can you "do well" as a self-taught Python dev?

Hey there,

Newsletter reader Brad has been programming in Python for a little under a year.

He's entirely self-taught and had no prior development experience whatsoever.

Brad reached out to me with a few career questions that I started answering in one of my previous emails.

There was one more burning question that I didn't get to cover the last time:

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How many self-taught devs do you know who have done very well for themselves?

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Interesting question! I'm going to take this as:

"Can you work on interesting projects and get paid well as a self-taught dev?"

I know some self-taught folks who have done extremely well for themselves:

For example, I remember interviewing a Python developer who had just finished a development bootcamp and was now looking for his first job.

He had no formal CS education, just some coding experience and the bootcamp.

And it showed in the interview—but it was also clear that he was extremely motivated and eager to learn.

The interviewing team was on the fence about giving him the "thumbs up" at first…

But we all felt he had the right mindset to be a programmer, and that he'd be a great fit for the team.

So after a discussion with our CTO we decided to take our chances and to bring him on as a junior developer.

And, guess what happened—

He did well. So well in fact, that maybe 18 months later, this guy took a job offer to join the data science team of a big ride sharing company in San Francisco (== $$$).

Nicely done!

Now I'm not gonna lie and say that self-taught developers do better in general compared to the folks with formal training.

Plus all I have to offer here is some anecdotal evidence…

But they seemed to be about on par, maybe at a slight disadvantage overall.

You see, my hunch is that there's different "failure modes" for self-taught devs and those with formal education:

Some people with academic backgrounds have a tendency to find incredibly complicated solutions to simple problems.

And some self-taught devs have a hard time with performance issues and larger projects because they don't know much about memory/space complexity analysis, Big-Oh notation etc.

As always, it's hard to generalize but I would say that being a self-taught developer doesn't seem to be holding people back per se.

It's all about having the right attitude and being eager to learn.

Happy Pythoning!

— Dan Bader