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This was fun to read. What I saw was someone say that they were panicking because they needed time to understand how all the things that go into learning to be

This was fun to read. What I saw was someone say that they were panicking because they needed time to understand how all the things that go into learning to be a researcher goes into learning how to be a professional programmer. I'm quite sure his mind will be blown once he realizes that creating things, while incredibly rewarding, is only half the work. The other half is getting someone else to use your widget. Also (bad at math joke), there's an extra 50% involved in getting attribution. My take? I'm biased because I was educated as a researcher. I can name-drop three famous professors at my alma mater (and yes, I did study under all three), but what really pushed me was getting a job, on campus, writing software to support PhD candidates in another discipline. I quickly made the jump from researcher to practicum precisely because I was trained as a researcher, then applied those skills to understanding what my customers needed. Seems to me this guy found his own "push". And yet, he's still a researcher.

sanxiyn 12y ago
FYI, the author is not male.
enraged_camel 12y ago
>>but what really pushed me was getting a job, on campus, writing software to support PhD candidates in another discipline. I quickly made the jump from researcher to practicum precisely because I was trained as a researcher, then applied those skills to understanding what my customers needed. I think what allowed you to make that jump was that you were inherently familiar with the problem domain; even though your customers did research in another discipline, at the end of the day they were still researchers. I was the lead trainer at my company, and the training materials (hundreds of pages of them) used to be on Word documents. I got fed up with it, taught myself Rails, developed and deployed a learning management system, and migrated the content there. It was very successful because as the lead trainer, I knew exactly what features would be needed and how they should work. It was kind of funny actually because when I gave a demo to the trainers in other teams, they basically said, "wow, this is exactly what we need -- when can we start using it?" Which is music to any programmer's ears.

sanxiyn 12y ago

FYI, the author is not male.

enraged_camel 12y ago

>>but what really pushed me was getting a job, on campus, writing software to support PhD candidates in another discipline. I quickly made the jump from researcher to practicum precisely because I was trained as a researcher, then applied those skills to understanding what my customers needed. I think what allowed you to make that jump was that you were inherently familiar with the problem domain; even though your customers did research in another discipline, at the end of the day they were still researchers. I was the lead trainer at my company, and the training materials (hundreds of pages of them) used to be on Word documents. I got fed up with it, taught myself Rails, developed and deployed a learning management system, and migrated the content there. It was very successful because as the lead trainer, I knew exactly what features would be needed and how they should work. It was kind of funny actually because when I gave a demo to the trainers in other teams, they basically said, "wow, this is exactly what we need -- when can we start using it?" Which is music to any programmer's ears.