Phone mail, so pardon top post. Formal education needn't kill the love of a subject. I formally learnt archaeology - both the theory and the practice - and my love for the discipline and the study has only gone up. So much so that I'm now helping organise a world-wide collaborative arch event. I also learnt documentary film production formally and it is now my day job. Of course, as in all things, YMMV. C (pardon, please, phone mail)
On 6/11/11, Biju Chacko <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> This list contains a large number of self-taught programmers. How did >> you get started, and how did you get to a moderate level of skill? (If >> you want to talk about what happened after that, great, but I am more >> interested in the first two stages) > > When I was studying architecture, I generally found the archi crowd's > khadi-clad, I-am-an-artist-this-is-my-art conceit insufferable so I > started hanging out with a bunch of CS guys. I started playing video > games on their computers, progressed to cracking them in order to > cheat and then writing batch files for minor automation. I soon > realised that writing code gave me a better rush than the games -- and > that I was getting no rush whatsoever from architecture. > > I dropped out, scrounged a job writing VB code for an ERP company and > the rest, as they say, is history. > > Funnily enough, many of the CS guys I hung out with back then never > seemed to love the machines the way I did and ended up getting MBAs > and leaving the industry. Another data point: my sister is my only > sibling to actually have a CS degree. She's also the only one who's > not in IT -- she works in an ad agency. > > It seems formal study is a sure shot way to kill any interest in a subject. > > -- b > > -- Sent from my mobile device http://www.uk.linkedin.com/in/chandrachoodan http://www.flickr.com/photos/ravages http://www.selectiveamnesia.org/ +919884467463
