4 ms·
I work at a place with a very high count of PhDs. Some of them write code. All of them view writing code as something menial and unimportant and its shows in th
by theflyinghorse 6y ago
I work at a place with a very high count of PhDs. Some of them write code. All of them view writing code as something menial and unimportant and its shows in the resulting work, which from my experience is atrocious.
Of course I understand that YMV, but I will forever be skeptical of anyone writing code with a PhD after working here.
- lordgrenville 6y agoAre they CS/EE PhDs?
- theflyinghorse 6y agoThe ones who's work I've seen are EE
- baron_harkonnen 6y agoThink back to your own CS professors, were any of them particular good software engineers? I've found that Physics PhDs tend to have the highest probability of being good coders since a certain subset of them get bit by the software bug when they need to write non-trivial amounts of code to solve research problems.
- analog31 6y agoI got my physics PhD in the early 90s. Physics has had a tradition of interest in programming that goes back decades. We've always had "big data," meaning big relative to the tools available at any given moment. We ran out of problems that could be solved by pencil and paper in the 1930s. Every physics student at my college had to take FORTRAN, plus programming was assumed in many of the other courses, and we also took an electronics course that included digital techniques. And maybe the main thing was simply that programming was interesting and fun. We've also had a tradition of learning to do everything ourselves, for better or worse. I had no access to a professional programmer.