181–190 of 193 posts
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This would be the worst job ever if I didn't love it. I can't imagine doing it otherwise.
I don't especially enjoy my work, but the people I work with are decent and it pays the bills.
You can't be effective at your job if your manager sucks and you work with rude coworkers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've met plenty of programmers who had no sincere interest, but just saw it as a job they did 9-5 and then never thought about computers outside of those times. Programming was simply seen as a skill that could lead to comfortable, reasonably well paid job, and that was all the incentive they needed to learn the minimal amount needed to get said job. Basically as long you have an incentive to want to learn and a bit…
This would be the worst job ever if I didn't love it. I can't imagine doing it otherwise.
I think that largely depends on what kind of programmer you are. Like it or not, systems development, app development, backend, frontend, integrated circuit development all have their own mindset and associated challenges and skills. What is your most essential skill? the drive to learn.
I think a big part of _keeping_ that drive if you have it (or cultivating that drive if you don't) requires a sort of being able to experience delight / happiness from learning new things. Even the little things.
Like today, I learned a tiny shortcut in writing rails routes. Not a huge game changer obviously, but little things like that make me smile!
#1 skill programmers are paid for is converting requirements (wants, ideas) from human to deterministic reproducable algorithms.
I think it's a really underrated / underinvested skill in the industry (from my experience) with a lot of complexity. For example, there's so many levels of listening. It's one thing to understand what someone is saying but yet another to pick up on meta messages (facial expression / body language) that signal true thoughts / feelings.
I 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.…
As a front end developer your existence is ultimately defined by your grasp of very few tree models, namely the DOM but also the file system and various similar concepts when writing systems automation. It is common for developers to not grasp the concept of implicit relationships, which are a fundamental consideration of tree models.
This is basic stuff, the foundation that defines your career. And still many developers do not grasp it. They spend so much of their careers hiding from the core concepts of their jobs dependent upon abstractions to reframe the technology.
What may begin as embarrassment evolves into stubborn resolution masking extreme insecurity. Everybody can see when you are embarrassed, insecure, and when you fail to understand something. So many times people will try to redefine an important problem to appear less lost or hopeless. When other people are really listening they can see through it. It’s only a shallow self-deception.
It’s okay to not know something and need help. Pretending otherwise is poor character.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't especially enjoy my work, but the people I work with are decent and it pays the bills.
Yeah, there are so many different motivators for work. I really enjoy programming as a hobby, but I also wish we would stop treating that as if it's a pre-req to doing good work. You can't be effective at your job if your manager sucks and you work with rude coworkers.
In other words:
- Empathy
- Listening
- Communicating
- Collaborating
- Abstract thinking
#1 skill programmers are paid for is converting requirements (wants, ideas) from human to deterministic reproducable algorithms.
I think this is exactly why "communication" crops up so often and why "talk to your customers" is the number one advice for founders. I think it's a really underrated / underinvested skill in the industry (from my experience) with a lot of complexity. For example, there's so many levels of listening. It's one thing to understand what someone is saying but yet another to pick up on meta messages (facial expression / b…
I whould say “understanding” part of communication crucial for programmer.
But always together with “converting what is understood in formalized logic”
- Communication skills Being able to clearly explain why your solution will solve a given problem better than the alternative and listen to your colleagues when their suggestion is better than yours, will save you an incredible amount of frustration. It is in my opinion the most important skill I have learned - Asking why when debugging Finding the code that's causing a bug is only the first step. The next is prevent…
>99% of bugs are there because there wasn't time to do things better For a very narrow definition of 'better', maybe. I'd argue most bugs are there because the cost of a bug is less than the cost of developer time it's take to prevent such bugs. There are industries where the cost of a bug is very high, but mostly bugs are like unemploymency rates: it's almost never economically feasible to get them down to zero.
You make it seem more planned and reasoned out than it really is. I mean, you can make a meta-argument, that market evolution and pressures push things towards that optimal cost-benefit spot, but on the micro scale it often just happenstance.
Again, the meta-argument can be that even doing the cost-benefit analysis is not worth the cost, but it's quite handwavy.
What counts as "better" anyway? From the engineering perspective it's about efficiency, bug-freeness, elegance. From the company perspective, profits. From the manager perspective, looking good and getting promoted.
You can often game the system by rushing a subpar product out the door, downplaying and not even caring about the defects, wooing customers into buying in with clever sales tactics and marketing, then moving on before things start crumbling down. In some sense this was worth it in terms of your personal costs and benefits and all was done in the best possible way.