Don't Call Yourself a Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#191

Post by _delirium » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 3:46 PM UTC

cageface wrote: post #104

In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career. I wish more HR/recruiting people understood this.

It depends on the job, I think. I'm not even a C++ wizard myself, and yet it's pretty easy for me to tell apart the people who've been doing it for 6 months versus 6 years. If they're good, both will know the language in some sense; the main difference is that the one who's been doing it for 6 years will have a much bigger mental database of gotchas to be aware of, idioms to use in common situations, interaction between features, etc.

Somewhat true for C also. It's a much smaller language, but there's a fair amount of best-practice and idiom to pick up to be a great C programmer.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#192

Post by mechanical_fish » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 3:48 PM UTC

m0th87 wrote: post #115

> If you really like the atmosphere at universities, that is cool. Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want. Backpacks are a lot cheaper than working in academia. You can lead the life of the mind in industry, too — and enjoy less politics and better pay. You can even get published in journals, if that floats your boat. (After you’ve escaped the min…

How long have you been out of grad school?

If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem.

If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What?

I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed very fun hobbies [1], though very very expensive in lost income and opportunity cost. But now I support a large number of PHP apps, make significantly more money than I did as a researcher, have significantly more impact on human lives than as a researcher, work less hard than a researcher... And am, gosh, approximately ten years behind my peers career-wise. Oh, those expensive hobbies!

Still, nothing wrong with having hobbies. Just do be sure to know the difference between hobby and career. It can be similar to the difference between the transient and the steady-state.

And if you're out of grad school and have managed to secure an awesome steady-state career as an academic researcher with job security and good pay and time to spend with your family, your other hobbies, and your community, please do write back and tell us again how arrogant we are.

---

[1] In much the same way, I imagine, that the triathlon is fun.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#193

Post by maaku » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 4:08 PM UTC

anthonyb wrote: post #137

maaku wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those MBA's clueless? Programmers are costs, and expensive ones at that. We start off underwater on the value proposition. Saying "I'm a programmer" is saying "I'm a large, fixed cost." The question for the businessman is always: what value do you add, and does it exceed your costs? Yes, there's value for an in-house engineering team , but with widely varying skill distributions and unevenly matched compensation.…

The value of programmers tends not be linear with cost though. Paying an extra 25-50% for decent ones gets you at least a 2x improvement, possibly more if they can rewrite large chunks of your corporate code to improve it.

That's precisely my point. The question in the businessman's head is "are you one of the decent ones? are we getting our money's worth?"

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#194

Post by kamaal » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 4:15 PM UTC

scottschulthess wrote: post #188

kamaal wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering is a older profession that Medicine. Remember it was wheel and before that tools to invent the wheel that got invented. Software is a sub branch of engineering. Like veterinary doctors. In fact man kind had taken huge leaps in engineering before they took in medicine(Stuff like Pyramids of Giza etc). Doctors and Lawyers have a nature of work which if done badly or of subjectively low quality a persons qua…

Even primitive cultures have medicine men. But they don't have engineers, at least, certainly not full-time ones.

No, they do have.

Not just primitive cultures. Even older than them. There have been huge marvels of engineering for daily lives and occupation. Like Irrigation system in Indus valley civilization(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization). That sort of a system can't be built by adhoc work. You will need dedicated people to plan, design and implement it. Its more or less as advanced as any decently large irrigation project today. Except that it was more difficult for them. They didn't have many things at their disposal which most engineers today have(which made their job more difficult than we can imagine)

While biological sciences were still in Infancy then.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#195

Post by mattdeboard » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 4:27 PM UTC

daviddaviddavid wrote: post #79

mattdeboard wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not a thing is true is orthogonal to whether or not you want the thing to be true. I'm a new programmer but not new to business. He hit the nail right on the head for just about any profession (minus to the programming-specific bits).

Saying that the truth of X and the desire that X be true/false are orthogonal is rather like saying that "things just are the way they are". While this is the case in scientific matters, it's definitely not the case in social matters. There are plenty of things that I and others can do to bring about a business climate that fixes some of the shittiness that the author lays out.

You can't change other people or how they behave. The only thing you can do is to change yourself, your attitude and/or your habits. Trying to "fix" other people and the environment they've created is a waste of time and energy.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#196

Post by bmccormack » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 4:40 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #69

ycapply2011 wrote: post #17

>> ”What is your previous salary?” is employer-speak for “Please give me reasons to pay you less money.” Answer appropriately. What is the proper approach to answering this question?

"You're better situated to judge my worth to your company than I am. What do you think I should be paid?" Counter with better offer. My other stock answer: "As a matter of professional courtesy, I decline to comment on specific policies of previous employers. You should appreciate this, after all, someday someone will be asking about yours."

EXCELLENT suggestions. I'm 100% positive that being blindsided by the "previous salary" question cost me thousands of dollars when negotiating for a previous job.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#197

Post by ekanna » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 4:49 PM UTC

fantastic article...

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#198

Post by Periodic » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 5:03 PM UTC

davidwparker wrote: post #182

synnik wrote: post #164

I love corporate, boring, "soul-crushing" work. Why? Because I can sit down, whip out a basic CRUD form with a small approval cycle in a day. It saves a company 100K over the year, I am loved by the customers, and because it is so simple, it normally requires no maintenance. Maybe we update the fields once a year or so. At the end of the week, I've already saved the company more than my salary. After a year, I am a c…

I find that pretty interesting, and quite the opposite of my experience. I'm guessing that it has to do with the size of the boring corporation. I worked for a mega corp, and redtape and layers upon layers of bureaucracy would pretty much make any project take months instead of a day. Additionally, there were plenty of times where the right arm was working on something and the left arm didn't know about it, so it was…

I'll add in that I expect 90% of enterprise programming is maintaining someone else's code. It isn't making small CRUD apps, it isn't innovating, it isn't bringing costs down, it isn't bringing profits up.

It is simply maintaining the behemoth they spent a fortune on N years ago which was over-, under- and poorly designed all at the same time. It is just keeping it working well enough that it can continue being used because as long as it is working there's no reason to rewrite it. The words "rewrite" to an executive mean, "do a lot of work and spend a lot of money to make something we already have."

And there will have been non-FizzBuzz programmers working on that project before you.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#199

Post by _delirium » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 5:16 PM UTC

mechanical_fish wrote: post #192

m0th87 wrote: post #115

> If you really like the atmosphere at universities, that is cool. Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want. Backpacks are a lot cheaper than working in academia. You can lead the life of the mind in industry, too — and enjoy less politics and better pay. You can even get published in journals, if that floats your boat. (After you’ve escaped the min…

How long have you been out of grad school? If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem . If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What? I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed…

The main arrogance, I think, is his claim that journals are just blog posts with more elitism, combined with a strange sort of anger towards academia (which doesn't seem to be based on knowledge of how academia works; it's not much of an ivory-tower fairy land, but really quite industry-like, with professors as managers in charge of running moderate-sized organizations, which they need to do PR, mentorship, and management for, along with generating revenue streams to keep the lab provisioned and grad students / postdocs paid).

As for journals, I like blogging, and hope to see academic publishing move towards a more online, networked open model, but I simply don't think we're anywhere near that. A typical blog post and a typical journal article are miles apart, today, and very few novel scientific results are produced in blog posts. So if your goal is to advance science, you're probably going to be part of academic culture in one way or another, and probably going to publish your results in conferences or journals. That's also possible to do outside academia or an industrial research lab, but relatively few people outside those kinds of settings actually manage to get the time to do so, since their local incentives don't reward it. In some cases they actively hinder it; I've been working with some game-industry people who hope to publish some of their AI techniques in venues like (http://www.aiide.org/aiide11/), but publishing is often vetoed by their management.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#200

Post by 16s » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 5:18 PM UTC

My employer calls me a programmer. They print it in on my business cards and hang a sign on my door that reads "Senior Systems Programmer"... so I'm a programmer and I'm not ashamed to be called that.