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Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

arstechnica.com

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Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#41

Post by UweSchmidt »

interfixus wrote: post #33
UweSchmidt wrote: post #6

Regardless of how accurate this portrait of programmer culture is, I must say that I welcome the attempt to create some positive PR. Our fellow nerds, doctors and lawyers, somehow got star treatment by hollywood, while our kind is usually portrayed as unattractive, awkward, laughing stock and at best a passive character in an assisting role. This tragically reflects on our perception in the real world.

As perceived by the general public, there is a huge difference: Most people have some idea, however vague, what a doctor or a lawyer actually does , while ' programming a computer ' is utterly obscure and opaque to a lot of those same people. This keeps surprising me again and again, but apparently any kind of computing device is a black box built on magic, probably to the vast majority out there.

Not sure if that's true. Legal minutiae and latin diseases are at least as opaque to people as software code, the actual work likely less glamorous than programming.

Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#42

Post by JustSomeNobody »

externalreality wrote: post #3

There's a lot of fantasy in this article. Most programmers today do very little actually - we don't wield major influence. We basically glue together a bunch of Free Open Source offerings. The most critical skill is that ability to move fast by practicing with our Free Open Source offering tools. We pay (MS, Google, or Amazon) to host our applications. And we perform maintenance on these applications for years. Nothi…

Sure, a 13 year old could write a web ui and crud back end for a $20 IoT device. And you're correct, that's not that difficult. And while a lot of HNers live in the web world, not all of development has to do with the web. There are lots of development jobs that are much more difficult and take more skill. They don't pay FAANG money so they don't get the attention on HN, but they do exist.

Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#43

Post by world32 »

smartstakestime wrote: post #31
world32 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a real world example of glueing "together a bunch of Free Open Source offerings"? I've heard the idea that thats all software engineers really do before but it doesn't seem realistic at all.

browsers + javascript + css (frontend opensource) ... to backend , many frameworks for each langauge, many languages all documented ... to persistence layer (mysql , postgres, mssql), and finally server but as OP said thats on amazon, Azure, Dreamhost ... etc OP is discussing more so the practice of professional dev for 70 - 90% of the devs. Business guys want results , they dont care about scaling and so its about g…

I think you are describing the work of a junior software engineer. Sure a junior engineer can do "google-fu" and glue together a working application but there is so much more to being a software engineer than that. Here is just a sample of the kinds of things a more seasoned engineer has to consider when developing an application. Note that none of it can be solved by simply googling and glueing in another open source piece of kit. It requires careful consideration and knowledge/experience that lets you make these decisions.

Frontend:

- Should I use a frontend framework with backend API for a single-page application? or use a standard web site with no distinction between frontend/backend.

- How will I handle mobile responsiveness of the html/css?

- How will I server css & js assets? Use a CDN or host them locally?

- Will I minify css & js?

Backend:

- What business requirements will I take into account when choosing a language/framework?

- Is speed and concurrency a must (perhaps choose Golang)? Or rapid prototyping and complex business logic (perhaps Ruby on Rails or Django)?

- Will I write a monolithic application or go for microservices?

- How important is security? Will my framework prevent vulnerabilities like XSS and SQL injection automatically?

- What web server should I use? What kind of scaling requirements do we have?

- How will we handle version control? What processes need to be put in place around deployment?

- How do we handle deployment?

Database:

- Relation SQL database or NoSQL?

- Are there any cases where I will want to de-normalise my data right away or should I wait

- How can I design my schema to be flexible yet still scalable?

- What columns need to be indexed?

Hosting:

- Use a cloud host? (AWS, Google, Azure...)

- Do we need dockerized deployments?

- Should we use kubernetes or a more managed solution?

- How important is vendor lock-in?

- How do we handle config secrets (like API keys)

- How do we handle changes in configuration (i.e. use Chef/Ansible/Terraform etc.)

Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#44

Post by Supernaut »

interfixus wrote: post #33
UweSchmidt wrote: post #6

Regardless of how accurate this portrait of programmer culture is, I must say that I welcome the attempt to create some positive PR. Our fellow nerds, doctors and lawyers, somehow got star treatment by hollywood, while our kind is usually portrayed as unattractive, awkward, laughing stock and at best a passive character in an assisting role. This tragically reflects on our perception in the real world.

As perceived by the general public, there is a huge difference: Most people have some idea, however vague, what a doctor or a lawyer actually does , while ' programming a computer ' is utterly obscure and opaque to a lot of those same people. This keeps surprising me again and again, but apparently any kind of computing device is a black box built on magic, probably to the vast majority out there.

Very true. When I'm at social occasions and I get asked what I do for a living, the subject will be hurriedly dropped when I reply that I'm a software developer. It amuses me. As you say, the whole concept seems to be so far outside of most people's frame of reference, that they have literally nothing to say on the subject.

The lack of intellectual curiosity in the general populace is dismaying to me, but it was ever thus.

Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#45

Post by bildung »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #23
NotPaidToPost wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe does not look like the typical software developer job at all. Certainly not anyone can write software. In fact, many who see themselves as "coders" are not very good at it themselves. Edit: I've found it's a bit similar to law in terms of skills and mindset. Some people struggle to follow the text of an actual law. Then, drafting an actual law is an even more specialised skill. In both software and…

I sometimes think drafting laws badly is a feature not a bug - after all think of all that lucrative legal work for other lawyers.

Couldn't the same (IMO flawed) reasoning applied to the topic at hand? "Computers are made complicated on purpose - after all think of all the lucrative programming jobs"

Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#46

Post by jlokier »

w8rbt wrote: post #40

That picture made me cringe. Who sets a cup full of coffee right next to their laptop keyboard and phone?

I confess that I do this quite often, if there isn't enough room on the tiny coffee shop table to keep the drink and the laptop far away from each other. What else can you do?

At least the phone is water-resistant.

Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#47

Post by notacoward »

externalreality wrote: post #3

There's a lot of fantasy in this article. Most programmers today do very little actually - we don't wield major influence. We basically glue together a bunch of Free Open Source offerings. The most critical skill is that ability to move fast by practicing with our Free Open Source offering tools. We pay (MS, Google, or Amazon) to host our applications. And we perform maintenance on these applications for years. Nothi…

As others have said, speak for yourself. Sure, there are plenty of "coders" who just bolt together stuff written by others, but somebody has to create the pieces and that takes at least a little bit of real creativity. The problem is that we don't distinguish between specialties and roles. In medicine the division is clear between various surgical and non-surgical specialties, or between physicians vs. assistants vs. nurses. In law nobody confuses contract and criminal law, or attorneys (sometimes even barristers vs. solicitors) and paralegals. But we don't do that. You're slightly right in that there are people who call themselves coders who don't really create code, but real coders aren't fantasy.

Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#48

Post by notacoward »

smartstakestime wrote: post #31
world32 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a real world example of glueing "together a bunch of Free Open Source offerings"? I've heard the idea that thats all software engineers really do before but it doesn't seem realistic at all.

browsers + javascript + css (frontend opensource) ... to backend , many frameworks for each langauge, many languages all documented ... to persistence layer (mysql , postgres, mssql), and finally server but as OP said thats on amazon, Azure, Dreamhost ... etc OP is discussing more so the practice of professional dev for 70 - 90% of the devs. Business guys want results , they dont care about scaling and so its about g…

> to backend , many frameworks for each langauge,

As somebody who develops storage systems, I'll bet that what you consider "back end" is still multiple layers "front" of where I sit.

> server but as OP said thats on amazon

You do realize that Amazon employs thousands of coders to create that platform, right? And "borrows" code written by even more thousands, from firmware and kernels up to databases and similar? I'm sure they're still far outnumbered by the front end glue-writers, but there are still enough to create a culture worth writing about.

Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#49

Post by world32 »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #41
interfixus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As perceived by the general public, there is a huge difference: Most people have some idea, however vague, what a doctor or a lawyer actually does , while ' programming a computer ' is utterly obscure and opaque to a lot of those same people. This keeps surprising me again and again, but apparently any kind of computing device is a black box built on magic, probably to the vast majority out there.

Not sure if that's true. Legal minutiae and latin diseases are at least as opaque to people as software code, the actual work likely less glamorous than programming.

Yeah I don't really see law or medicine as any different in this regard.

People all have a basic idea of what makes you ill, what various diseases, treatments etc. are. But most people don't understand the intricacies of the endocrine system.

People all have a basic understanding of the law, what kind of sentences to expect for what crimes, how court works etc. But most people don't understand .

You see where I am going with this..

People all have a basic idea of how the internet works (you connect to the network and data is returned to your computer), the difference between 4G and Wi-fi etc. But most people won't be able to explain the difference between RSA cryptogrpahy and eliptic curve cryptography.

Re: Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

#50

Post by LandR »

externalreality wrote: post #3

There's a lot of fantasy in this article. Most programmers today do very little actually - we don't wield major influence. We basically glue together a bunch of Free Open Source offerings. The most critical skill is that ability to move fast by practicing with our Free Open Source offering tools. We pay (MS, Google, or Amazon) to host our applications. And we perform maintenance on these applications for years. Nothi…

Nope.

Dont know how much experience you have of trying to hire developers, but the majority out there (even the ones with years of experience) don't pass the most basic of criteria for the job.

Our test for hiring is a simple app that can take a value, decrement a balance and show if the new balance is negative or not.

I've seen some of the tests that come in, 80%+ of the applicants fail to do this. A non-neglible amount will send in something that doesn't even compile.

Good developers are rare IME.

Another mate of mine that has to hire developers says he's lucky if 10% of the people who apply and get to the interview turn out they can actually write code.

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