No, you are not nuts. Here is an example of nuts: thinking that you have a telepathic connection with your ex-girlfriend, who wasn't actually your girlfriend.
You are normal. Go for it.
Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
61–70 of 85 posts
Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The law of supply and demand.
You mean there are too many people wanting to work for a game company?
Many, many young devs are in love with the idea of developing games. Many more than the industry actually needs. It follows that you're less likely to land such a gig, and that you're more likely to get underpaid and be burned out by overwork if you do - there's always someone else who still has stars in their eyes, waiting to take your place.
If gaming is really a dev's passion, they should already have compelling work they've done on their own, a substantial portfolio, some contacts developed, etc. If not, it's probably an unrealistic flight of fancy, and it should be recognized as such and discarded.
Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you FizzBuzz? If so, you're experienced enough to get a job as a developer. I am always so surprised when I hear that, and have a difficult time believing that's true. With only an extremely beginner's level understanding of Python, I can solve FizzBuzz. Can I get a dev job?
It's surprising how bad many developers are. We had a candidate in the other day who was struggling with a problem, so we kept making it easier until finally we asked him to "write some code to tell me if the input string consists only of the letter 'a'". When he got that wrong, the interview was over. Not to pick too much on this guy, because I really enjoyed talking with him, but it was a good reminder of how the r…
I'm very sorry, but I have to laugh at this. That's like the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy skit where for the Final Jeopardy round an exasperated-to-the-breaking-point Trebek deploys a deliberately extremely easy question at the celebrities such as "write any letter" and they still find a way to mess it up.
And no, I don't feel sorry for people like this. Despite their glaring incompetence they still manage to snow people into hiring them. Some of them easily make $500,000/year and up if they remora themselves to the underbelly of a large company and emit horrible VB code.
Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
#64You're nuts.
I'm also 33 years old, and let me tell you, getting a break in this business at 33 with not much professional experience is very, very difficult. By 33 you're expected to have around ten years experience in the relevant technologies/application domains. At least 3 or 4 are pretty much requird for even a so-called "entry level" position. Companies are willing to cut you a break if you're fresh out of college, less so if you're not.
Your best bet is to move to either the SF Bay area or the Boston area. There you are more likely to find hiring managers who don't care about the bullshit HR filters and do care about what you can actually do and what your interests and motivations are.
Outside of that, good luck to you.
Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
FizzBuzz comes from a game for six to eight year olds, who also don't understand modulus. That's part of the reason it is such a great problem: they fact that you realize "Hey, this is a whole lot easier with modulus" demonstrates that you can reason abstractly. You certainly don't need a mod operator to make it work -- if you're capable of writing a function, you can write divides_evenly_by_3(int number) using facts…
> write a program which calculates the sum of all numbers between 1 and 1,000 whose digits sum up to 7 My Python answer: sum(x for x in xrange(2, 1000) if sum(int(y) for y in str(x)) == 7) # 9324 Anyone have improvements on that? (I used the range (1, 1000) as opposed to [1, 1000], but it doesn't make a difference since the edge values don't have digits that sum to 7.)
There are a lot of micro improvements you can do to this. For example, after you find sum() == 7, you can increment x by 9 (since the largest digit in the ones column can be 7, and this takes a deficit of two digits to get back to the rollover -- and then 7 more to get a sum of 7 again).
And frankly I'm not sure if its faster to convert to string and back to int, or if it would be better to just use modulo arithmitic to get the values associated with the ones/tens/hundreds.
In any case, what you have is certainly readable though.
Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's surprising how bad many developers are. We had a candidate in the other day who was struggling with a problem, so we kept making it easier until finally we asked him to "write some code to tell me if the input string consists only of the letter 'a'". When he got that wrong, the interview was over. Not to pick too much on this guy, because I really enjoyed talking with him, but it was a good reminder of how the r…
What?! Wait, was this an interview for Google? How did this guy get to this stage? I've always assumed I probably couldn't get an interview at Google, but geez...
Yeah, I would love to know how he got that far as well. It's definitely not a normal occurrence for people to get onsite interviews and then bomb like that. Everyone that I've interviewed up until this point was pretty decent even if they weren't ultimately extended an offer.
Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> write a program which calculates the sum of all numbers between 1 and 1,000 whose digits sum up to 7 My Python answer: sum(x for x in xrange(2, 1000) if sum(int(y) for y in str(x)) == 7) # 9324 Anyone have improvements on that? (I used the range (1, 1000) as opposed to [1, 1000], but it doesn't make a difference since the edge values don't have digits that sum to 7.)
There are a lot of micro improvements you can do to this. For example, after you find sum() == 7, you can increment x by 9 (since the largest digit in the ones column can be 7, and this takes a deficit of two digits to get back to the rollover -- and then 7 more to get a sum of 7 again). And frankly I'm not sure if its faster to convert to string and back to int, or if it would be better to just use modulo arithmitic…
I mainly meant "improve" in terms of conciseness and readability. I didn't see any need for optimization because the snippet runs instantly:
$ time python -c "print sum(x for x in xrange(2, 1000) if sum(int(y) for y in str(x)) == 7)"
9324
real 0m0.138s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m0.012sRe: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered -- is the reason people can't do fizzbuzz because a lack of understanding of modulus or because they can't comprehend the problem? I know modulus isn't necessary, but I can see someone not doing the problem if the solution they are turning in is in a less elegant way.
FizzBuzz comes from a game for six to eight year olds, who also don't understand modulus. That's part of the reason it is such a great problem: they fact that you realize "Hey, this is a whole lot easier with modulus" demonstrates that you can reason abstractly. You certainly don't need a mod operator to make it work -- if you're capable of writing a function, you can write divides_evenly_by_3(int number) using facts…
My Python answer for the second question, where `post` is patrio11's post as input:
from collections import defaultdict
from string import ascii_letters
d= collections.defaultdict(int)
for letter in post:
d[letter] += 1
print [letter for letter in sorted(d, key=d.get, reverse=True) if letter in ascii_letters][2]
Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered -- is the reason people can't do fizzbuzz because a lack of understanding of modulus or because they can't comprehend the problem? I know modulus isn't necessary, but I can see someone not doing the problem if the solution they are turning in is in a less elegant way.
FizzBuzz comes from a game for six to eight year olds, who also don't understand modulus. That's part of the reason it is such a great problem: they fact that you realize "Hey, this is a whole lot easier with modulus" demonstrates that you can reason abstractly. You certainly don't need a mod operator to make it work -- if you're capable of writing a function, you can write divides_evenly_by_3(int number) using facts…
> Or write a program which takes this post as input and tells me what the 3rd most common letter used was.
I'm going for 'a'.
And, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(... (via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency) your four most frequently used letters match the table for English.
.svg){kind=link}
Tested in Python 2.7:
s = "your text here"
import string
d = {}
for i in list(s.lower()):
if i in string.letters:
d[i] = d.setdefault(i, 0) + 1
print sorted(d.keys(), cmp = lambda x, y : cmp(d[x], d[y]), reverse = True)[2]
Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?
#70"and I can't get started without experience"
No, no..that's not universally true. Don't let yourself to be affected by this concept. You can get employed without formal experience, some bigger companies also hire newbies. You will just get lower salary.