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The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

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Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#21

Post by alkonaut »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

I think if you miss doing proper algorithmic coding and feel stuck gluing frameworks between a db and a web browser, you should just try to avoid web related development.

In embedded, desktop, games and a ton of other disciplines, there is lots of old school and fun dev and a minimal amount of CRUD boilerplate.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#22

Post by 1001101 »

First paid programming gig was working on network equipment in the 90s. If you thought MacOS was primitive, we had to write everything from bootstrapping, to the OS, to the network stack and up from scratch. On some platforms we had to debug with morse code on an LED, uphill both ways in the snow. I miss those "primitive" times as well, but.. We're so much more efficient now. Things that used to take person years now take minutes to download, and we can move on to making our stuff do things that are much more valuable to society, rather than duplicating the same work as everyone else over and over. We have the shoulders of the Stallmans, Torvalds, and many others of the world to stand on now.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#23

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

hathawsh wrote: post #18
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to me this is more like you learned to be a woodworker because you liked actually creating things with your hand tools, and now all day long is just using a CNC router is copy-pasting CNC patterns from cncoverflow and then glueing the machined wooden pieces together. it's not woodworking anymore, it's glueing and google-fu to find the best patterns on cncoverflow, together with maybe some shim-building here and there…

I just searched for cncoverflow based on your comment. I was disappointed to find it doesn't exist. It sounds cool. ;-)

hah surprised it doesn't honestly, you'd think there'd be a need for people to discuss feed rates, cnc bits, materials and so on, especially with quite a few techie woodworkers nowadays building their own CNC from kits

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#24

Post by flyaway »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

> It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one would you pick for this set of requirements and why?

I play this game with my students on the second day of class, along with "read all these people fighting on StackOverflow and tell me the answer you have the most faith in." They split 50/50 between terrified and super pumped about how much trust they'll be putting in Random Internet Code.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#25

Post by BearGoesChirp »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

>I sometimes feel like doing an Ask HN about "how do you find a coding job where you actually code most of the day when you are 20 years into your career"

Find a company who requires any non-approved outside code, no matter how well known and even if using an already approved license, to go through a multi-month approval process that is almost always longer than the current project's allotted timeline.

As it is, if I need a red black tree, and if it isn't in any approved libraries, it is faster for me to write it myself.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#27

Post by lordnacho »

I don't wish back those days. I get that it's interesting to work to the bottom of things yourself, sure. But I've run into several problems that I couldn't have hurdled on my own, in any amount of time, without the help of the internet.

- dll broken from MS. This happened to me. I did a lot of sleuthing, taking things apart, and it just didn't make sense. It was for a DB adapter, so the official documents would have been enormous. And unfruitful to read. In the end I got a hotfix from MS.

- Sort algorithm broken in Swift. Another one of those jobs where you take apart everything, because you assume it was your use of it, not Apple's library. Did a workaround after I got someone on SO to confirm it wasn't just me.

- Any number of little things that are unfindable in a manual. Heck, how often do you even look at a manual rather than an example?

- Learning issues. When you're new to a language, you don't necessarily know what you don't know. So being on an island with a manual is going to lead to you dying. Witness the many calls for help on SO from people with score 1. They don't know what's wrong with their code, and they don't know how to ask. Sometimes someone with have mercy on them and help, because it's normally something quite trivial. I remember being 15 and trying to learn c++. It was hard, because every little error you get is cryptic.

- You can make so much more with so much less now. There's a library for just about everything you can think of. The coder is mostly a chef who mixes existing ingredients. This means you can explore writing things that you'd never have time for otherwise. For example I did some web and mobile side projects beside my financial c++ coding. Always good with a breath of fresh air.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#28

Post by dheera »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

I disagree. A lot of times it still makes sense to write your own code from the ground up. There are so many instances where a lot of stuff out there is way too overcomplicated for the task at hand and takes more time to configure and resolve dependencies than it takes to just code the part you actually need from scratch.

A lot of times, if I'm looking at some random github repo out there and its dependencies aren't apt-gettable or pippable or npmable, I just say "screw it" and write it from the ground up using only things that are apt-gettable, pippable, or npmable.

Except OpenCV 3.1. I'm willing to deal with that one. But I have a script to install it that's 55 lines long. (How ridiculous is that -- we need 55 lines of code to install things these days. Can't we just tell our computers to install stuff and aggressively figure out how to install it, no questions asked?)

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#29

Post by marssaxman »

alkonaut wrote: post #21
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

I think if you miss doing proper algorithmic coding and feel stuck gluing frameworks between a db and a web browser, you should just try to avoid web related development. In embedded, desktop, games and a ton of other disciplines, there is lots of old school and fun dev and a minimal amount of CRUD boilerplate.

Yes, this has worked well for me. Stay out of web development and it's not hard to spend your time doing "real" programming. Embedded work is especially good if you feel nostalgic about 80s-style PC hacking - the downside is that product cycles are limited by the hardware side, so the pace can feel really slow.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#30

Post by pavlov »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

If doctors were hired like programmers, they would be quizzed on chemistry trivia and then asked to mix their own drugs in vials using raw pharmaceutical ingredients.
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