The ability to stay with a problem for a long time. I think some folks will see something they don't understand and just disengage with it, but a lot of successful programmers that I've seen will continue to think about situations/ problems a lot longer after realizing they haven't fully grokked it, until eventually they do.
Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
131–140 of 193 posts
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#132A lot of great comments here and I generally agree. One thing I think we all need to consider essential is ethics. As software continues to eat the world, programmers are being used for unethical endeavors and I think all too often we don't notice it.
I'm not suggesting every programmer who works for the likes of Facebook, Exxon, and Comcast quit their jobs. (though, if they did, wouldn't that turn some influential heads in the right direction?) Simply push back when asked to work on something that you feel might cause harm.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#133I consider this essential: The ability to decouple the task from your ego. Specifically: - Never say "Got it" or "OK" when someone is explaining a problem or solution and you don't follow. It feels awkward to say "Sorry, I'm still not following. Do you mean that when..." five times in the same conversation but it is worth your time and embarrassment to come away with a correctly framed and well understood situation.…
I've never mentally dinged someone for saying they don't know how to use a particular technology. This field is immense and there is no possible way for any person to understand it all. But when someone said they could do something a particular way and the results suggest otherwise I find it completely frustrating.
It's extremely hard to prove things in programming.
You can either develop both options and pick the best, or you can use "best practices", which is non scientific. Authority and tradition make best practices.
Also "don't @ me" about basic logic like nested loops and bigO. That's not what I'm talking about here.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#134As with everything in life: Get your ego out of the way. People tend to identify themselves with technology they mastered and miss out on all the improvements that happen. This works for a few decades if they're lucky, but someday they're old and wonder why nobody values their skills in an obsolete technology. We can't all maintain Cobol code bases when we are 50.
I hope you are aware that 50 year olds started working 1990 to 1995 or even later, when there was a lot more than just COBOL going on. In fact, a 50 year old is more likely to have caught the rise of desktop GUIs and of Linux than have spent a career doing COBOL.
At that time, COBOL was still huge in big-ass manufacturing systems, such as those in aerospace & defense.
In the early 1990s, Accenture (then Andersen Consulting), put every incoming employee through six weeks of on-campus programming training that was taught entirely in COBOL. It was old-school even then.
I was also amused to note that all of the daily-announcement monitors in the hallways of their training facility were being driven by an Atari 800. Yep, well into the '90s.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#135A lot of great comments here and I generally agree. One thing I think we all need to consider essential is ethics. As software continues to eat the world, programmers are being used for unethical endeavors and I think all too often we don't notice it. I'm not suggesting every programmer who works for the likes of Facebook, Exxon, and Comcast quit their jobs. (though, if they did, wouldn't that turn some influential h…
Agreed. Another way to put it: 1) Honesty. 2) Treating others the way oneself would want to be treated (the Golden Rule)--from this one can derive testing, the right amount of documenation, observing, communicating, working well with others, so much.
And 3) the ability to think something through patiently, thinking of what should happen, and what could go wrong, and being willing to develop the skills to make a ~"plan" (i.e., a program) that will do it properly.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#136Grit. Don't give up on hard problems. Manage your feelings. Overcome obstacles. Practice patience.
Been programming for 40 years. This is the best answer here, and why I came to comment.
If you're not making headway, step back, sleep on it, and try another approach. Giving up will guarantee you fail. You haven't failed until you give up.
Also related, fail fast; do the minimum amount of work to create a proof-of-concept, to see if you're on the right track or not. Don't build the whole UI until the algorithm is working, don't focus on the wrong things, focus on the most important thing first.
And finally, know when to ask for help. There is no shame in it. It's better to ask for help than waste time.
Just. Never. Give. Up.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#137If you intend to work on a team larger than, say, 4 people, writing english (or your team's common language that isn't english) is supremely important.
I spend a lot of time reading the writing of other programmers. I've read 4 page documents that are a slog and 20 page documents that are a joy. Your writing, in a lot of cases, will be people's first impression of you, NOT your code.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#138This is an incredible thread. Thank you all for sharing.
For me, a good programmer realizes that "everything is code". Like, sometimes it's easy to think X problem is too hard for me or I don't have enough experience or this bug is unfixable but end of the day, it's all just code. You can change it however you want and if someone else did implemented something before, it's highly likely that you'll be able to do the same. Having a level of distance from the code one writes really helps.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#139The ability to stay with a problem for a long time. I think some folks will see something they don't understand and just disengage with it, but a lot of successful programmers that I've seen will continue to think about situations/ problems a lot longer after realizing they haven't fully grokked it, until eventually they do.
I'd second this. The most important skill for a programmer is being able to look at a problem and say "I have absolutely no idea what's going on here, but I know that I eventually will". Going from a complete lack of context on something to fully comprehending and solving it is infinitely satisfying.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#140The question is too broad, but along the lines of Norvig's answer... There's a particular micro-expression I sometimes notice with people who are working on a software problem. I notice it when something goes wrong unexpectedly. People who aren't particularly talented at SW development, for a brief instant, give a facial expression of disgust when something crashes or behaves incorrectly. People who are awesome at de…
It's a lot easier to be interested in a surprise failure mode when you're not under the gun to deliver on a deadline. I find failures interesting too, but I'm not feeling happy when I expect the reason will be because the tooling I'm using hides information behind insufficient logging or the answer I seek is probably on a system I don't have permission to access.
I agree, a bug can lead to excitement. A bug somewhere deep in a framework that is now causing issues on production, no amusement to be found.