4 ms·

I'd like to hear about how the author's interactions with other coders changed after the transformation from "being a programmer" to "doing programming". In pa

• joshvm 4y ago
  From experience it can be difficult and it's something that a lot of people come across when they join a company for the first time. Particularly people coming from research into industry, or self-taught programmers (like me!) I think there's a lot of nuance around giving and taking criticism and being empathetic to the people you're working with. I've found both extremes in academia. There are researchers who will throw together absolute spaghetti, publish the paper and repository and move on, never to touch it again. There are researchers who get extremely anxious that anyone will see their spaghetti and never publish the code. There are researchers who are by all accounts good programmers, but are terrible at working with other people because they're not used to it and can be quite opinionated. The latter is also something that industry exposure helps with - e.g. when is "good enough", good enough. Also understanding that prior design decisions were made for a reason and "we had two days" is a valid one! I have a few projects that I collaborate on with people outside work and by far the most enjoyable are the "passion" ones where there's no pressure, we try to write solid code and we play around with current best practices to see what's feasible to maintain. But we also accept that there will be bugs and laugh it off when someone breaks the build.