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Originally Posted by Sholar
Sure--why wouldn't they? In all of that text, it isn't clear to me what the advantages of said "polymath" is over someone who, you know, went the normal education route and then did something (either on their own or working for someone else).
I wasn't making a claim that it is better, per se. I was pointing out the fallacy of person 2's thinking.
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Indeed it points to the opposite: someone who is likely to be motivated/value to "do it their way, on their own" which isn't typically what one wants in a colleague.
It's hard to explain all of this without getting into deeply personal stories I don't care to share, but I've been self-teaching since I was a kid due to being far removed from classical education / upbringing. I've also worked in many disparate industries, managed to be team leader in many of them, and never once have I had meaningful training.
Does that mean that my way is the best way? Not at all. It simply meant that I found myself in situations where either a) the base knowledge wasn't there at all, and management decided I can figure it out, or b) people with knowledge deemed me capable enough regardless of my actual background.
If your fear is that someone like me lacks humility, I'd argue that we are probably more humiliated with our learning path than average, which is why we study for years before doing it.
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Someone telling me that they are a "self-taught polymath" is definitely in "cool story bro" territory and probably somewhat worse than that if they don't have anything to show for it.
I self-learn out of necessity. I've talked to a few people who are person 2, and not a single one did it because they want to. Not a single one is proud of the circumstances that made it impossible for them to go through a classical route. They each decided it was better to use that mental capacity to at least try something than, idk, buying a TV for video games or doing meth. The fact is, each one has a very complicated background, and none of them do it for selfish ego-stroking reasons.
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Originally Posted by jjshabado
For the self-taught people, what's your measuring stick of success? How do you know when you've learned something?
Learning resources - I've always believed in finding books, classes, etc, with homework and, most important, answers.
I'm a firm believer in mastering the fundamentals. That gives you an intuition in what is happening later on, and it gives you the intuition to judge a resource, or at least think on it. Even people with many years of experience and college have a flimsy grasp of the fundamentals.
There is an upper bound to book-learning, and there is a knowledge / practicum ceiling, and that is okay.
The second proxy: does it work the way it should work (this step is not before the fundamentals).
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Originally Posted by jjshabado
* It's really hard to objectively know if you've mastered something by just building something for yourself. If you misunderstood a concept, you can just as easily misunderstand it in your code as well. You need external review to help counter that.
This is a valid concern.
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* Lots of concepts require a significant application to really use. In my Operating Systems course I built an operating system. That's hard and takes a ton of time even with lots of support / resources. Same with some advanced data structures. Real big data jobs. Etc. If you're self-learning I think its easy to think you've built something that demonstrates the concepts when in reality you didn't even scratch the surface.
I don't think anyone is claiming that a self-taught is going to build up a new OS or the next Google.
A self-taught can figure out to build a web app, use a database, or admin a server without knowing how to build RoR, MySQL, or Linux by hand.
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Originally Posted by leavesofliberty
I'll prove my worth to consumers, and use my shoestrings for investors. I am not going into detail though for obvious reasons.
Bull****. No idea in the history of ideas has ever been stolen and executed on.
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Originally Posted by leavesofliberty
What's wrong with StackExchange and GitHub?
There is a large amount of downright wrong chosen answers on SE. There is a ton horrible code on github.