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A nice quote from the last chapter: Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same mo
by gcv 17y ago
A nice quote from the last chapter:
Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier you could actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.
Well said, Zed. Very well said indeed.
- jrockway 17y agoThis is very true -- if you're bad at it.
- jerf 17y agoIf you finish this book in its intended role, you will be bad at programming. That's an upgrade from the "completely unable to program" from before you started, but still, you'll be bad. Instead of reading it as discouragement to become good at programming, I'd read it as encouragement that it can be used in the other things you are interested in. You don't have to be "a programmer". It's an important point.
- zedshaw 17y agoActually, you're right, but I wouldn't say "bad", I would say, you're ready to learn programming. Kind of like this gets you your programming brown belt.
- gcheong 17y agoCurious to know what other profession you might be considering going into where you can use your programming skills as your secret weapon.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoAlmost every profession, actually.
- starkfist 17y agoLike running a fast food restaurant? Or being a surgeon? Or a lawyer?
- inerte 17y agoDefinitively being a lawyer. Last week ago I hired a lawyer to look for some documentation for a house I was planning to buy, and about its owner. He showed me I think more than 20 prints of web apps that he had visited, and on each one he sometimes typed his login, sometimes searched for a number, other times the name of the person, other with his state of residence. He could have reduced his typing to just one. Also, if you don't believe this particular anecdote, I have dozens more. I've built web apps for law offices during 4 years. And when I left the company the TODO list for what I was working on was still huge. Absurdly huge. Software is never done. Programming manages information and reduces repetitive computer tasks, and lots of professionals have this problem. Now, should the owner of a fast food restaurant learn to code? Maybe not. Should he hire someone that knows how to code? Maybe not. Should he buy somekind of software to manage his operations? For sure. But it's the same necessity: There's a problem, you can either solve it yourself or pay someone else to do it. And the problem is managing information and time.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- zedshaw 17y agoPorn?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- nailer 17y agoI can attest that programmers in porn can do incredibly well - Red Hat has a customer who purchased about 30K of Linux architecture training just to keep his brain active while he sat on the beach and occasionally reconfigured a server.
- jrockway 17y agoFinance, though it's obviously not a secret weapon anymore.
- dagw 17y agoI'm having a hard time thinking of a profession (outside of menial physical labour) where you couldn't use programming skills to either make your job easier or to do it better.
- jerf 17y agoI was deliberately matching the way I thought jrockway was using "bad". The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step; this is in no way intended as criticism of your guide for the first step.
- jrockway 17y ago"Bad" is more of an attitude than anything you learn. You can be a good programmer before you ever know what Python is. And you can be a bad programmer even after writing 84 monad tutorials.
- zedshaw 17y agoWell of course you'd be a bad programmer after just 84 monad tutorials. You need at least like 300, maybe 385 just to finally get it. Sheesh, don't you know anything?
- ynniv 17y agoI still don't fully grok monads, but I think this is due to not having programmed in Haskell. Thus I conceptualize monads as a hole in an infinite plane. People (Haskell programmers) who deal with this infinite plane understand the hole to be an essential feature to move things from side to side. People who don't live with this plane wonder why the hell people think that a hole is so damn useful.
- steveklabnik 17y agoYou don't need to really grok Haskell to grok monads. It's just that that's where they're most useful... If you cared to hear my explanation, I'd tell you. (it involves a burrito...)
- yummyfajitas 17y agoTo grok monads, don't read a monad tutorial. Just write some code in haskell and monads will become clear very quickly.
- sp332 17y agohttp://catandgirl.com/?p=2418 http://catandgirl.com/?p=2418 "I'm not a [programm]er, I'm just [programm]ing!"
- gcv 17y agoWhat does skill have to do with anything? Pure programming is an answer in search of questions. Programming helps solve problems, but without knowledge of other fields, a programmer, no matter how good, has no idea what problems to attack. Programmers know a whole lot about... programming. Some people therefore write development tools, IDEs, text editors, compilers, operating systems, and databases. This seems to me a relatively small niche, though. Commercial development tools often live and die by free and open-source competition. Otherwise, without actual domain knowledge, a programmer becomes a tool for people who do possess this knowledge. Typical programming jobs suck because they boil down to pushing data from point A to point B, while transforming it in a way specified by someone else. For example, in the financial industry, a non-quant programmer is just a cog. Possibly a highly intelligent and competent cog, but still never the person who designed the underlying process. On the other hand, a quant with programming ability actually has a chance to do something original. Even traditional "computer sciencey" work is rarely just about programming. Computational biology, computational geometry, robotics — those are real fields, where programming helps solve problems.
- abyssknight 17y agoI have to agree. The act of executing someone else's ideas with code is mundane and borderline annoying. It's the other things, the design and development that really gets your brain churning -- its also what gives you more value.
- starkfist 17y agoYou are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession In what fields is this true? What is the metric of "better off?" More money? More "respect?"
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoThe metric in the sentence quoted is "interesting", and that the money is not the issue (as it is comparable to running a fast food joint.)
- starkfist 17y agoStill interested in examples.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoRead the last page of the book, he enumerates many.
- lindsayrgwatt 17y agoI think the point is around how coding can give you superior analytical skills that just blow people away because you can generate better insights. Examples I've seen are people in marketing departments who can write a little python script and suddenly analyze hundreds of thousands of data points. Or someone who combines thousands of geo-targeted data points to better decide where to open chain x's new store. Traditional companies are structured so that there's a "marketing" team and a "business intelligence" team of dba's-cum-statisticians. 90% of the time, if the marketing person doesn't ask the perfect question, they don't get a useful answer - and the BI person is on to their next task. The coder can both ask the question, generate the data and then iterate based on the results of the output. Hugely powerful and can't be done by 90-95% of people in most companies.
- hyperbovine 17y agoBusiness consulting. They look at you like a wizard.
- richcollins 17y agoBullshit. You can make gobs of money as a contract developer with very little risk.
- riklomas 17y agoDoesn't necessarily make you happier though...
- pmiller2 17y agoBased on life experience and things I've read, I've found that once one reaches a level where basic needs are met and there's no need to worry about where the next (or the next three dozen) meal(s) come(s) from, money does very little to make people happy. Hell, as a student right now, my net worth is very, very negative, but I'm also very happy because every day I get to do exactly what I want to be doing, and my immediate future is pretty secure. Money is really just a form of freedom. If people are free to do what they want, they will be happy; if not, they will be miserable.
- jaybol 17y agoI have had (like many people) quite a rollercoaster over the past few years, and after making more money than I needed, and then having the rug pulled out from under me, I remember telling my brother "I just can't wait to get back to an equilibrium" and once I got back to that point, I appreciated it so much more and came to understand that blowing any surplus income (or even worse, money we don't have) is the equivalent of flushing years of your life down the toilet. I love your perspective on money as a form of freedom and couldn't agree more.
- richcollins 17y agoI was refuting his assertion that running a fast food joint pays as well as programming. Not that making more money by programming will make you happier.
- pmiller2 17y agoI guess it depends on what is meant by "running a fast food joint." If it's "running" it as the general manager, then I'm sure programming wins handily. If it means owning said fast food joint, then maybe not (though I don't have a good idea how much such a business nets its owners per year).