There should be a fourth fear in the "Giving Up" section: giving up a decent to great salary when being mediocre cuts it just fine in a lot of positions.
The Mediocre Programmer
11–20 of 95 posts
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#12The funny thing is that another definition of mediocre is 'low quality'. And it seems plausible to me that even expert programmers can write low quality programs.
Expert programmers should write 'low quality' programs if that's what the situation calls for. Most of us are solving business problems, and lateral thinking can be worth more than perfect engineering or fancy algorithms.
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#13> before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers Sure it's true, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity. There seems to me to be a superegalitarian notion that all people given t…
I gotta ask, What do you consider good? There's plenty of working software that's good enough. Made by fair programmers who don't care about lisp or FP. Is your scale of good affected by what you see here on HN? Because I feel like the front page of this site has the same effect as Facebook for skewing views of reality.
I’m not sure how to express it very well, but I interact a bit with people who I’d consider “good” programmers. I don’t think I’d correlate it with experience or effectiveness at a job, a good many of them haven’t even made it out of school yet. But they tend to be able to internalize programming/mathematics concepts that by many are considered difficult or complex. I know some will disagree with this, arguing that things related to experience like domain knowledge, ability to effectively work and lead in a team, understanding business needs, etc. and I don’t want to diminish the importance of these things in a professional context. However, I think there’s a good bit to programming that’s more purely technical and more related to raw intelligence (IQ or whatever you want). These people are able to easily understand things that I can’t seem to put together in my head very well.
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#14Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#15> before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers Sure it's true, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity. There seems to me to be a superegalitarian notion that all people given t…
Yeah I’m not sure. I’ve had a good bit of passion for programming through both my hobbyist and professional career (naturally more through the latter) and these days I find the things I get most excepted about or find most interesting I’m not really able to understand fully. I guess we all have our limits, but I’ve tried a few different things in recent years that I’ve effectively had to give up because things wouldn’t “click” no matter how much I read. Unfortunately it’s kinda killed off a good bit of that passion, and I’m not particularly interested in what options it’s leaves me.
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#16Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#17> before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers Sure it's true, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity. There seems to me to be a superegalitarian notion that all people given t…
On another hand, many commercial programming tasks or programming roles are relatively mundane or lower-skill, and do not require exceptional levels of programming ability. If an exceptional programmer was dropped into one of these roles, they might quit out of boredom, or try to refashion the role into building tooling or systems to automate away some or all of the drudgery, but perhaps at the cost of not delivering…
I agree that an exceptional programmer would not only not be appreciated in a job like this but their work/code will also be misunderstood and create a huge libility for the company. Hence tgh industry dumbed everything down to the lowest denominator (not absolutely lowest but quite low) such that every role is replaceable (hint: it has to look like an ordinary cog in a system)
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#18> Instead of trying to avoid it or wishing for comfort, we can instead relish that we're in uncertain territory and feel those brief twinges of fear and doubt.[1]
Generally true, but it also sounds like you’ve not made big mistakes.
Big mistakes often involve slight twinges of fear and doubt also.
[1]- http://themediocreprogrammer.com/build/html/the_mediocre_pro...
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#19> before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers Sure it's true, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity. There seems to me to be a superegalitarian notion that all people given t…
I gotta ask, What do you consider good? There's plenty of working software that's good enough. Made by fair programmers who don't care about lisp or FP. Is your scale of good affected by what you see here on HN? Because I feel like the front page of this site has the same effect as Facebook for skewing views of reality.
I generally define things more in terms of "not bad" or "less bad" - to me software development is too rapidly an evolving discipline to allow for a static definition of good.
But things like: - don't copy, paste and tweak a piece of code when additional parameters are a better option, - don't grossly overload a definition with parameters instead of breaking up a function.
There's nuance there, and the question of what amount of technical complexity is reasonable for a given problem - but if I start thinking about that I'll never stop digressing.
I have dealt with an entire office of people who seemed to code purely in bug-filled technical debt: you could tell when they clocked on because the build broke an hour later.
As far as FP is concerned, I think that the memory and performance penalties are often too heavy: there's certainly a place for mathematically provable programming - I just don't know what it is.
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I gotta ask, What do you consider good? There's plenty of working software that's good enough. Made by fair programmers who don't care about lisp or FP. Is your scale of good affected by what you see here on HN? Because I feel like the front page of this site has the same effect as Facebook for skewing views of reality.
I’m not sure how to express it very well, but I interact a bit with people who I’d consider “good” programmers. I don’t think I’d correlate it with experience or effectiveness at a job, a good many of them haven’t even made it out of school yet. But they tend to be able to internalize programming/mathematics concepts that by many are considered difficult or complex. I know some will disagree with this, arguing that t…
I'm not sure how relevant it is today but one litmus test I found years ago was how naturally they grasped the concept of a pointer. If a programmer grokked pointers that was a good indicator that s/he was on the path to being a good programmer. It's probably just a proxy for being able to think at a level of indirection.