As a somewhat accomplished self taught outlier as well, my perspective is slightly different.
While it's absolutely possible to no have a degree and succeed in megacorp, don't discount the randomness (luck) involved in getting the right experience and meeting the right people at the right time of your career (and aligning with market demands).
Please don't hear this as "you didn't work hard to get to where you are". I certainly believe that folks like us, self taught, are able to work hard and teach ourselves what's needed to get to the next level because we cannot rely on credentials to carry us. A lot of things still need to go right for us to be successful, more so than folks with formal education, especially in the early stages of our careers.
IDK why but it ironically brings me joy to find typos in old code. Maybe a reminder that we're all human (well back when code was written by humans /s).
> We can bring that back.
I agree with all of your points. I am not 100% sure how to do this (if anyone has guidance I would appreciate the insight). My personal anecdote is that my 8yo goes to school with other children who's parents have a low understanding of the impact social media is having on them and their children. I was shocked when my daughter came home and told me that her best friend had an iPhone and a Tiktok account. I spoke with her friend's Mom about it and she said that it's fine because she follows her and sees everything that she's doing on it. I respectfully disagreed but this is very real. I expect that over the next couple of years the majority of her friend's socializing will move into messaging apps. I am terrified.
+1 for "How Big Things Get Done". It changed the way I run projects. I got lucky in the sense that I was able to convince my corporate overloads to allow us to have separate Discovery and Delivery goals, on the premise that discovery is cheap and delivery is expensive (the former significantly reduces risk of the latter) and we show our work. Discovery goals come with prototype deliverables that we're ok not shipping to production but most times lay the foundational work to ship the final product. Every single time we've found something that challenged our initial assumptions and we now catch these issues early instead of in the delivery phase.
We've fully embraced the "Try, Learn, Repeat" philosophy.
We use PG Notify at work extensively and it's the source of a lot of pain and suffering. Not because of the functionality itself, more so because what we did to ourselves by using it in the way we did.
I think this could be great for certain projects, but there is a lot room to put yourself into a situation that's hard to maintain if you/you're team doesn't possess the right amount of discipline around documentation, developer tooling, observability etc..
> I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home
From my experience and observations I've gathered from my teams, my conclusion is the opposite of this. I have to regularly tell folks to watch out for burnout and it's ok to wait until Monday.
While it's absolutely possible to no have a degree and succeed in megacorp, don't discount the randomness (luck) involved in getting the right experience and meeting the right people at the right time of your career (and aligning with market demands).
Please don't hear this as "you didn't work hard to get to where you are". I certainly believe that folks like us, self taught, are able to work hard and teach ourselves what's needed to get to the next level because we cannot rely on credentials to carry us. A lot of things still need to go right for us to be successful, more so than folks with formal education, especially in the early stages of our careers.