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Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

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Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#81
post #78

"Build it and it will come." That was my strategy. I had no career and a degree in Philosophy that was taking me nowhere. Out of the blue I jumped into Web development and started building websites for anybody that needed them, for free. Once I had a portfolio of 10 or so I got a few part time position doing web development at a university. This gave me more experience and at the same time I started hacking on more t…

Yes, it does, thank you

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#82
post #29

Earlier 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…

> 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. Tested in Python 2.7: s = "your text here" import string d = {} for i in list(s.lower()): i…

You don't need to do `list(s.lower())`, you can already iterate over a string. Also, instead of converting the whole string to a new lowercase one, which means allocating "a lot" of memory, you can convert each character separately as needed.

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#83
post #62
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

If you want to work for a game company as a game developer you are right. I know some ridiculously bright people working for comparatively low wages in the industry.

If, however, you want to be a SysAdmin, or otherwise work on boring back end bullshit, my experience has been that if you don't mind being part of a department nobody listens to or cares about, game companies are good places to break into the industry (or to earn more than you would be worth elsewhere.) It's frustrating because you clearly have little autonomy or power, and management knows just about jack about ops work, and god help you if you interfere with a game's release schedule, but eh, the pay is good relative to the skill expected, and they are willing to hire people who are worse or less experienced than average, mostly because they don't know any better.

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#85
post #37
post #29

Earlier 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…

That's true enough. But fact is, if someone's ignorant of modulus, I'd say that's scary. Knowing modulus doesn't necessarily demonstrate you have a great grasp of programming. But I think not knowing modulus demonstrates that there's a higher probability you know very little. And fact is, FizzBuzz also filters out all the people who know modulus, but can't figure it out anyway. You definitely don't want those people.

I didn't realise that some programmers didn't know modulus ... really??
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