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Obviously everyone's past and background is different, so how the industry impacts them will also be different, and their views on tech culture will also be dif

Obviously everyone's past and background is different, so how the industry impacts them will also be different, and their views on tech culture will also be different, but many things that the author said resonated with me as well. I've been a programming for 10 years (three fourths of a masters degree in software engineering -- will be graduating from a part-time program next year, bachelors in engineering, multiple publications, 5 years industry), and, a couple weeks ago, asked a straightforward question about a particularly complicated implementation of a Java callable pattern, to a co-worker who had done some work with the code I was expanding on. He took it as an opportunity to tell me that I'd be dealing with this stuff all the time when I started doing "real programming" and should get used to it. He then talked about the difference between "real programming" and what I'd apparently been doing my whole career for a couple minutes, and sent me links to a github repo with code he said I should look at and learn. He wasn't more senior than I was, I had always considered us to be equals at work, he never actually answered my question, but the entire exchange unsettled me for a couple days -- I felt like what I'd been working for my entire career was just dismissed as "not real" by him, and potentially others around me (this was after a couple of other similar incidents -- class I had to drop, failed interview for a freelance job -- that had happened recently, which made it especially unnerving) That's the worst thing about this industry. It's almost habit for some people to dismiss others if they haven't heard of a particular style of in-memory caching that you use, or haven't used some language, or even use a language that you loathe. It's obnoxious. I've been thinking quite a bit about leaving, myself.

hollerith 11y ago
The rude coworker probably has that attitude (i.e., the attitude that technical skill is everything) because his social skills are so bad that he has given up on the possibility of improving them. So, if your skin is thick enough, you might take some comfort in the knowledge that the guy's probably not skilled enough to harm you even if he decides you "deserve" to be harmed :)
- erroneousfunk 11y ago
  My social skills aren't exactly world-class, but sure, I could leave if I wanted to. It's easy enough to get another job. But what happens at the next job, or the next? It's not the "technical skills are everything" view that I think was at play here -- it's the "a person must do X, Y, and Z for me to consider them a 'real programmer'/respect them" (where X, Y, and Z vary wildly from person to person). Java developers scoff at PHP developers, and NoSQL evangelists look down on anything with tables. If you don't know how to search a b-tree, computer science majors extol the virtues of a formal education, and if you're self-taught with 10 years in industry, you laugh at the poor CS majors who can't properly manage a Github repo. This creates a dangerous mix when a "culture of constant learning" starts to become a "culture of constant pedantry"
  - dblohm7 11y ago
    Wow, IMO with this comment you nailed it!
  - kragen 11y ago
    I’m self-taught with 10 or 20 years in industry, depending on how you count, and my problem with the poor CS majors is not the ones who don’t understand source control — although that’s an important skill! — but the ones who can’t write a for loop, or who use global variables when they should be using local variables. That is, my problem is not that certain CS majors don’t know things they’d never studied, but rather that they don’t know the things they did study, either. I also don’t have much patience for self-taught people with 10 years in industry who complain that tech interviews expect them to know that a B-tree lookup takes logarithmic time, or to be able to write correct syntax (of a language they supposedly know) on a whiteboard without an IDE. I probably should have patience for these people, because, objectively speaking, spelling is hard for most people, and complexity theory is rarely used in practice. But, I feel, if you’ve been self-teaching a subject for ten years, how do you manage to not teach yourself such basic things? And yet, I’ve been self-teaching Spanish for ten years, and I constantly come upon words and senses of words that I don’t know, let alone errors of gender and incorrect idiomatic expressions in my speech. Like, maybe one per sentence. So, I think I really need to have more patience.
tomjen3 11y ago
Reading through the lines he didn't know the answer and rather than say so, he turned around and attacked you. There is only one way to get around things like that and that is to keep pushing, but it requires the self-confidence that you are worth something which cannot be bootstrapped.
- angelbob 11y ago
  Sure. But the original article is a condemnation of an industry that supports and encourages people like the rude coworker. And it's not wrong. (I've been in the industry for 17 years, not counting part-time jobs, college and various stuff before. I'm not dismissing blindly or without experience.)

hollerith 11y ago

The rude coworker probably has that attitude (i.e., the attitude that technical skill is everything) because his social skills are so bad that he has given up on the possibility of improving them. So, if your skin is thick enough, you might take some comfort in the knowledge that the guy's probably not skilled enough to harm you even if he decides you "deserve" to be harmed :)

erroneousfunk 11y ago
My social skills aren't exactly world-class, but sure, I could leave if I wanted to. It's easy enough to get another job. But what happens at the next job, or the next? It's not the "technical skills are everything" view that I think was at play here -- it's the "a person must do X, Y, and Z for me to consider them a 'real programmer'/respect them" (where X, Y, and Z vary wildly from person to person). Java developers scoff at PHP developers, and NoSQL evangelists look down on anything with tables. If you don't know how to search a b-tree, computer science majors extol the virtues of a formal education, and if you're self-taught with 10 years in industry, you laugh at the poor CS majors who can't properly manage a Github repo. This creates a dangerous mix when a "culture of constant learning" starts to become a "culture of constant pedantry"
- dblohm7 11y ago
  Wow, IMO with this comment you nailed it!
- kragen 11y ago
  I’m self-taught with 10 or 20 years in industry, depending on how you count, and my problem with the poor CS majors is not the ones who don’t understand source control — although that’s an important skill! — but the ones who can’t write a for loop, or who use global variables when they should be using local variables. That is, my problem is not that certain CS majors don’t know things they’d never studied, but rather that they don’t know the things they did study, either. I also don’t have much patience for self-taught people with 10 years in industry who complain that tech interviews expect them to know that a B-tree lookup takes logarithmic time, or to be able to write correct syntax (of a language they supposedly know) on a whiteboard without an IDE. I probably should have patience for these people, because, objectively speaking, spelling is hard for most people, and complexity theory is rarely used in practice. But, I feel, if you’ve been self-teaching a subject for ten years, how do you manage to not teach yourself such basic things? And yet, I’ve been self-teaching Spanish for ten years, and I constantly come upon words and senses of words that I don’t know, let alone errors of gender and incorrect idiomatic expressions in my speech. Like, maybe one per sentence. So, I think I really need to have more patience.

tomjen3 11y ago

Reading through the lines he didn't know the answer and rather than say so, he turned around and attacked you. There is only one way to get around things like that and that is to keep pushing, but it requires the self-confidence that you are worth something which cannot be bootstrapped.

angelbob 11y ago
Sure. But the original article is a condemnation of an industry that supports and encourages people like the rude coworker. And it's not wrong. (I've been in the industry for 17 years, not counting part-time jobs, college and various stuff before. I'm not dismissing blindly or without experience.)