4 ms·

I have never met anyone who was not technical and then became a coder. In pre-2000 dot.com you could've gotten a job with a word 'Internet' on your resume, but

by jscore 16y ago

I have never met anyone who was not technical and then became a coder. In pre-2000 dot.com you could've gotten a job with a word 'Internet' on your resume, but nowadays you should at least know decent coding.

Seth_Kriticos 16y ago
Yup. There are people with the logical mindset and problem solving ability to just naturally pick up coding. But most are not, and that's just an ability that's very hard to develop in later phases of life. In most cases it develops during teen age. Guess the last few decades did not really encourage these kind of developments, which is why we are running short now. It's not easy to fix though.
- kls 16y ago
  Guess the last few decades did not really encourage these kind of developments, which is why we are running short now. It's not easy to fix though It was the .com bust along with a few other things. The market was so over-saturated with hacks in for a quick buck that when it popped it took a while to shake out who was who. This ran a lot of good developers out of the market never to return. The outsourcing craze right afterward did nothing to help the situation and just reinforced that the remaining few jobs where going to be further and further constrained. Which is what happened for a while. The schools and their CS programs pretty much became ghost town overnight. I know, I had went back to finish my degree after 10 years in the industry around that time. I remember what was a full class became me an 2 other guys. I remember saying to one of them. Times are going to get good again in about 5 years.
iamelgringo 16y ago
Mind you, I was programming Basic when I was 7, but I left it behind for years. I went back to school for software engineering when I was 33. I've been working as an ER/Critical Care nurse for 18 years. I'm currently bootstrapping a search engine for economic/financial news at http://Newsley.com http://Newsley.com. (alpha of search is here: http://newsley.com/search http://newsley.com/search )
- benmccann 16y ago
  Your tagging is pretty cool. How'd you figure out for each tag whether it was a person, country, city, etc.? Did you just look them each up on Wikipedia? E.g. http://newsley.com/articles/eu-threatens-to-block-chinese-bids-for-public-contracts/24095 http://newsley.com/articles/eu-threatens-to-block-chinese-bi...
  - iamelgringo 16y ago
    It's a semantic web api from Reuters: http://www.opencalais.com/ http://www.opencalais.com/ Frankly, it's amazing. There's a sandbox where you can play with it here: http://viewer.opencalais.com/ http://viewer.opencalais.com/ Copy and past a couple paragraphs of text into the text box, and you can see some of what the api can do.
GFischer 16y ago
My googling skills are failing me, but there was an article that had some data on the number of people in the "hard" sciences moving into the "soft" sciences, and the number of people that went the other way. Not surprisingly, it was basically a one-way street. (It also reminds me of http://xkcd.com/435/ http://xkcd.com/435/ ) Addendum: For the difference between hard and soft science, see http://clustertwo.org/articles/Strong%20Inference%20%28Platt%29.pdf http://clustertwo.org/articles/Strong%20Inference%20%28Platt... - the hard sciences are the ones based on the "strong inference" defined there

by jscore 16y ago

Seth_Kriticos 16y ago

Yup. There are people with the logical mindset and problem solving ability to just naturally pick up coding. But most are not, and that's just an ability that's very hard to develop in later phases of life. In most cases it develops during teen age. Guess the last few decades did not really encourage these kind of developments, which is why we are running short now. It's not easy to fix though.

kls 16y ago
Guess the last few decades did not really encourage these kind of developments, which is why we are running short now. It's not easy to fix though It was the .com bust along with a few other things. The market was so over-saturated with hacks in for a quick buck that when it popped it took a while to shake out who was who. This ran a lot of good developers out of the market never to return. The outsourcing craze right afterward did nothing to help the situation and just reinforced that the remaining few jobs where going to be further and further constrained. Which is what happened for a while. The schools and their CS programs pretty much became ghost town overnight. I know, I had went back to finish my degree after 10 years in the industry around that time. I remember what was a full class became me an 2 other guys. I remember saying to one of them. Times are going to get good again in about 5 years.

iamelgringo 16y ago

Mind you, I was programming Basic when I was 7, but I left it behind for years. I went back to school for software engineering when I was 33. I've been working as an ER/Critical Care nurse for 18 years. I'm currently bootstrapping a search engine for economic/financial news at http://Newsley.com http://Newsley.com. (alpha of search is here: http://newsley.com/search http://newsley.com/search )

benmccann 16y ago
Your tagging is pretty cool. How'd you figure out for each tag whether it was a person, country, city, etc.? Did you just look them each up on Wikipedia? E.g. http://newsley.com/articles/eu-threatens-to-block-chinese-bids-for-public-contracts/24095 http://newsley.com/articles/eu-threatens-to-block-chinese-bi...
- iamelgringo 16y ago
  It's a semantic web api from Reuters: http://www.opencalais.com/ http://www.opencalais.com/ Frankly, it's amazing. There's a sandbox where you can play with it here: http://viewer.opencalais.com/ http://viewer.opencalais.com/ Copy and past a couple paragraphs of text into the text box, and you can see some of what the api can do.

GFischer 16y ago

My googling skills are failing me, but there was an article that had some data on the number of people in the "hard" sciences moving into the "soft" sciences, and the number of people that went the other way. Not surprisingly, it was basically a one-way street. (It also reminds me of http://xkcd.com/435/ http://xkcd.com/435/ ) Addendum: For the difference between hard and soft science, see http://clustertwo.org/articles/Strong%20Inference%20%28Platt%29.pdf http://clustertwo.org/articles/Strong%20Inference%20%28Platt... - the hard sciences are the ones based on the "strong inference" defined there