Advice From An Old Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#21

Post by timr » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:07 PM UTC

rdouble wrote: post #7

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre progra…

"This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre programming job, but your office is a folding table under a decommissioned fume hood."

It depends on your level of domain knowledge. I saw a lot of programmers start into the world of biology seeking "interesting jobs", but with no background in the field. What they don't (usually) realize is that if a research lab is hiring a coder without research experience, they have some non-specific automation job that needs done. Think: maintaining the website, DBA work, basic sysadmin tasks, etc.

If you have a thorough understanding of a research field and you know how to code, life can be better. There is the potential of great upside (and the problems are usually far more interesting than building yet another caching/database system for a website). But even so, you aren't going to jump ahead of the guy who has spent his life studying the subject matter just because you breeze in with the ability to write code. Writing code is the easy part.

That said, academia is always a shitty place to be if you only want to make money and you aren't a football coach.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#22

Post by noname123 » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:07 PM UTC

rdouble wrote: post #7

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre progra…

Yea, I second that. Although I'd say that if you could have your cake and eat it too, it's the best.

Guys like David Shaw who funded their own trading firm to get the bitcoinz so that they could work on fun stuff like DE Shaw Research.

Or even the programmer that eventually published a Bioinformatics paper in Nature without any official affiliation, that just started by poking his head into UT labs; can't remember his name but probably pissed off all of the post-doc indentured servants who slaved away for years for minimum wage and in comes Mr.Programmer to take away their thunder.

But yea, speaking from experience working for Big Pharma IT has both good and bad. Low stress, good stability and decent pay but in no ways does it match the pace, (potential) pay-out of working at a prop desk/brokerage.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#23

Post by a3camero » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:07 PM UTC

mattdeboard wrote: post #3

>Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. This is so very true in my experience. The way I think has fundamentally changed since programming became the primary professional/pastime activity in my life about two years ago. I'm 32, and everything from my politics to my decisions about where to live has been effected. (Whether I'm using the proper choice between 'effect'/…

Effecting = Doing Affecting = Being done to

You effect change and change affects you.

Something was done to your decisions so the right word is "affected".

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#24

Post by orillian » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:08 PM UTC

mattdeboard wrote: post #3

>Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. This is so very true in my experience. The way I think has fundamentally changed since programming became the primary professional/pastime activity in my life about two years ago. I'm 32, and everything from my politics to my decisions about where to live has been effected. (Whether I'm using the proper choice between 'effect'/…

(Whether I'm using the proper choice between 'effect'/'affect' is still a challenge...)

Somehow....deep down inside I think you knew you wrote it wrong, but that was the "effect" you were going for wasn't it! ;)

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#25

Post by Greenisus » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:09 PM UTC

mattdeboard wrote: post #3

>Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. This is so very true in my experience. The way I think has fundamentally changed since programming became the primary professional/pastime activity in my life about two years ago. I'm 32, and everything from my politics to my decisions about where to live has been effected. (Whether I'm using the proper choice between 'effect'/…

effect/affect is simple: effect is a noun and affect is a verb. when you affect something, it causes an effect :)

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#26

Post by turar » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:10 PM UTC

rdouble wrote: post #7

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre progra…

Agree. I found that working as a programmer with a bunch of biologists, you're somehow become the "support staff", the "computer guy". Sometimes, a "cost center".

When you're working as a programmer in a technology company, you're creating "core product". It's quite a different feeling.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#27

Post by ktusznio » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:14 PM UTC

mattdeboard wrote: post #3

>Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. This is so very true in my experience. The way I think has fundamentally changed since programming became the primary professional/pastime activity in my life about two years ago. I'm 32, and everything from my politics to my decisions about where to live has been effected. (Whether I'm using the proper choice between 'effect'/…

Could you give some examples of how programming has taught you about critical thinking?

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#28

Post by juiceandjuice » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:16 PM UTC

rdouble wrote: post #7

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre progra…

Don't underestimate what you are doing though. Just because it's not super fun or interesting doesn't mean it's by any means trivial.

I looked for over a year for a job that I could love after I graduated with a BS in Applied Physics (and a ton of research experience) that would pay the bills, and I ended up mostly working on a pipelined batch processing framework, and web and database stuff, but at a DoE lab supporting physics experiments. It's a happy medium for me, I'm still around physics, I'm still hearing how people do the interesting things, and occasionally I get to drop back down into "find the novel mathematical way to solver this" mode.

Of course it's easy to be a quant and make money making rich people richer, and maybe it is glamorous, and many people prefer glamour, but glamour never cured anybody.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#29

Post by bluekeybox » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:17 PM UTC

rdouble wrote: post #7

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre progra…

> programming for biology and medical research ... is just like any other mediocre programming job, but your office is a folding table under a decommissioned fume hood.

That is sooo spot on (left my bioinformatics job a month ago for the exact same reason).

What the author additionally misses is that when you have never programmed/developed as your primary means of making a living, you likely have never worked with people who do not consider programming to be scary voodoo magic, and thus you have missed out on a golden opportunity to learn from others who are better than you. If you value your skills, always try to be around people better than you, otherwise you will end up cut off from the rest in a dark corner writing silly musings like this one.

P.S. I guess you can interpret this comment as "Have read the article but ignored where it's from and who wrote it."

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#30

Post by Rickasaurus » Thu, Jun 16, 2011, 8:18 PM UTC

I got bored with programming so I started to break out into more mathy things like machine learning and computational linguistics. It's the best of both worlds.