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Simple: Experience. With a little grey hair comes the wisdom of what paths NOT to go down, no matter how attractive they are initially. Also, math and analysi

Simple: Experience. With a little grey hair comes the wisdom of what paths NOT to go down, no matter how attractive they are initially. Also, math and analysis skills never go out of style. The fact is, the technology industry does not value experience it values novelty. Try asking a rails dev what a taylor series is sometime. I'll take the guy with deep experience and analytical skills and self awareness but just a little $cooltech exposure any day.

ahoyhere 15y ago
Grey hairs don't correlate with wisdom. Most people don't actually grow and change all that much, they just get older.
steve-howard 15y ago
How much programming requires you to know about Taylor series? I think they're nifty, but not very relevant to most work. I sort of agree with you that experience matters, but I'm not so sure math is useful unless you're writing programs for scientific computing or you want to be a professor.
- moultano 15y ago
  That's self-fulfilling. Math lets you solve problems that you wouldn't even have though of as problems before. If you don't know the math, your brain skips over them as a fact of life rather than as something with a solution. Programming doesn't require math because programmers don't necessarily know math, not because the opportunity isn't there.
- amcintyre 15y ago
  It's not so much knowing a long list of mathematical facts, as acquiring the mindset that lets you take those facts and apply them to new situations. Sure, you can choose a programming career where you don't need to know what a Taylor series is, how large linear systems are solved, or even what sine and cosine are. Maybe that will be a safe choice for the forseeable future, but more and more apps involve 3D, machine learning, computer vision, data analysis, etc. I personally view it as increased job security to learn as much as I can about the basic tools that let me understand how those things work. To not do so is (in my mind, anyway) very much the same as saying that caching, or complexity theory, or how to build a linked list is "not very relevant to most work": it may seriously limit the jobs you're eligible for in the future, because you'll lack the foundation to understand the work at hand at even the most basic level. That said, I've always been interested in math, and probably obsess too much over knowing how things work. I can appreciate that it's just not interesting enough for most people to pursue.
- cageface 15y ago
  Taylor series are very handy in DSP for finding good approximations to computationally expensive functions.
tsotha 15y ago
>With a little grey hair comes the wisdom of what paths NOT to go down, no matter how attractive they are initially. That's certainly true. After awhile you've been involved in enough projects you can pick out the ones that are in trouble long before the younger guys. The problem is this kind of experience/wisdom is hard to get across in an interview.

ahoyhere 15y ago

Grey hairs don't correlate with wisdom. Most people don't actually grow and change all that much, they just get older.

steve-howard 15y ago

How much programming requires you to know about Taylor series? I think they're nifty, but not very relevant to most work. I sort of agree with you that experience matters, but I'm not so sure math is useful unless you're writing programs for scientific computing or you want to be a professor.

moultano 15y ago
That's self-fulfilling. Math lets you solve problems that you wouldn't even have though of as problems before. If you don't know the math, your brain skips over them as a fact of life rather than as something with a solution. Programming doesn't require math because programmers don't necessarily know math, not because the opportunity isn't there.
amcintyre 15y ago
It's not so much knowing a long list of mathematical facts, as acquiring the mindset that lets you take those facts and apply them to new situations. Sure, you can choose a programming career where you don't need to know what a Taylor series is, how large linear systems are solved, or even what sine and cosine are. Maybe that will be a safe choice for the forseeable future, but more and more apps involve 3D, machine learning, computer vision, data analysis, etc. I personally view it as increased job security to learn as much as I can about the basic tools that let me understand how those things work. To not do so is (in my mind, anyway) very much the same as saying that caching, or complexity theory, or how to build a linked list is "not very relevant to most work": it may seriously limit the jobs you're eligible for in the future, because you'll lack the foundation to understand the work at hand at even the most basic level. That said, I've always been interested in math, and probably obsess too much over knowing how things work. I can appreciate that it's just not interesting enough for most people to pursue.
cageface 15y ago
Taylor series are very handy in DSP for finding good approximations to computationally expensive functions.

tsotha 15y ago

>With a little grey hair comes the wisdom of what paths NOT to go down, no matter how attractive they are initially. That's certainly true. After awhile you've been involved in enough projects you can pick out the ones that are in trouble long before the younger guys. The problem is this kind of experience/wisdom is hard to get across in an interview.