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I'm all for not gatekeeping who "real" programmers are. But I feel like we are doing entry-level developers a disservice when we repeat "Learn to code, it's eas

I'm all for not gatekeeping who "real" programmers are. But I feel like we are doing entry-level developers a disservice when we repeat "Learn to code, it's easy FREE MONEY!" It's not. It's a slog. Programming gets very boring sometimes. It takes time. Anybody else sick of the "Just gluing stuff together" and "I just copy and paste from stackoverflow hahaha" lines? It does not reflect my day-to-day at all. Whenever I hear someone say that, it shows they are early in their career or they are not spending their time learning outside of hacking together code. More than anything, I find that NOBODY has already done what I'm currently doing, and that online resources other than primary documentation is mostly useless. Programming is hard because you have to be constantly learning and there is SO MUCH TO LEARN. Not just programming languages, or mathematics, although THAT is a whole mountain to climb in itself. But other skills: - Communication, both internally and with customers - Project management, requirements gathering - Writing good documentation - Management, mentoring new developers - Marketing - Leadership - Other random software and tools that are NOT programming. And NONE of this knowledge is going to come without study. We have worked hard to develop technologies and techniques to try and increase the probability of our projects succeeding. "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut." - Stephen King To be a great ANYTHING means being a great student first. Which means it behooves you to study and learn from the past before charging ahead.

commandlinefan 8y ago
> Programming gets very boring sometimes Not to be contrary, but I've never found _programming_ to be boring. What I've found to be the biggest frustration of working as a professional programmer (25 years now) is the expectation that programming, shared by apparently everybody who doesn't program for a living, that programming is easy as long as you've read the "learn programming in 24 hours for dummies" book and put ridiculously unrealistic expectations on anybody who calls themselves a programmer of any level of experience. And, in my experience, protecting that what they're asking for is unreasonable is a waste of breath - "I can't deliver that in that time frame because I still don't even know what it is" is always met with "you have to, figure it out, lowly programmer".
collyw 8y ago
> or they are not spending their time learning outside of hacking together code. We need to get past this attitude. >Anybody else sick of the "Just gluing stuff together" and "I just copy and paste from stackoverflow hahaha" lines? I cut and paste plenty from Stack overflow. Stack Overflow also rates me as top 5% for Python and Django answers. I glue stuff together. I try and do it in a way that is elegant and won't cause problems down the line.

commandlinefan 8y ago

> Programming gets very boring sometimes Not to be contrary, but I've never found _programming_ to be boring. What I've found to be the biggest frustration of working as a professional programmer (25 years now) is the expectation that programming, shared by apparently everybody who doesn't program for a living, that programming is easy as long as you've read the "learn programming in 24 hours for dummies" book and put ridiculously unrealistic expectations on anybody who calls themselves a programmer of any level of experience. And, in my experience, protecting that what they're asking for is unreasonable is a waste of breath - "I can't deliver that in that time frame because I still don't even know what it is" is always met with "you have to, figure it out, lowly programmer".

collyw 8y ago

> or they are not spending their time learning outside of hacking together code. We need to get past this attitude. >Anybody else sick of the "Just gluing stuff together" and "I just copy and paste from stackoverflow hahaha" lines? I cut and paste plenty from Stack overflow. Stack Overflow also rates me as top 5% for Python and Django answers. I glue stuff together. I try and do it in a way that is elegant and won't cause problems down the line.