5 ms·

Programming isn't that hard - why don't any of them want to join us? You could become a passable programmer in 3 years and there's no school admittance board yo

by emmett 15y ago

Programming isn't that hard - why don't any of them want to join us? You could become a passable programmer in 3 years and there's no school admittance board you have to impress with test scores!

rorrr 15y ago
To be a good programmer is hard. It requires knowledge of a lot of areas - math, logic, algorithms, particular languages, operating system, networks, databases, particular technologies. Just think of what it really takes to create even a simple dynamic website.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  I think to be a good/great programmer is hard. But to be a good-enough programmer to make a well-above-average living isn't that tough.
  - recampbell 15y ago
    Exactly. Even below average programmers can find a job and feed their families.
- ams6110 15y ago
  I can honestly say that I hardly ever really use math in the programming I do. The rest I agree with. EDIT: To clarify, I hardly ever use math at the level I was required to study in my comp. sci. degree curriculum. Of course I use basic arithmetic calculations often enough.
  - Roboprog 15y ago
    Yes and no. Do we not use many of the concepts? * boolean algebra / simplification of terms? * vectors, matrices, tensors (er, strings, arrays, objects) * functions? functions of functions? * set theory? * graph theory? * "closure" of operations (e.g. - what are the limits / bounds of this operation / function? Can I encode every character / code-point in this output representation? -- no? prepare to get hacked, then)
jonknee 15y ago
Programming isn't that hard to you, it's extraordinarily hard to a large percentage of the population. There are plenty of things I perceive as hard that people who specialize in it do not (I can't draw for the life of me!).
- rorrr 15y ago
  Drawing is actually a skill, you can learn it. It just takes time. Make 10-20 drawings a day of real life objects, and in 3-4 months you will see how much better you are.
  - emmett 15y ago
    This is completely true. I took a 1 year drawing course in highschool and was shocked by just how good I got, practicing 5 hours a week. Most skills are not as difficult as people think they are with consistent effort over time. People are not born with a drawing module in their brain that makes them different than you, and that's true for programming and pretty much everything else as well.
- billswift 15y ago
  You might try Henning Nelms Thinking with a Pencil, it is a great source for learning practical sketching and drawing.
patio11 15y ago
So I periodically think this is true, and wonder "Why do I get paid so fantastically well for just drizzling some AJAX goo on top of pre-existing APIs?", and then I actually talk to Real People (TM) and remember that I inhabit another planet from them. On their planet, being able to calculate the area of a rectangle reliably, the first time, makes you anomalously good with math. The notion of programs as long strings of instructions, followed sequentially, with predictable results is a fantasy: computers are observed to operate mostly randomly, all of the time. Some days I go to my Googles and it's the Googles with the box in the middle,a some days I go to my Googles and it's the Googles with the box at the top. Why does Microsoft keep changing the Googles? THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING. You and I might think there is a distinction between programs and data, and we could describe how these exist in different places in a hierarchical file system on a computer, which is an abstraction over sectors on a hard disk. Every technical word in that sentence is scary juju to most of the population. There are many otherwise intelligent people who cannot open MS Word without a document emailed to them first. If you took away the document, they wouldn't know how to open Word and wouldn't know how to correct that. In addition, many folks who are unemployed or underemployed in the United States either cannot read this post or cannot understand enough of it to answer simple questions like "Does Patrick think that programming is hard?" You can certainly become a passable programmer in 3 years starting from being well-educated, intelligent, and reasonably skilled at knowledge work in the information economy. If you're 3 for 3 on those, you don't have a problem right now.
- ams6110 15y ago
  Every technical word in that sentence is scary juju to most of the population. This is why I hate to get into small talk with someone I've just met. One of the first polite questions I get is "so, what do you do?" and to judge by reactions its as if I immediately start talking like the adults in a "Peanuts" cartoon. And even if I try to be as nontechnical as possible ("I do website work") you can see they just don't want to continue the conversation at that point.
  - jasonkester 15y ago
    "I make websites. No, not the pretty graphics and stuff, the bit that make them do stuff. You know that little "e" up in the corner? Whenever that's spinning around, my stuff's happening." "sound exciting" "Yeah, it's almost exactly that exciting. So what do you do?"
rorrr 15y ago
3 years of learning will only land you very junior level positions. In 3 years you will barely learn how to write crappy code and a few technologies. I've written a few times here about how I interview people. Most of the candidates have BS degrees in comp sci, most of them have 3 to 15 years of work experience. Most of them cannot write a (correct) function to reverse a string.
- mahyarm 15y ago
  Where are you interviewing? Are you putting tricky restrictions like you can't allocate a second array and other things like that?
  - rorrr 15y ago
    I interviewed at a very large corporation. 3-4 interviews a week. We accepted any correct solution.
    - jodrellblank 15y ago
      You've said correct twice, but what do you mean by it? Do you give a spec they have to meet or a test set to compare against? Must they handle encodings/Unicode, or fail predictably in edge cases? Or are you talking about characters swapped, even/odd lengths/ empty strings, that's all?
      - rorrr 15y ago
        Oh, we usually ask a very simple version - function to return a reversed string that's passed as a parameter. It consists of English letters, it's not blank. You're not allowed to use the standard string reverse function/method. It never gets to edge cases. Most people can't even write the simple version. I'm pretty sure nobody can write the unicode-safe version during the interview, even the smartest developers I've worked with (I guess that depends on the language though).
  - jcromartie 15y ago
    I recently had 2/5 candidates with Master's degrees in CS unable to give me a number in hex. I didn't ask them to write a program to do it, just to include it in the email subject when replying to a posting. Another 2/5 of them gave me awful code to do it. It's kind of sad.

by emmett 15y ago

Programming isn't that hard - why don't any of them want to join us? You could become a passable programmer in 3 years and there's no school admittance board you have to impress with test scores!

rorrr 15y ago

To be a good programmer is hard. It requires knowledge of a lot of areas - math, logic, algorithms, particular languages, operating system, networks, databases, particular technologies. Just think of what it really takes to create even a simple dynamic website.

mattdeboard 15y ago
I think to be a good/great programmer is hard. But to be a good-enough programmer to make a well-above-average living isn't that tough.
- recampbell 15y ago
  Exactly. Even below average programmers can find a job and feed their families.
ams6110 15y ago
I can honestly say that I hardly ever really use math in the programming I do. The rest I agree with. EDIT: To clarify, I hardly ever use math at the level I was required to study in my comp. sci. degree curriculum. Of course I use basic arithmetic calculations often enough.
- Roboprog 15y ago
  Yes and no. Do we not use many of the concepts? * boolean algebra / simplification of terms? * vectors, matrices, tensors (er, strings, arrays, objects) * functions? functions of functions? * set theory? * graph theory? * "closure" of operations (e.g. - what are the limits / bounds of this operation / function? Can I encode every character / code-point in this output representation? -- no? prepare to get hacked, then)

jonknee 15y ago

Programming isn't that hard to you, it's extraordinarily hard to a large percentage of the population. There are plenty of things I perceive as hard that people who specialize in it do not (I can't draw for the life of me!).

rorrr 15y ago
Drawing is actually a skill, you can learn it. It just takes time. Make 10-20 drawings a day of real life objects, and in 3-4 months you will see how much better you are.
- emmett 15y ago
  This is completely true. I took a 1 year drawing course in highschool and was shocked by just how good I got, practicing 5 hours a week. Most skills are not as difficult as people think they are with consistent effort over time. People are not born with a drawing module in their brain that makes them different than you, and that's true for programming and pretty much everything else as well.
billswift 15y ago
You might try Henning Nelms Thinking with a Pencil, it is a great source for learning practical sketching and drawing.

patio11 15y ago

So I periodically think this is true, and wonder "Why do I get paid so fantastically well for just drizzling some AJAX goo on top of pre-existing APIs?", and then I actually talk to Real People (TM) and remember that I inhabit another planet from them. On their planet, being able to calculate the area of a rectangle reliably, the first time, makes you anomalously good with math. The notion of programs as long strings of instructions, followed sequentially, with predictable results is a fantasy: computers are observed to operate mostly randomly, all of the time. Some days I go to my Googles and it's the Googles with the box in the middle,a some days I go to my Googles and it's the Googles with the box at the top. Why does Microsoft keep changing the Googles? THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING. You and I might think there is a distinction between programs and data, and we could describe how these exist in different places in a hierarchical file system on a computer, which is an abstraction over sectors on a hard disk. Every technical word in that sentence is scary juju to most of the population. There are many otherwise intelligent people who cannot open MS Word without a document emailed to them first. If you took away the document, they wouldn't know how to open Word and wouldn't know how to correct that. In addition, many folks who are unemployed or underemployed in the United States either cannot read this post or cannot understand enough of it to answer simple questions like "Does Patrick think that programming is hard?" You can certainly become a passable programmer in 3 years starting from being well-educated, intelligent, and reasonably skilled at knowledge work in the information economy. If you're 3 for 3 on those, you don't have a problem right now.

ams6110 15y ago
Every technical word in that sentence is scary juju to most of the population. This is why I hate to get into small talk with someone I've just met. One of the first polite questions I get is "so, what do you do?" and to judge by reactions its as if I immediately start talking like the adults in a "Peanuts" cartoon. And even if I try to be as nontechnical as possible ("I do website work") you can see they just don't want to continue the conversation at that point.
- jasonkester 15y ago
  "I make websites. No, not the pretty graphics and stuff, the bit that make them do stuff. You know that little "e" up in the corner? Whenever that's spinning around, my stuff's happening." "sound exciting" "Yeah, it's almost exactly that exciting. So what do you do?"

rorrr 15y ago

3 years of learning will only land you very junior level positions. In 3 years you will barely learn how to write crappy code and a few technologies. I've written a few times here about how I interview people. Most of the candidates have BS degrees in comp sci, most of them have 3 to 15 years of work experience. Most of them cannot write a (correct) function to reverse a string.

mahyarm 15y ago
Where are you interviewing? Are you putting tricky restrictions like you can't allocate a second array and other things like that?
- rorrr 15y ago
  I interviewed at a very large corporation. 3-4 interviews a week. We accepted any correct solution.
  - jodrellblank 15y ago
    You've said correct twice, but what do you mean by it? Do you give a spec they have to meet or a test set to compare against? Must they handle encodings/Unicode, or fail predictably in edge cases? Or are you talking about characters swapped, even/odd lengths/ empty strings, that's all?
    - rorrr 15y ago
      Oh, we usually ask a very simple version - function to return a reversed string that's passed as a parameter. It consists of English letters, it's not blank. You're not allowed to use the standard string reverse function/method. It never gets to edge cases. Most people can't even write the simple version. I'm pretty sure nobody can write the unicode-safe version during the interview, even the smartest developers I've worked with (I guess that depends on the language though).
- jcromartie 15y ago
  I recently had 2/5 candidates with Master's degrees in CS unable to give me a number in hex. I didn't ask them to write a program to do it, just to include it in the email subject when replying to a posting. Another 2/5 of them gave me awful code to do it. It's kind of sad.