Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What do you say to someone who wants to get into software development?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–77 of 77 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you say to someone who wants to get into software development?

#71

Post by marsa »

khalladay wrote: post #53
marsa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you please elaborate why? i plan to start learning to code and making a game would be one of the final milestones on the loose roadmap i've set for myself -- i get it's complex but would love to know why you advise against it.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have a bit of insight here. I've been happily employed in the games industry for the past 10 years and don't have any plans to leave it, but while I have absolutely recommended programming/software dev as a career field to people before, I would hesitate to _suggest_ the games industry to someone who wasn't already excited about it. To your comment, making games is great a…

thank you for the insightful and detailed reply.

making this game i've envisioned is more of a carrot on a stick, a clear goal that forces me to learn loads of different stuff on the way. whether or not the game itself ultimately materializes is not as important as picking up new skills, and i definitely don't see myself working in the games industry (nor the IT industry).

Re: Ask HN: What do you say to someone who wants to get into software development?

#72

Post by khalladay »

marsa wrote: post #71
khalladay wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have a bit of insight here. I've been happily employed in the games industry for the past 10 years and don't have any plans to leave it, but while I have absolutely recommended programming/software dev as a career field to people before, I would hesitate to _suggest_ the games industry to someone who wasn't already excited about it. To your comment, making games is great a…

thank you for the insightful and detailed reply. making this game i've envisioned is more of a carrot on a stick, a clear goal that forces me to learn loads of different stuff on the way. whether or not the game itself ultimately materializes is not as important as picking up new skills, and i definitely don't see myself working in the games industry (nor the IT industry).

hell yeah, making a game just for fun or to learn new stuff is the best. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: What do you say to someone who wants to get into software development?

#73

Post by ramesh31 »

marsa wrote: post #28
pixl97 wrote: post #5

Whatever you do, don't get into gaming.

can you please elaborate why? i plan to start learning to code and making a game would be one of the final milestones on the loose roadmap i've set for myself -- i get it's complex but would love to know why you advise against it.

>can you please elaborate why? i plan to start learning to code and making a game would be one of the final milestones on the loose roadmap i've set for myself -- i get it's complex but would love to know why you advise against it.

Making your own games is really fun and rewarding. Highly recommended. But the games industry works more like Hollywood than Silicon Valley. Games are either a hit or a flop, and they have very tight release schedules with hard deadlines like a movie. The resulting work environment is notoriously terrible.

Re: Ask HN: What do you say to someone who wants to get into software development?

#74

Post by Graffur »

deltaonefour wrote: post #61
Graffur wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's really not that hard I think this is a myth that people who learned a long time ago and learned over a long time say. It is hard - there's a lot of complexity involved. It does a disservice to other software engineers.

I highly disagree. Software engineering is hard, but out of all the engineering disciplines out there it is the easiest. That's why it's a very normal thing for software engineering to be learned in boot camp or without any assistance. Most other engineering disciplines are much harder in the sense that the benefits are not immediately practical and the answers aren't as straightforward. Not many people are going to…

That seems to be a different argument.

Also the products of bootcamps tend to be quite poor for the most part.

Re: Ask HN: What do you say to someone who wants to get into software development?

#75

Post by Graffur »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #55
Graffur wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's really not that hard I think this is a myth that people who learned a long time ago and learned over a long time say. It is hard - there's a lot of complexity involved. It does a disservice to other software engineers.

I recently put my wife through a programming videogame (exapunks). She gas a mechanical engineering degree. She has great memory, but she said the hardest part was holding 2 nested loops in her brain to foresee the execution. That's when I remembered that way back I had similar problems. It takes time to develop that skill and the average person will struggle with that

Cool! My new year resolution is to not buy more games while I have other uncompleted or not started ones but I have bookmarked that game for when I start buying games again.

Re: Ask HN: What do you say to someone who wants to get into software development?

#76

Post by digisign »

hirvi74 wrote: post #66
digisign wrote: post #58

In the "old days" there was a dividing line we noticed in class. If the student could understand pointers they would succeed, if not they wouldn't. It was quite accurate for the time. Today things are higher level so I think there is room for a wider range of folks. One group are folks that are great at spreadsheets and the like. Gamers or someone who is interested in tinkering with javascript. Perhaps they have a te…

> If the student could understand pointers they would succeed, if not they wouldn't. What were common hang-ups that people had with pointers? I guess, it's safe to assume I am of a younger generation than you, but I may have had a bit of an unfair advantage (compared to my peers) when I dabbled with C because I studied assembly (x86 and a bit of ARM) prior to C, so pointers weren't exactly foreign concepts. I do not…

As developers know, pointers require you to work with a variable that points to another variable. It is one more level of indirection, and one needs to keep additional information in short-term memory to understand the code. For whatever reason, a significant portion of students can't deal with it and give up. At the time, there were no "CSS expert" type of jobs to focus on instead. Perhaps Excel jockey or IT management as mentioned, but a different major entirely.

Perhaps one reason is that the traditional C syntax for it is rather cryptic. Personally, first learned it in (Turbo) Pascal, which I found easy to learn (with its ^ syntax), and with that made learning it in C easier later.

Post reply on HN