I give math lessons to high school people in my "free" time. One of my guys needs to use calculator to compute sums with 0 and yet he wants to become a programmer 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

And when people develop shit, they often don't even understand the basics of the technology. But without understanding what the abstractions actually abstract away, it's impossible to use them correctly, let alone debug shit when they don't work.

Point in case, I read a blog posting the other day where a moron presented a "solution" for different image formats to different browsers, using some JS driven Vue hackery with URL rewriting and UA sniffing. Yeah because just using "picture" without any JS and let the browser decide what it wants to load would be too easy?! And the web is full of such shit.

@M1sf3t in my opinion education and certificates are overrated. If you're not willing to apply yourself and teach yourself in an ever changing industry then what chance does one have?
For example. A friend of mine and myself at the time used to play around with PHP. I was 17 he was 15. He was far better than me and decided to go to uni. I decided to work at pizza Express, freelance and paint whilst I taught myself.
10 years later I have a very decent job and he's finished uni and has been unemployed since.
I don't understand why big companies want to see certificates from universities on a person's CV because it says they're more "determined" than someone that taught themselves.

@bashleigh Depends on what you develop.

E.g. when developing for embedded, you also need to at least read the schematics to know how the software interfaces to the rest of the system. Closed loop control or digital filters involves some advanced math like Laplace transformation just to know whether it will be stable. Designing the software with EMI in mind requires knowledge about how electromagnetic fields work, and Fourier transformation.

While it's totally possible to teach that oneself, I've yet to meet someone who actually did.

Or, people who make stuff that other devs just use, like Clang and GCC, better have an idea about advanced CS stuff like compiler theory.