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This essay has that tint and feel of the time where programming was an art and programmers read other programmers' code for the beauty of it. This is when my w

This essay has that tint and feel of the time where programming was an art and programmers read other programmers' code for the beauty of it. This is when my world crashed hard: when I discovered most employers dont read your past code to decide weither to hire you or not. To me, it's like hiring an illustrator without looking at its illustrations. But asking color theory questions.

robocat 4y ago
> time where programming was an art and programmers read other programmers' code Rose coloured past? In my experience, a few decades ago you wouldn’t read much of others code, and you wouldn’t have a folio of previous work you could show a potential employer. Open source or source available hardly existed. You learnt from manuals or books (Code Complete), and you often started greenfield without libraries and did everything from scratch e.g. build using DBase IV, or writing embedded code on a microprocessor starting with nothing. Now you are continually reading code to fix problems in integrated third party libraries, discussing APIs, reviewing PRs, dealing with large team software, and generally having a lot to do with code written by other people. Shitty programmers were a thing - that hasn’t changed. Amazing programmers hardly ever shared their code with others, because the infrastructure and culture to do so didn’t exist. Things are vastly better today: choice, skill, experience.
- quadcore 4y ago
  Rose coloured past? I wish you were wrong :) I wonder though, in specific industries like games for example. I remember in the 90', I was young but when we'd put our hands on some code, oh man we'd jump and read it until we'd get it. Code was rare back then, at least for us. Being able to write code alone was extraordinary. It was a new medium. It was magical. Btw, my mom used to work with dbase 3 :)

robocat 4y ago

> time where programming was an art and programmers read other programmers' code Rose coloured past? In my experience, a few decades ago you wouldn’t read much of others code, and you wouldn’t have a folio of previous work you could show a potential employer. Open source or source available hardly existed. You learnt from manuals or books (Code Complete), and you often started greenfield without libraries and did everything from scratch e.g. build using DBase IV, or writing embedded code on a microprocessor starting with nothing. Now you are continually reading code to fix problems in integrated third party libraries, discussing APIs, reviewing PRs, dealing with large team software, and generally having a lot to do with code written by other people. Shitty programmers were a thing - that hasn’t changed. Amazing programmers hardly ever shared their code with others, because the infrastructure and culture to do so didn’t exist. Things are vastly better today: choice, skill, experience.

quadcore 4y ago
Rose coloured past? I wish you were wrong :) I wonder though, in specific industries like games for example. I remember in the 90', I was young but when we'd put our hands on some code, oh man we'd jump and read it until we'd get it. Code was rare back then, at least for us. Being able to write code alone was extraordinary. It was a new medium. It was magical. Btw, my mom used to work with dbase 3 :)