Who are we?

We are self-taught. We are self-motivated. We are self-disciplined. We are self-aware.

Self-taught

All of us went through trainee programs in software houses and through university. In the end, all of us came to the same weird conclusion: Nothing that we have been taught at university has any relevance in our day to day work. The best way to learn programming is to have a mentor and to just do it.

The reason is not that our universities have been bad. The reason is that they usually teach two kinds of skill-sets: soft-skills and hard-skills. The soft-skills are kind of obvious. They are common sense and no one really needs to waste three years at university picking them up. You would learn how to negotiate in three days if you were forced to face a real customer in the real world anyways.

The hard-skills are in our case, of course, all related to programming and guess what: We already knew most of it before we started university. Most of us wrote their first BASIC programs at the age of 10 or so. After all that was the reason why we decided to study this field: We dreamt of turning our hobbies into our jobs.

Please take this with a grain of salt. If you wanted to invent the next programming language or worked as a software engineer for NASA, it would probably be a good idea to have some extensive university knowledge backing up your tasks. But we are doing web-development here. This is more like an art and less like a serious profession (it is still serious, but in a less life-threatening way than writing software for sending people to mars).

Our main skill-set is Python, Django, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. All of this is perfectly documented on the internet and backed up by huge and helpful communities. None of this is taught in universities or if it is, it is horribly outdated and of no use in the real world.

One thing is for sure: We socialized at university. We learned to cope with stress and deadlines. We learned how to think analytically. But the real skills that pay our bills right now are 100% self-taught.

Self-motivated

TODO: Write about how we need to know where we are going as individuals in order to fit into the company, wake up in the morning and push the company forwards even though no one is forcing us to do so.

Self-disciplined

TODO: Write about the threats of working from home and the incredible amount of self-discipline this demands.

Self-aware

TODO: Write how we are constantly questioning ourselves, trying to become more effective in our work without losing sight of our private life goals.