3 ms·

Slightly different question: If you don't program, why? Because it doesn't seem relevant, or you've tried and don't like it, or you've tried and can't do it, or

by robfitz 16y ago

Slightly different question: If you don't program, why? Because it doesn't seem relevant, or you've tried and don't like it, or you've tried and can't do it, or other people can do it well, or it seems scary, or your expertise is elsewhere, or...? I meet lots of people who want to build things that require programming but don't program for whatever reason, and I've always wondered what the root cause there is. Also, happy new years ;)

zugzug1 16y ago
Probably because they don't have the mindset of a programmer. They might be good learners but lack motivation - at least that's my problem.
luckyisgood 16y ago
I don't code because I don't need to: I an employer to other smart developers who are better at development than I could ever be.
- zugzug1 16y ago
  Did you have a previous venture that did well for you? I assume that's how you can afford to hire developers.
  - luckyisgood 16y ago
    No, the company that I run now, is my first company. For the first few years, our web development studio couldn't afford to hire anyone. On of my business partners was the sole developer. My other business partner was in charge of administering web hosting and domains. I did all the selling, marketing and project management myself. We were outsourcing web design work to freelancers and students, because the three of us had no web design skills whatsoever. Then we changed the way we market our business and made our business website really sell. Business took off, we hired two designers and our first developer. After that, we hired new people in support and project management. I convinced one of my developers to accept a job in the sales department and that was one of the best decisions the both of us ever made; It enabled the company to hire more (sales)people and gave more freedom to me personally, so I could concentrate on running the business. A few months ago we outsourced one part of our business to a specialized web hosting and domains company, because they are doing it much better than we ever could. We hired a senior developer who took over software development from my partner, became our lead developer and is currently in charge of software research and in-house software products. He's not writing any code for our clients, our junior developer is. Tomorrow is our company's 9th birthday. Today, we are focusing on building a powerful sales force and creating software products we could launch internationally. I guess we could afford to hire the 10th guy in the same way we could afford to hire the 1st guy: Our business itself had to make enough money to pay for all their salaries (and our own - and we were three partners in the company). The key moment was when we put enough thought into sales+marketing and gathered enough courage to hire a complete stranger to come work for us.
klbarry 16y ago
Mostly for division of labor. I know plenty of programmers, but I want to focus on my most loved field - namely, mass persuasion in all of its forms, the science behind it, the history, practicing it, etc.
jaysonelliot 16y ago
I don't program because I'm a user experience professional. My expertise requires full-time learning as it is. I do work closely with programmers, though, and I consider our relationship a symbiotic one.
- fluorescentLAMP 16y ago
  I don't do much UX, but I have a friend who loves it but is a little disillusioned with his education. I am curious, what kind of schooling / experience do you have?
  - jaysonelliot 16y ago
    I went to college in the early nineties for art & design, started out by working as a print designer, and launched an independent magazine in 1992. That led me to the web in '95, where I learned HTML by working right on the server, using vi as my text editor. We had a tiny shop, so everyone did everything. Graphic design, front end coding, content - the only thing I couldn't do was back-end stuff. Eventually we were bought by Razorfish, and they decided some people would be called "information architects," so in 1997 I took the title of IA, and went from there. I've studied with various mentors, but my best education has come from Nielsen Norman Group's usability weeks, and constantly pestering people in emails, on message boards, listservs, conferences, you name it. The UX community is pretty tight-knit, and people really help each other out. In the years that I've done IA and UX, I've worked for IBM, Disney, and several large agencies. I started as a usability freak, but have expanded my horizons to realize that there's a whole spectrum of things that are important to a good experience. The best wakeup calls I had were when Don Norman published "Emotional Design," and when Peter Morville made his UX honeycomb ( http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php) I'm now executive director for a large NY agency with offices worldwide, and I have a very diverse group of UX people in the different offices. One thing I look for in a UX practitioner is a diversity of experience and background. Someone who studied IA in college and has only been on one path often has trouble empathizing with real world users. I have hired people with degrees in library sciences, human computer interaction, design, computer science, psychology, human factors, even theater. It's all about how a person solves problems to me, not the degree they pursued. I'd encourage your friend to spend more time on listservs like IXDA or SIGIA, going to conferences like Adaptive Path's UX Week and N/Ng's usability week, and making that his new education. It's incredibly rewarding.
slyall 16y ago
I'm a Sysadmin so programming would be useful. I can do simple scripts, scan though code, but 20-30 lines I probably my limit on anything. At work there is plenty of other stuff to do so it's not a priority to improve my programming skill. I sit next to a dozen devs who handle all the programming for the sites. In my spare time I'm working on a couple of other things so it's not a big priority either. Despite the people here who say that they went for no-programming to having a huge internet facing webapp in 3 months: (a) That was 3 months of 60+ hour weeks (b) I don't think that being a "good" programmer is that easy. The junior programmers at work have been doing it for 5 years full time. I don't think I can get to a reasonable standard in just a few months (even of 60 hour weeks).
m0nastic 16y ago
In the general sense, I don't program anymore. I work around programming (both by breaking other people's programs and reviewing source code), but I'd say the past 12 years or so the only programming I've done is limited to small scripts written to make a specific job easier. I'd love to say that the reason I haven't been programming is due to my company's policy strict intellectual property agreement (wherein I'm forbidden from working on open source projects, or publishing any code); but I stopped coding before that was even an issue. The past few months I've rekindled some of my interest, I have some things I'd like to work on, and I've rediscovered an interest in math that has lead me to start to fill in some of the gaps of my experience. I'm hoping that interest doesn't fizzle out (as it usually does), and I actually make some headway on some of my projects. In some ways I feel like we're in a golden age of programming; if nothing else I'm more excited about the state of things then I've been anytime in the past fifteen years.
lkrubner 16y ago
I think I can offer a partial answer to the question "Why do you not program." A lot of my friends have asked me to teach them how to program. Mostly they want to learn some basic PHP so they can make minor tweaks to their own websites. So far, only one has gone on to become serious and build a career in web development, mostly doing front end stuff, some jquery, etc. Of those who don't go further with it, most don't for sheer lack of interest. Of the infinite ways we can spend our time, they have other things that interest them more. Of the others, the main block is the arbitrariness of programming. They usually have the same problem with math. Most math beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication and division strikes them as divorced from reality. They question whether statistics are real, or just a fluke. They'll wonder what the practical significance of solving a quadratic equation is. They are put off by the notation, and especially the wholly arbitrary and historically structured use of certain letters for equations, such as x, y and z for unknowns, a and b and c for coefficients. They will ask why? They are not happy to be told that these conventions were adopted for convenience. They will ask "Whose convenience?" Jeff Atwood has written about this here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm... That page has this good quote: "It has taken us some time to dare to believe in our own results. It now seems to us, although we are aware that at this point we do not have sufficient data, and so it must remain a speculation, that what distinguishes the three groups in the first test is their different attitudes to meaninglessness. Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it."

by robfitz 16y ago

zugzug1 16y ago

Probably because they don't have the mindset of a programmer. They might be good learners but lack motivation - at least that's my problem.

luckyisgood 16y ago

I don't code because I don't need to: I an employer to other smart developers who are better at development than I could ever be.

zugzug1 16y ago
Did you have a previous venture that did well for you? I assume that's how you can afford to hire developers.
- luckyisgood 16y ago
  No, the company that I run now, is my first company. For the first few years, our web development studio couldn't afford to hire anyone. On of my business partners was the sole developer. My other business partner was in charge of administering web hosting and domains. I did all the selling, marketing and project management myself. We were outsourcing web design work to freelancers and students, because the three of us had no web design skills whatsoever. Then we changed the way we market our business and made our business website really sell. Business took off, we hired two designers and our first developer. After that, we hired new people in support and project management. I convinced one of my developers to accept a job in the sales department and that was one of the best decisions the both of us ever made; It enabled the company to hire more (sales)people and gave more freedom to me personally, so I could concentrate on running the business. A few months ago we outsourced one part of our business to a specialized web hosting and domains company, because they are doing it much better than we ever could. We hired a senior developer who took over software development from my partner, became our lead developer and is currently in charge of software research and in-house software products. He's not writing any code for our clients, our junior developer is. Tomorrow is our company's 9th birthday. Today, we are focusing on building a powerful sales force and creating software products we could launch internationally. I guess we could afford to hire the 10th guy in the same way we could afford to hire the 1st guy: Our business itself had to make enough money to pay for all their salaries (and our own - and we were three partners in the company). The key moment was when we put enough thought into sales+marketing and gathered enough courage to hire a complete stranger to come work for us.

klbarry 16y ago

Mostly for division of labor. I know plenty of programmers, but I want to focus on my most loved field - namely, mass persuasion in all of its forms, the science behind it, the history, practicing it, etc.

jaysonelliot 16y ago

I don't program because I'm a user experience professional. My expertise requires full-time learning as it is. I do work closely with programmers, though, and I consider our relationship a symbiotic one.

fluorescentLAMP 16y ago
I don't do much UX, but I have a friend who loves it but is a little disillusioned with his education. I am curious, what kind of schooling / experience do you have?
- jaysonelliot 16y ago
  I went to college in the early nineties for art & design, started out by working as a print designer, and launched an independent magazine in 1992. That led me to the web in '95, where I learned HTML by working right on the server, using vi as my text editor. We had a tiny shop, so everyone did everything. Graphic design, front end coding, content - the only thing I couldn't do was back-end stuff. Eventually we were bought by Razorfish, and they decided some people would be called "information architects," so in 1997 I took the title of IA, and went from there. I've studied with various mentors, but my best education has come from Nielsen Norman Group's usability weeks, and constantly pestering people in emails, on message boards, listservs, conferences, you name it. The UX community is pretty tight-knit, and people really help each other out. In the years that I've done IA and UX, I've worked for IBM, Disney, and several large agencies. I started as a usability freak, but have expanded my horizons to realize that there's a whole spectrum of things that are important to a good experience. The best wakeup calls I had were when Don Norman published "Emotional Design," and when Peter Morville made his UX honeycomb ( http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php) I'm now executive director for a large NY agency with offices worldwide, and I have a very diverse group of UX people in the different offices. One thing I look for in a UX practitioner is a diversity of experience and background. Someone who studied IA in college and has only been on one path often has trouble empathizing with real world users. I have hired people with degrees in library sciences, human computer interaction, design, computer science, psychology, human factors, even theater. It's all about how a person solves problems to me, not the degree they pursued. I'd encourage your friend to spend more time on listservs like IXDA or SIGIA, going to conferences like Adaptive Path's UX Week and N/Ng's usability week, and making that his new education. It's incredibly rewarding.

slyall 16y ago

I'm a Sysadmin so programming would be useful. I can do simple scripts, scan though code, but 20-30 lines I probably my limit on anything. At work there is plenty of other stuff to do so it's not a priority to improve my programming skill. I sit next to a dozen devs who handle all the programming for the sites. In my spare time I'm working on a couple of other things so it's not a big priority either. Despite the people here who say that they went for no-programming to having a huge internet facing webapp in 3 months: (a) That was 3 months of 60+ hour weeks (b) I don't think that being a "good" programmer is that easy. The junior programmers at work have been doing it for 5 years full time. I don't think I can get to a reasonable standard in just a few months (even of 60 hour weeks).

m0nastic 16y ago

In the general sense, I don't program anymore. I work around programming (both by breaking other people's programs and reviewing source code), but I'd say the past 12 years or so the only programming I've done is limited to small scripts written to make a specific job easier. I'd love to say that the reason I haven't been programming is due to my company's policy strict intellectual property agreement (wherein I'm forbidden from working on open source projects, or publishing any code); but I stopped coding before that was even an issue. The past few months I've rekindled some of my interest, I have some things I'd like to work on, and I've rediscovered an interest in math that has lead me to start to fill in some of the gaps of my experience. I'm hoping that interest doesn't fizzle out (as it usually does), and I actually make some headway on some of my projects. In some ways I feel like we're in a golden age of programming; if nothing else I'm more excited about the state of things then I've been anytime in the past fifteen years.

lkrubner 16y ago

I think I can offer a partial answer to the question "Why do you not program." A lot of my friends have asked me to teach them how to program. Mostly they want to learn some basic PHP so they can make minor tweaks to their own websites. So far, only one has gone on to become serious and build a career in web development, mostly doing front end stuff, some jquery, etc. Of those who don't go further with it, most don't for sheer lack of interest. Of the infinite ways we can spend our time, they have other things that interest them more. Of the others, the main block is the arbitrariness of programming. They usually have the same problem with math. Most math beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication and division strikes them as divorced from reality. They question whether statistics are real, or just a fluke. They'll wonder what the practical significance of solving a quadratic equation is. They are put off by the notation, and especially the wholly arbitrary and historically structured use of certain letters for equations, such as x, y and z for unknowns, a and b and c for coefficients. They will ask why? They are not happy to be told that these conventions were adopted for convenience. They will ask "Whose convenience?" Jeff Atwood has written about this here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm... That page has this good quote: "It has taken us some time to dare to believe in our own results. It now seems to us, although we are aware that at this point we do not have sufficient data, and so it must remain a speculation, that what distinguishes the three groups in the first test is their different attitudes to meaninglessness. Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it."