming for 9 years. By the time most people are leaving university I was already nearly 15 years into my programming journey. It's hard to ignore that kind of passion and drive. I'm now four decades in and love it in the same way I did at the start. I'm a maker, I like making. I keep reading the papers and am constantly interested in where this thing is going ... and I write a lot of code! However, I don't like the premise that self-taught engineers lack foundational concepts just because they didn't go the academic route. I think many of us find the academic aspects just as interesting -- it really depends on the field you're in I think. For sure, we don't normally have the time to do a deep dive of something, but by the time you're decades in you've probably got just as many if not more 'foundational chops' than someone who spent a few years at school. Anecdotally, as someone who's hired and fired plenty over the years, I think there is something to the Self-Taught Engineers Outperform theory. But I think it's purely that they spend much more time doing. They do more in work and they do more in their free time. The passion brute-forces the learning.
- danaris 1y ago
  I think that what most people mean is that with a self-taught engineer, you have no way of knowing whether they have the foundations. It's going to be much more common with self-taught engineers than with formally-educated ones to have areas of surpassing brilliance, and areas where they don't know their arse from their elbow, and no easy way to predict what those will be until you get to know the specific engineer. With formally-educated software engineers, so long as the school they got their degree at is a reputable one with a decent program, you can be reasonably confident that they'll have a solid foundation, and if you're familiar with the institution you may even know what their strengths and weaknesses are likely to be.
  - louthy 1y ago
    > With formally-educated software engineers, so long as the school they got their degree at is a reputable one with a decent program, you can be reasonably confident that they'll have a solid foundation Based on the 100s of candidates that I've interviewed over the years, I disagree. In fact I often wonder what on earth people are doing at these university courses, because they rarely seem to have even a basic grasp of computer science. I've had to personally mentor many (academic route) engineers over the years on what I would consider absolute basics. Frankly, I don't consider a degree a useful barometer of quality at all. They're only useful if the candidate is applying for their first job out of university. After that, experience is much more important and I basically ignore the education part of a CV.
stronglikedan 1y ago
> mixture of formal and informal/self-taught That's me. Took plenty of college classes, but never tested well, so never got a degree. I learned most everything on my own, but those classes were a foundation for what I taught myself, and I couldn't have done it without them (as quickly).
- nativeit 1y ago
  This is a good point. I think the structured curricula can be the only way to learn many technical topics, even if you aren’t being formally taught. I also found my time at university to be invaluable for the equipment, facilities, and resources that were made available to me for learning that I could never have provided to myself.
zahlman 1y ago
> The reactive ingredient is passion, not the learning modality. Sure, but passion also drives self-teaching. It's less necessary in a classroom setting because there's always someone trying to keep you on track. > Self-taught approaches tend to be goal oriented (I'm learning X because I want to do Y), which can overlook fundamentals that are important. For some, understanding a system can be a goal in itself.
positron26 1y ago
Yeah, being lead to some water does not create dependence on being lead to all water. If there is a consistent argument, it's that self-taught people have all demonstrated leading themselves to some water.

bevr1337 1y ago

> When you don't know what you don't know, having someone to efficiently guide you can save a ton of time, and for some topics, that mentor is a great textbook or teacher. A bit of a self insert, but I think you described the reality so well that I wanted to offer my own anecdote. I'm somewhere between formally educated and self-taught. I did not complete higher level undergrad maths like discrete or linear. Because of this, my vocabulary is lacking. I don't even know what to google, even if I could teach myself! Some subjects really benefit from instruction and direction. It's actually hard to find a math tutor to proof your vector math program in your late 30s. My colleagues either forgot or are using that energy elsewhere.

edwardbernays 1y ago
Have you considered trying to acquire the language by reading a textbook alongside a lecture series?
- bevr1337 1y ago
  Quite a bit! MIT and Harvard open courses are great for aligning self-guided learning and finding vetted resources. My regex compiler would not be functional without those lecture series.
asgraham 1y ago
> It's actually hard to find a math tutor to proof your vector math program in your late 30s. They exist, if you know where to look and are willing to pay (source: me, or generally and probably more affordably wyzant.com)
- bevr1337 1y ago
  It was nice in my 20s when we traded labor for beer and weed. A style of collaboration and exchange is what I aimed to describe. Now, all my peers have wisened up and can get the big bucks elsewhere. So definitely, if a student of any age has the money, they can get a tutor. But it's nice to find a young tutor who would gladly proof your work in exchange for tacos or help on their CS homework
harulf 1y ago
As another commenter proposed, try getting a course book and going through it at your own pace. With your newfound determination and interest it wouldn't surprise me if you stuck with it this time. Alternatively, if you prefer putting vector math into immediate practice, fields like graphics and game dev use it a LOT.
- bevr1337 1y ago
  I've got them under my thumb now, and thank you! I've managed to muddle through linear and develop an ECS and prove it's in linear space and enough discrete to be pleasantly surprised by Noam Chomsky's many lives. I used them as examples of when I transitioned back to CS and had to learn what to learn before I could learn. So to speak. Anything on your own learning journey you'd like to share?

louthy 1y ago

> The reactive ingredient is passion, not the learning modality. As a self-taught programmer I agree with this. I started teaching myself on 8 bit computers in the mid-80s and didn't go to university. By the time I got my first full-time programming job, at the age of 19, I'd already been programming for 9 years. By the time most people are leaving university I was already nearly 15 years into my programming journey. It's hard to ignore that kind of passion and drive. I'm now four decades in and love it in the same way I did at the start. I'm a maker, I like making. I keep reading the papers and am constantly interested in where this thing is going ... and I write a lot of code! However, I don't like the premise that self-taught engineers lack foundational concepts just because they didn't go the academic route. I think many of us find the academic aspects just as interesting -- it really depends on the field you're in I think. For sure, we don't normally have the time to do a deep dive of something, but by the time you're decades in you've probably got just as many if not more 'foundational chops' than someone who spent a few years at school. Anecdotally, as someone who's hired and fired plenty over the years, I think there is something to the Self-Taught Engineers Outperform theory. But I think it's purely that they spend much more time doing. They do more in work and they do more in their free time. The passion brute-forces the learning.

danaris 1y ago
I think that what most people mean is that with a self-taught engineer, you have no way of knowing whether they have the foundations. It's going to be much more common with self-taught engineers than with formally-educated ones to have areas of surpassing brilliance, and areas where they don't know their arse from their elbow, and no easy way to predict what those will be until you get to know the specific engineer. With formally-educated software engineers, so long as the school they got their degree at is a reputable one with a decent program, you can be reasonably confident that they'll have a solid foundation, and if you're familiar with the institution you may even know what their strengths and weaknesses are likely to be.
- louthy 1y ago
  > With formally-educated software engineers, so long as the school they got their degree at is a reputable one with a decent program, you can be reasonably confident that they'll have a solid foundation Based on the 100s of candidates that I've interviewed over the years, I disagree. In fact I often wonder what on earth people are doing at these university courses, because they rarely seem to have even a basic grasp of computer science. I've had to personally mentor many (academic route) engineers over the years on what I would consider absolute basics. Frankly, I don't consider a degree a useful barometer of quality at all. They're only useful if the candidate is applying for their first job out of university. After that, experience is much more important and I basically ignore the education part of a CV.

stronglikedan 1y ago

> mixture of formal and informal/self-taught That's me. Took plenty of college classes, but never tested well, so never got a degree. I learned most everything on my own, but those classes were a foundation for what I taught myself, and I couldn't have done it without them (as quickly).

nativeit 1y ago
This is a good point. I think the structured curricula can be the only way to learn many technical topics, even if you aren’t being formally taught. I also found my time at university to be invaluable for the equipment, facilities, and resources that were made available to me for learning that I could never have provided to myself.

zahlman 1y ago

> The reactive ingredient is passion, not the learning modality. Sure, but passion also drives self-teaching. It's less necessary in a classroom setting because there's always someone trying to keep you on track. > Self-taught approaches tend to be goal oriented (I'm learning X because I want to do Y), which can overlook fundamentals that are important. For some, understanding a system can be a goal in itself.

positron26 1y ago

Yeah, being lead to some water does not create dependence on being lead to all water. If there is a consistent argument, it's that self-taught people have all demonstrated leading themselves to some water.