Thread: 10 Reasons Why Self-Taught Engineers are the Best in the World

When it comes to learning, passion is essential. Because if you have passion you have the boundless energy you need to overcome the challenges you will face in becoming a self-taught engineer. Formal education is not a requirement any more, all you need is a curious mind and passion for learning. This is why self taught engineers often deliver the best results. This is why a lot of tech companies these days choose to reject people with an engineering degree and ten years of experience, and instead hire those that are either fresh graduates or those with no formal engineering education, as long as they are passionate about their field.
Here are some reasons why companies may prefer to hire self taught engineers:
1.) They aren’t in it for the money

In the tech business, a lot of difficult problems occur. These problems are often tackled by passionate engineers working in their company’s purely because those people love to be challenged. They don’t care how much work they have to do and how many hours they have to put in to finish the project. They are thirsty for knowledge and they believe that whatever frustration their work gives them will be outweighed by the new things they learn along the way.
Engineers often give away free resources online. Many of them are self taught software engineers. They share their work with others to give back to the community, as they have gained so much from it themselves. One of the best websites to access free online programming resources from professionals is Livecoding.tv. Here, you can watch experienced engineers code products live. You can chat with them as they tackle real problems, and work on real projects.
Another great site is thenewboston. This website is also founded by a self taught programmer named Bucky Roberts. This website offers free educational materials such as programming videos, science subject videos, math and many more. The site offers a great user experience. You can even watch the videos without signing up.
2.) They Don’t Require Much Supervision

With programmers, less is more. These kinds of people or engineers believe they know what they are doing and they have high self confidence. When problems occur, they usually don’t complain, because it’s their chance to learn something new. They become an expert at what they do because they embrace failure positively.

Complete article: https://medium.com/@livecodingtv/10-...06f#.be8oej84m

10 Reasons Why Salesmen Selling Religion are the Best Leaders in the World

1. Profit
2. Gains
3. Money
4. Currency
5. Cash
6. Wealth
7. Opulence
8. Affluence
9. Fame
10. Fortune

Reinstate slavery for economic growth! It'll trickle down, I promise!

Originally Posted by Salem

There's only one word to describe religious speech, and that's flatulence.

I object to that! Flatulence is a useful source of energy, you see.

Calling self-taught engineers the best in the world because they don't know their worth or skills, don't have any self-esteem to walk away when you screw them, and are willing to work like slaves, is like calling actual slaves the best workers in the world. After all, they do the most work for the least cost, and you get to abuse them in any way you wish.

Here in Finland, lots of companies, especially telephone marketers and web content creators, like to use high-school kids to do the work, because adults will not work for such slave wages (no minimum wage in Finland, you see), and high-schoolers are too naïve to realize they're being exploited, especially if you blind them with bullpoop talk. Just like shady salespeople, and tele-evangelists or whatever those money-askers on TV are. Makes me angry.

Wow. This is super relevant to me. I literally just got my first MEAN stacks job like 2 months ago and they already want me to work a 56 hour week... This thread has been good for me lol

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

they already want me to work a 56 hour week...

Typical exploitation.. very common, too.

This occurs when management -- especially middle management in larger organizations; in smaller organizations, those managers who have been promoted to their position with little to no actual management training or experience -- thinks they can enhance their own position by squeezing just a bit more from the workers/production teams. They may, for example, have a financial incentive to do so: if they wring a bit more out of the teams, they themselves get a bonus.

Of course those "managers" love self-taught engineers; they're the most pliant workers!

Unfortunately, I for one am at a loss as to how to effectively counter the pressure. I know from my own experience that increasing your efficiency and/or output does not work; they simply ask for more, until you burn out and quit, at which point they just hire someone new. If you have my kind of luck, you also get very little to no attribution for your efforts, and possibly even get badmouthed behind your back. Such experience wreaks havoc on anyone who just wishes to do their work well, and is not worth the work experience. You may just end up burned out and spending years in therapy, trying to re-learn how to cope.

Suggested counter-strategies include pointing out that work product quality (and even the volume, especially for creative work) drops when weekly work load exceeds about 40 hours, or daily work load exceeds about 10 hours (depending on how often you get a rest day, how long the commute is, and what kind of breaks (voluntary and forced) you get). There is actual research on this, so it's not just verbal fluff.

A more common approach is to find out the underlying reason, and to try to counter-manipulate the manager to use better management techniques; a lot of people do this instinctively, as a social survival strategy.

Perhaps someone here has been successful in countering such pressure, and could give us hints?

Originally Posted by Nominal Animal

Perhaps someone here has been successful in countering such pressure, and could give us hints?

I've been in this situation but not as a programmer--as a CAD drafter. The only way to win really is to never ever show off how fast or good you are, which pretty much means starting fresh at a new company. You pretty much have to deliberately be lazy, which is retarded. If you try to shine, you will do just that and look like a wildfire in the middle of the night and people will ask more and more of you until there's no way out. It's so sad that things are this way.

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

Wow. This is super relevant to me. I literally just got my first MEAN stacks job like 2 months ago and they already want me to work a 56 hour week... This thread has been good for me lol

Leave now

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

"Hey guys, you wanna know what's cool about PHP? A script can fail and it doesn't bring down your entire server !"

No, it just hands the server on a platter to the first shady character that finds the script.

But yeah, back to the original topic: The way I see the self-learned/formal education divide is similar to becoming professional at something. You can do it yourself, but it requires more self-control than most have; doing it via formal education, where you're guided towards it, is much easier.

Let's say you do concrete for a living. If you're professional -- regardless of whether you have formal education in concrete or not --, you'll make it your business to know what kind of concrete is required for what purpose, and how to produce concrete that matches the client requirements.

Most concrete workers are not that; to most, it's just manual labor. Some might get really good and fast at some specific task (like pouring the exact right amount, estimating the amounts needed for typical jobs, vibrating the poured concrete, or flattening it fast but nice) -- at least enough so to be paid more than a regular concrete-Joe does.

That's how many self-learned "engineers" are, too: they know how to do the one or few things they are really interested in, and often have lots of practical experience doing it, too, but they usually lack even the basics outside that narrow area.

Our technology and sciences have grown so complicated, that one human being is not able to master an entire field anymore. (You could say one form of the singularity is here.) Formal education forces the learner to grasp the basics of the entire field, especially the uninteresting bits, with real-world applicable parts being frankly a very small part only.

The self-learning aspects are necessary, as they make it possible for the person to master some aspect of the field (or become a generalist -- very valuable for team leader and management types). However, typically, self-learners do not take the time to learn the uninteresting but eventually important parts of the general field they are in, but center on the part they find most interesting.

Nowadays, even a very specialized expert needs the sort of basic knowledge and skills even a second-rate formal education gives outside their focus area, to be able to maximize their effectiveness and utility in a team, and to adapt to the field itself changing. Having some overlap with others is that necessary, and useful.

In natural sciences (for researchers instead of engineers), this overlap is even more important. Even though fields are specializing at an amazing pace, there are lots of overlap. For example, someone specializing in space physics, say Earth's magnetosphere and solar wind, might very well be able to make a jump to fusion research, because the two have interesting parallels and relate to each other.

As an another example, there is very little difference between quantum chemistry, quantum biology, and materials physics (using ab initio-, or quantum, methods). But, having someone switch between physics and biology departments after their master's degree does sound pretty weird. Today, it's not weird at all, its just how our fields of research diverge and merge at different levels.

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

I'm at the point where they can honestly just fire me.

There you go. So yeah, put in notice, try to be nice to everyone, and leave.