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It’s a little confusing and sad to me that people have to try to pressure themselves to go from zero to professional engineer in a short period of time. That so

by tibbar 5y ago

It’s a little confusing and sad to me that people have to try to pressure themselves to go from zero to professional engineer in a short period of time. That sounds stressful and, frankly, almost impossible. Like a lot of people here, I taught myself how to code as a child in a terribly inefficient manner. I spent probably around 100 hours making games on my TI-83 - you had write a formula to figure out how to color each pixel, it was awfully slow. I spent hundreds of hours on Microsoft InfoPath making toy apps with a little scripting. Everything was very difficult, but it was insanely fun. I’m a night owl but I would wake up at 4am to start coding stuff so no one could tell me to go outside. At some point I read an introductory text that showed how to do web things, and later I got a server, and made some real-time multiplayer games by the end of high school. I didn’t know about databases so I would serialize to and from a text file. I’ve never had that much fun for such a sustained period of time since then. I couldn’t replicate it, and with the distractions of modern tech I probably couldn’t even focus that much anymore. I’m grateful that my childhood obsession turned out to be absurdly lucrative. Best wishes to everyone, young and old, diving in for the first time!

analog31 5y ago
>>>> I’m grateful that my childhood obsession turned out to be absurdly lucrative. Best wishes to everyone, young and old, diving in for the first time! There does seem to be an irony, that the people who were movitated by interest in the subject matter aside from money, turned it into a lucrative career. Meanwhile the people who were motivated by a lucrative career lost interest quickly. Maybe not general enough to be a good generalization, but I've seen it a number of times. I think market demand for certain skill sets does not contradict the principle of "find your passion," but just means that some peoples' passions lead to marketable skills. Becoming a good scientist, or professional musician, takes about 15 years, starting in middle school or earlier.
908B64B197 5y ago
> It’s a little confusing and sad to me that people have to try to pressure themselves to go from zero to professional engineer in a short period of time. That sounds stressful and, frankly, almost impossible. ... That's what engineering school is for. At least, that's how aerospace engineers, EE and so on do it. > I’m grateful that my childhood obsession turned out to be absurdly lucrative. I find that, when there's passion there's generally money. People that are insanely passionate will make things happen naturally.
- tibbar 5y ago
  Yes, undergrad is a good place to learn to code. I’m still glad I learned when I did, and I think it made college a lot easier, but no doubt four years is plenty of time, and allows ample opportunities to code for pleasure as well. I was referring to the people who, say, try to switch careers to tech and go to a bootcamp to learn to code. That just sounds really hard to me, a horribly compressed timeline, and I feel like you would always be worried about gaining professional competency vs just relaxing and enjoying the ride. I knew a guy who actually went back for an undergrad and masters in CS in his fifties. He was a classmate and briefly a coworker. He was an excellent student and won some department award, and very organized, but somehow not very good at coding things. He would get lost in a sea of sticky pads and notebooks and take two weeks to do very small amounts of work. He was let go in the end. We forget how hard this stuff can be. (Ironically to me it’s everything else that seems hard, from music to mechanics to sports, coding is just so… logical.)

by tibbar 5y ago

analog31 5y ago

>>>> I’m grateful that my childhood obsession turned out to be absurdly lucrative. Best wishes to everyone, young and old, diving in for the first time! There does seem to be an irony, that the people who were movitated by interest in the subject matter aside from money, turned it into a lucrative career. Meanwhile the people who were motivated by a lucrative career lost interest quickly. Maybe not general enough to be a good generalization, but I've seen it a number of times. I think market demand for certain skill sets does not contradict the principle of "find your passion," but just means that some peoples' passions lead to marketable skills. Becoming a good scientist, or professional musician, takes about 15 years, starting in middle school or earlier.

908B64B197 5y ago

> It’s a little confusing and sad to me that people have to try to pressure themselves to go from zero to professional engineer in a short period of time. That sounds stressful and, frankly, almost impossible. ... That's what engineering school is for. At least, that's how aerospace engineers, EE and so on do it. > I’m grateful that my childhood obsession turned out to be absurdly lucrative. I find that, when there's passion there's generally money. People that are insanely passionate will make things happen naturally.

tibbar 5y ago
Yes, undergrad is a good place to learn to code. I’m still glad I learned when I did, and I think it made college a lot easier, but no doubt four years is plenty of time, and allows ample opportunities to code for pleasure as well. I was referring to the people who, say, try to switch careers to tech and go to a bootcamp to learn to code. That just sounds really hard to me, a horribly compressed timeline, and I feel like you would always be worried about gaining professional competency vs just relaxing and enjoying the ride. I knew a guy who actually went back for an undergrad and masters in CS in his fifties. He was a classmate and briefly a coworker. He was an excellent student and won some department award, and very organized, but somehow not very good at coding things. He would get lost in a sea of sticky pads and notebooks and take two weeks to do very small amounts of work. He was let go in the end. We forget how hard this stuff can be. (Ironically to me it’s everything else that seems hard, from music to mechanics to sports, coding is just so… logical.)