5 ms·
My PhD supervisor used to say: "one week of programming easily saves an hour of thinking"
by gpuhacker 6y ago
My PhD supervisor used to say: "one week of programming easily saves an hour of thinking"
- CyberFonic 6y agoThat is the core difference between academia and business. Any engineer who sits back and stares out the window thinking is reprimanded or even fired by the managers for not working.
- saagarjha 6y agoI know a lot of engineers who take walks and stuff and still keep their jobs. As long as they’re not skipping out on meetings and actually getting work done at some point, I don’t think it really matters all that much.
- LifeIsBio 6y agoHmm... as an engineer in industry, if I decide I want to take a walk in the middle of the day, I make sure I don’t have any meetings, then I get up and leave. There are a lot of differences between academia and industry, but this isn’t one of them. I can’t imagine working for a company where I was worried about something like looking out a window, or not appearing to be working.
- arvinsim 6y agoYou would be surprised of the number of companies who still has a “butt-in-seat” mindset.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoThey probably have legacy software and turnover problems... those are usually required before getting a "butt-in-seat" mindset.
- gspr 6y agoI undertand the general idea you're trying to convey, but holy shit, you seem to be in a terrifyingly bad work environment.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Sharlin 6y agoPerhaps ”some” but certainly not ”any”.
- empath75 6y agoNo software development job I’ve ever had has been that way.
- afarrell 6y agoI have never seen this.
- gspr 6y agoThis is so true, and I'm stealing this. One thing I have found programming helpful for in the thought process, though, is to uncover things that one thinks one has already thought through fully, but where there are gaps of detail one has leapt across without even noticing. Programming tends to reveal those.
- KineticLensman 6y ago> gaps of detail one has leapt across without even noticing. Programming tends to reveal those Agree. As a hobbyist coder I try where possible to do some conceptual thinking by writing out in English my high-level solution approach, and then start coding, fully expecting to uncover some details I hadn't anticipated in advance. I try to avoid diving right in with a hack. But sometimes I find it useful to start with a quick-and-dirty implementation, especially if I'm learning a new tool or language.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lpill 6y agoWhat about pen and paper? This phrase only applies when the "idea" is CC related. For all other subjects - and their intersection with CC - programming is secondary. Whenever I got the time to first sketch the idea I become much more assertive when coding it.
- KineticLensman 6y agoI once heard a training course described as "One day of useful content squeezed into a whole week"
- swyx 6y agohonestly im not sure how sarcastically to take this. you can listen to one day of content and really not absorb any of it. it takes the rest of the week to apply, reframe, doublecheck, internalize.
- KineticLensman 6y agoTotally agree with you about the time to internalise training. That said, the quote was a sarcastic one about a specific training course that one of my colleagues thought had too little content.
- amelius 6y agoBecause programming is 99% plumbing and 1% thinking.
- jcelerier 6y agoTo give another data point I don't remember one time during my phd where hours of thinking didn't crumble immediately after starting to write code to validate it (or did survive to live to this day if the line of thought was indeed valid). I've been in meetings that lasted for days and which were all ultimately invalidated by actually writing matching code which immediately made all the issues in the lines of thought glaring and obvious.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y agoIf programming is a random walk or if the programmer is a fitness function. UI programming makes me feel this way especially.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI believe the original of this type of quote is "A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library." This saying is referred to as Westheimer's Discovery.