How I got engineering jobs at Apple & Nokia with no degree

[@SIGSEGV1337]

Degreeless programmer gang rise up

[@xvzf115]

poverty gang

[@FRAMEDSKATEKREW69]

@Eddie Levitt stfu and your boyfriend

[@SIGSEGV1337]

@Azariah Ares No one cares larper

[@babayega1717]

you guys the real ballers

[@SpencerMckenithWilliams]

Sololearn is free and served me well. I pursue studying but in the sense of independence and cost. I have a EE bs from tesu and going for my masters in engineering . No you don't need a degree to get into this line of work particularly web design. I'm a greedy dummy that just wants it all.

[@antoniocs8873]

You actually put "and ended up burning me out." in your CV? Respect! Brutal honesty right there! :)

[@awesomekling]

Hah yeah in retrospect it was probably unusually honest! At the time I was quite worried about ending up in the same situation again so I wanted to be up front about it. :)

[@jay-xj1om]

With the perpetual victim complex of Silicon Valley I predict that adding any range of mental health issues to your CV will become an asset in the near future. Not trying to diminish anyone's problems by the way (we all have them) and wish you all the best.

[@arsnakehert]

I guess it's a good way of weeding out companies that would likely try to do this to you again lol

[@anjith]

Last year I wrote "Stress is my friend" in our Company year in review feedback.

[@elidrissii]

I think it's what the kids call "based" these days. Very based, Andreas.

[@StrangelyIronic]

Honestly, the passion part being the most interesting applies to basically everything. I got a lot of contracts with really intricate machining work just because of my borderline obsession with repairing vintage/antique watches, clocks, cameras, lenses, basically anything intricate and mechanical usually for fun. Most of my repairs involved hand-making replacement parts that are either unobtainable or too expensive to source. Word of mouth landed a couple family heirloom-type watches from the head of fabrication/manufacturing type company on my workbench. I give all the photos I take of each step in high resolution to the client, they saw my work making the parts from scratch, and contracted me to machine replacement parts they couldn't get in their older equipment. Word of mouth again and now making and repairing parts for equipment is something I do and enjoy.

[@Supergecko8]

Do some vids on it

[@seltenermann]

Thank you so much, I've followed everything you said and got my first job. Again, thank you soooooo much!

[@awesomekling]

Awesome! Congratulations :^)

[@guvenfazli]

Man, you alive?

[@christopherprobst-ranly6284]

Truth is: You do not learn programming at university, that's a myth. You learn maths, abstract thinking, and theoretical stuff. You do not actually need this for a job in the real world. So, even with a degree, you need to teach real programming yourself anyways. Even if your university teaches you some basic stuff, it's just basic. I have a master's degree in CS and I started programming with 12 myself. And you can get jobs without a nice CV in IT space without a problem. Why? Demand! There are just not enough people available to satisfy the market needs. However, without a degree, it will be hard to get up the ladder ;-) You do not want to be a level-1 programmer for your entire life. So a degree helps definitely at some point to differentiate yourself. In addition, the theoretical knowledge taught at university might seem boring, but for me, it really helped to understand the other side of CS. I think it just makes you a much better software developer in the end. But you have to learn to code yourself, there is no way around it.

[@alexfooify]

That's me! Didn't realise at the time but the IT work burned me out too

[@awesomekling]

Hey Alex! Yeah, it was clearly a mistake to accept all that extra work for no reason. At least we learned something :)

[@oukid2633]

Thank you for sharing this, I dropped out of hs and I want a to devlope a career making software and this comforting for me

[@KingHerring]

Wow, didn't know you were a highschool dropout like myself! (I took an exit exam actually) Good on ya!

[@mandaputtra]

Basicly Sharing and Skill is the most important part thanks 💖

[@patmelsen]

Awesome video! This is so interesting to me as a young coder just starting out.

[@shouryaparashar6920]

Just keep your hands on the keyboard

[@Nick-lx4fo]

@@shouryaparashar6920 and go outside once in a while

[@velho6298]

Its quite important to highlight what can you bring to the company. Got a job without a degree as well.

[@Terszel]

same, career of 5 years and never had a degree

[@tamgaming9861]

Thanks a lot for get this inside view from you! Helps a lot!

[@birarakisarap]

Hey Andreas! you are killing it when you coding stuff ✊ My point of view is that: when you have a degree you dont have to worry like dropouts do and that why guys are like you actually realy love computers and think out of box! I am myself I drop out from college and i was in love with computers since i got my amiga today I am working as a web dev. I really appreciate people like you as my fellow and idol.

[@awesomekling]

✊!!

[@christopherrensor4780]

I have made a minor in CS, and even I feel the pressure. You can get as many compliments as you want from your team and still there is that feeling that you have to prove yourself all the f******* time, because of all the - let's call it "bullying" - against minors and self-taught programmers (which often comes from older generations and college students) on the internet. A part of the community is insanely conservative.

[@arsnakehert]

Your Qt inspector application thingie is actually pretty impressive to me

[@AmCanTech]

great video! good luck with your OSS project

[@limitless1692]

So there is hope for people without a colege degre.. Thank You for the encouragement :)

[@emilsayahi1]

I like your videos. They feel very comforting to watch. Thank you so much, and best of luck on your continued coding work.

[@emilsayahi1]

Wow, you left high school in 2003 … that's the year I was born. I'm heading off to college in a few months …

[@roz1]

Believe me you have done more than many graduates in their 4 years

[@syrefaen]

KDE-Dev thats so cool! :D

[@HumbleHuman-k7g]

Sounds very nice, developer at KDE on Mate environment 😆

[@nullentrophy]

Thank you for this inspiring content. I also want to contribute to open source projects but don't know where to start.

[@123TeeMee]

Big thing seems to be the very industry relevant open source experience bit. I’d feel nervous deciding what project to join, out of every option.

[@ashwin372]

And here i am with electronics and communication engineering degree and doing weird odd jobs for living. I am planning to do Masters from a western country so i can get a better job too. Where you are born is also a privilege

[@deleted9821]

idk why everybody search for this degree, i mean if you got talent and wish for doing such work, you can learn it at home and go there and do stuff. What's the problem? Degree is just the paper when you think deeply.

[@vipzip8863]

Did you have to go through whiteboard interviews? Do you remember any specifics on what the interview questions were at the time of applying?

[@awesomekling]

Hi VipZip! I did one day of "whiteboard audition" at Nokia and two days at Apple. Here are some of the tasks I recall: At Nokia: 1) Design a C++ API for serializing and deserializing arbitrary objects. This one was done together with a partner who was also interviewing for the same job. Interesting setup. We both got offered a job afterwards and became coworkers. 2) I was given a C++ program that fit on an A4 sheet of paper, and told to find all of the bugs in it. I think there were 2 or 3 bugs to be found. An off-by-one, an uninitialized access, and maybe something else. At Apple: 1) Find a string within a string 2) Implement atoi() 3) Turn "www.apple.com" into "com.apple.www" 4) Given an arbitrary bag of coins with value 1, 5 and 10, write a program that enumerates all the possible combinations of those coins that add up to a given sum. 5) Write a program that loads a dictionary of English and checks if a word is contained. Basically implement a simple spell checker. 6) How would you achieve fast document scrolling on a low power device? Basically "how would you implement the CoreAnimation framework?" 7) (Because I had WebKit experience already) I was asked to debug a broken website in the latest nightly build of Safari. I think it was "You open wikipedia and the logo doesn't show up in the nightly build. It works fine on the latest release. Imagine that I am the computer and you can ask me anything. How do you debug this problem?"

[@vipzip8863]

@@awesomekling Appreciate the detailed answer!

[@TheKluxi1]

Respect

[@DEichenberg]

I worked 30 years as a mechanical engineer with no degree. They always asked why I quit college and my response was always "They couldn't teach me anything I didn't already know."

[@DEichenberg]

@@thatoneuser8600 Huh?

[@DEichenberg]

@UC2W5HdkdnoqJ4QlzKjFGGtg I fail to see what that has to do with mechanical engineering.

[@dixsusu]

Labour market doesn't care for PAPER . Cares for productivity and how cheap can deliver the goods .

[@iercan1234]

Famous video incoming

[@awesomekling]

Heh, I don’t know about that, but if you think someone would benefit from my story then please share it with them. :) Many people believe you can’t get into places without a degree, and that’s just not true.

[@rogerpenrose1368]

Did/do you work in the United States? If so, how did you manage to do this without a degree?

[@awesomekling]

Yes, I worked in the US for a few years. I was there on an L-1 visa. :)

[@HeySkidee]

wow

[@henrygoodbar9477]

Did you install random ware on their computers telling them to give you a job or their computers remain locked?

[@brianmillar6040]

>.doc >He doesn't write his CV in LaTeX or groff and version control it >He doesn't compile it to PDF and have a script to auto-convert it to dozens of other formats I'm disappointed in you Andreas. On a side note what month has 32 days? >Born 32nd??? lol.

[@doinalil]

you're confusing him with your classic /g/ ricers, he actually has a job so his time is valuable.

[@awesomekling]

Lemtember has 32 days, duh!

[@diegosandoval2043]

@@awesomekling Oh it was a fake month, I thought it was a real month in Swedish language lol.

[@bod3581]

But you were a drop out? which suggests you had what it takes to make it in the first place?

[@thepowerfulcoder2001]

Hello brother, I am the one who answered it in the comments. The problem here is that I am not fluent in English and did not understand anything from this video, now I am writing in English using Google Translate Brother, hope you can help. I'm a programmer with four years of experience and haven't found any work yet. I have created many projects and have not benefited from anything. help me please

[@pigalex]

oh my god, the microphone and young face is so foreign.

[@jeetenderkakkar7570]

Engineering job in ritesh country

[@glee21012]

A degree is not needed for web development. Try doing real embedded or DSP work without the background required calculus, diff-eq, linear algebra), that is what REAL engineers do. Real-time requirements, tight engineering requirements, some guy that learns web development will not be able to handle C++ with tight C drivers. No way. Just because you can hack some C++ code on one project does not mean I will hire you; this false titling of 'programmers' as 'engineers' needs to stop. These programmers or developers should not be called engineers, a engineer has a classic role, it involves a certain level of competence. Today everyone gets called an engineer, google what the legal definition of one actually is, every state (or country) has minimum qualifications to be called one legally, due to public safety.

[@Arbiteroflife]

Web Development is a step in the right direction. You really don't know what kind of web development they've done, they could've been working on scientific visualizations in web development or some other complicated task. There's also nothing that says they couldn't have learned to do embedded development on their own without a degree, it is perhaps harder for sure but not impossible. I do believe CS needs a proper way of certifying individuals as engineers like the PE exam but nothing exists yet.

[@ZephrymWOW]

Unless you are working on cutting edge research this is entirely false. Most of the math concepts required to do real world work with embedded systems can be learned by an average high schooler in under a month.

[@perpetuaL524]

"real engineers" this is sounding more like self-adulatory, and an arbitrary litmus test. I think you may want to look up the title of software engineer, and realize that not every project that requires some level of competency isn't in the area you think deserves the pedestal. Who says who is an engineer when a field is this broad? I know plenty of extremely smart people who call themselves programmers who could be called "engineer". Most of the "hard" stuff is taken care of by smarter people than you and you are just using their work anyway. What needs to happen is we need to get rid of this ego problem in programming and engineering. I am almost willing to bet you're a mechanical engineer who knows programming because those are the types that have this attitude mostly.

[@AnonYmous-spyonmepls]

*attempts to sound like a badass engineer* *lists the 3 simplest areas of advanced mathematics* I’m gonna be clear here, if you are not a mathematician or a physicist, please stop thinking you are good at math. All you know about math can be learned in a year. Bragging with an engineering degree give me a fucking break...

[@glee21012]

@@AnonYmous-spyonmepls Tesla was an engineer, considered one of the brightest minds that ever lived. What are you? How many digital signal processing applications have you developed? You sit in front of the whiteboard all day, doing equations? or do you actually build real shit? The point is many software developers can barely add, and shit out code for websites and call themselves engineers. PHD = Piled High and Deep.