Never apply online. You are lucky enough to be getting a form letter for your trouble; most people just never hear anything, if they go that route.

OK, here's the reality of things. As an autodidact, you are probably not very qualified to work on a team, because you lack the proper vocabulary to communicate with your team members. This will come through in an in-person interview (really, the only kind anyone should consider, unless they are about to graduate, and take a phone interview instead).

The way it will come through is that you will perhaps know how to solve a problem using the computer, and you might even write the correct code on the whiteboard, but you won't talk about "Big 'O' notation" (algorithmic time order complexity) correctly, you'll probably think "everything is a linked list" or "everything is a btree", and you won't be able to name algorithms, and you won't be able to answer questions like "Why did you use a bubble sort, rather than a quicksort? Why didn't you do an insertion sort when you were building your data structure?".

These may seem like trivial things to you, but on a 50 person team, you are going to drag communications to a stand-still, as people "Plain English" answers for you, or you give them plain English answers that they have to translate in their heads to the correct terminology.

At best, you will find yourself stuck in a junior or devops position as a result of this (and you will be lucky if it's devops, because that requires a lot more skill than just coding, and they will have to see those attributes in you).

If you insist on this (non-degreed) route as an autodidact, my advice is to get the Knuth Algoriths books, and Sedgewick C++ algorithms book, and several other books that include discussions on "Big O", and learn the vocabulary so that you'll be prepared for your next interview.

It also wouldn't hurt if you were to start an exemplary Open Source project in a compile language utilizing Linux or BSD style(9) throughout, so that you have a base of pretty code that they can look at before they talk to you, where they know that your code is at least readable, and not spaghetti.

You can, for the most part, if you've already got experience, and you already have the cred -- either via a degree, or via Open Source, or via work history.

But contrary to what Mark Cuban is currently telling everyone, we are not in another tech bubble. If we were, companies would be hiring 3rd year CS students out of college for outrageous salaries so that they could demonstrate growth by the number of cubicle warmers hthey have sitting in their cube farm. Or, I guess, these days, sitting in their Open Plan office space.

Tech companies are not (yet) back to the days of hiring cubicle/seat warmers.

You don't learn to code from those things.

Certs are BS, with a few exceptions (Cisco Network engineer, Oracle DBM, etc.) and are really narrow scope, when they are of value. If I see a bunch of 1-2 week certs on a resume, I tend to put it at the bottom of the pile. Many companies, in fact, say that their initial offer to someone will go down, all other things being equal, if they *have* an MSCE cert.

Starting your own company will solve your employment problem. It won't solve your vocabulary/communication problem, and unless you end up as an aquihire because your company itself is seen as valuable, and is aquired by a big player, don't ever expect experience at your own company, without a degree, to get you into places that have those requirements. If you had 10 years experience as a consultant, you're still going to face the same "jump through hoops to prove you would be a good team member" style interview.

The only difference that starting a company will make is that with a large block of work on your resume, you're more likely to make it past the online applications/recruiters who tend to grade on resume. Which takes us back to rule #1: Never apply online.

Few people want to actually commit to a long term career at a company, People want to be paid as much as they can possibly get for a given job, and job hop constantly. No wonder so few companies are willing to spend money training workers that come to them with a degree, but huge holes in their actual ability to do the job.

See how that works?

I had a friend who tried this. He outsources his financial and retirement planning to someone else in another country. He wouldn't have done that, but the person he outsource to was a very religious person, and also royalty. Unfortunately, he still lost all his money, despite having invested it with a Nigerian Prince.

I hope you have better luck outsourcing your finance work to another country.

God Bless.

I have it on pretty good authority... you *will* need algebra later in life, and you *won't* need football later in life.

Sadly, You can no longer take a C++ class at most universities in the United States. You can take a "Databases using C++", and be expected to learn C++ on your own, but of course, that's much more likely to be "Databases using Java" these days.

The ABET standards first changed in 1985 to discourage teaching of programming languages in classes which count towards a CS degree, and again in 1994, and again in 2006.

http://www.abet.org/DisplayTem...

Currently, ABET accreditation is "Outcome Based", a criterion which has been abandoned as hopelessly flawed in primary education for both math and reading:

General Criterion 3. Student Outcomes" ...

No where does it require proficiency in a programming language or other language, and in fact, it goes so far as to limit the requirement to reading about them - "exposure" - in section II:

Program Criteria for Computer Science and Simililarly Named Computing Programs ...
Student Outcomes ...
Curriculum

Students must have the following amounts of course work or equivalent educational experience:

a. Computer science: One and one-third years that must include: ...
2. An exposure to a variety of programming languages and systems. [CS]

In other words, your graduates don't need to be able to program, they don't need to be able to do explicit memory management, they don't have to understand pointers, they don't have to understand, at least basically, that for a given compiler input, here's the assembly language you are likely to get out, etc..

It's pretty pitiful the amount of (non) effort required to get a CS degree at many U.S. Colleges and Universities.

The good news is that they have degree programs where the contracts with the department actually require learning computer languages.

The bad news is that there's only a handful of places that have these programs, such as Brown, Rice, Stanford, MIT, CMU, and so on.

The good news is that if you attend one of these handful of universities, AND you opt into the degree program that actually forces you to learn to use the tools, and use a computer as a tool, in more than a theoretical, abstract way, AND you do well, you are practically guaranteed a job at a top tier company, like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.. The bad news is that these places tend to be a heck of a lot more expensive than a community college.

The good news is that there's nothing preventing a community college from adopting the same "in excess of ABET requirements" for one of their CS degree options.

The bad news is that, while nothing prevents it, they are all sitting on their thumbs and not doing it.

The good news is that if you learned in a non-ABET manner AND you did well, e.g. at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, you are also pretty much guaranteed a job.

The bad news is that those jobs are from H1B workers from Germany, and you're a U.S. citizen who is buying or who has bought your education from the wrong vendor, and it's too late for you.

The good news is, Starbucks is hiring!

Finland is in the process of revamping their education system. They are tired of being #1 in the world, and everyone comparing themselves to them, so they have decided to fuck it up.

Wrong. It also says:

"The comparative data on skills attainment and parental education highlight another salient point:
The scores of U.S. millennials do not compare favorably with those of their international peers who
have parents with similar levels of educational attainment. In fact, across all three levels of parental
educational attainment, there is no country where millennials score lower than those in the United
States.48 Additionally, while a relatively large percentage of our millennials (and the parents of millennials)
have pursued post-secondary education when compared to other countries, on average,
the scores for this more advantaged group are still disappointingly low. "

I will *HAPPILY* work on an solar power project!

As long as it get launched into space, where the sunlight is 24/7. Otherwise, come up with a storage system for the 75% of the time ground-based solar won't work as a sole source, or piss off.

Congratulations!

You have just made the "A college degree is not a guarantee of competence, it is a union card substitute". argument. If you don't value your degree more than that, it says a lot about how much effort you put into actually learning from your courses, and it begs the question of why I should value your degree more than that, as well.

And as an employer, my per-employee loading costs go up by 20%.

Tell you what: Go to a single payer health care system, roll unemployment, disability, and retirement into a Basic Guaranteed Income program, and define away poverty because with a BGI, it doesn't exist, and I'll happily split up jobs into as many pieces as you want, down to 20 hours/week/worker, because it won't cost me extra to hire more people, as long as the same number of hours get worked.

Until then, thank your government unfunded mandates and offshoring for current unemployment levels (26%+, according to World Bank numbers, since DOL unemployment statistics only count people receiving unemployment insurance, and vastly underestimate the number of unemployed).

If you want to fix the offshoring problem, I can help with that, too, but you really need to abandon the TPP, modify NAFTA to eliminate the trans-shipment loophole, and eliminate MFN status for China (for starters; there's other things that will need to happen on top of that, but it's the minimum foundational bedrock necessary to move forward).

The bullying comment was specifically in reference to the press bullying tech over something tech is already more cognizant of than any other industrial segment.

In terms of personal bullying, I think a lot of people who enter tech were bullied when they were younger, which has driven them towards technical pursuits, where they are less likely to have to associate with the general population. Perhaps, by implication, more young women should be bullies to address the STEM imbalance? I would not suggest that we should do that, even if it would be successful, since the tradeoffs are simply not worth it.

I maintain, however, social isolation leads to more STEM careers than it does to retail sales positions.

The whole "brogrammer" myth, which I think arose from the movie "The Social Network" and the Winklevii in particular, is pretty much a myth. The only fitness nerds I know in tech these days are fitness nerds because of reaction, not because that's the way they've been their entire life. In fact, most of them do it because they are using it as a means of life extension.

Then why aren't they? The ability to operate at 66% capacity with one person out sick, instead of at 50% capacity? Also, assuming you temporarily 1.5X the hours of the remaining two workers, you operate at 100% capacity, instead of 50% capacity? The answer is that the math does not work out like that; the per employee costs overwhelm any potential benefit to the employer.

People keep saying this, but if you divide the number of employees into the salary of the CEO of McDonals, it comes out to ~$8.65 *PER YEAR* per employee. In most places, where prevailing McDonalds wage is higher than that, they can pick up more money by picking up an our of work.

In terms of "slightly more efficient", they can do that without hiring more people, since the efficiency must come from business process practices anyway.

I find it interesting we are bashing tech (AGAIN).

If you look at the Fortune 500, there are 5.2% women CEOs.
If you look at the Fortune 500 tech companies, there are 8% women CEOs.
If you look at the Fortune 500 non-tech companies, there are 2.8% women CEOs.

(1) Tell me again how this is a tech problem, and not a systemic problem.
(2) Tell me again that tech is not on the right trajectory, compared to all other businesses.
(3) Tell me again how tech is not more progressive than every other business sector.

By all means, lets go back to bashing tech, the only place where this social issue is being redressed in any meaningful fashion. I'm sure there will be absolutely no backlash from beating them up over something they are actually doing something about, while giving everyone else who is doing *NOTHING* about the issue is given a pass.

It's not like tech is full of people who are familiar with how bullying works... the actual bullies *ALWAYS* get a pass.

Actually... No.

You are incorrectly assuming that the per-employee cost for hourly employees to the business for 3 x 30 hr/wk is the same as for 2 x 45 hr/wk. It's not. There is cost loading to the business in the form of unfunded government mandates, such as employer provided medical insurance, workers comp, social security, and so on.

As a specific example, there's a social security tax cap, and employers must match employee contributions. What this effectively means is that if I have 2 employees, my business is out of pocket (2 x CAP) in matching funds, and the rest of my income is mine, whereas if I have 3 employees, I am out of pocket (3 x CAP). This is generally true of all capped max-out-of-pocket employer matching.

Similar capped match values include 401K matching contributions, Medicare.

Other per-employee costs include state unemployment tax, federal unemployment tax, workers compensation insurance, paid holidays, vacations, and sick days, profit sharing plans, direct pension contribution, post-retirement health insurance contributions.

This ignores non-shared resources, like office space for individual employees simultaneously at the business, business equipment costs per employee, furniture, electricity for their computers, and so on.

So it costs a hell of a lot more for a business to employ 3 people than it does for them to employ 2 people.

Your math does not work.

They're not paid a smaller fraction of the proceeds.

(1) The proceeds are "after taxes, medical, and other costs", all of which are higher

(2) A substantial amount of the productivity increase money has gone into subsidizing cost reduction to the eventual consumer. Think "everyday low prices at Walmart"

Thank you for being more productive, comrade; lettuce is now cheaper, and even though you personally don't eat lettuce, know that your efforts are appreciated by those who do.