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Advice From An Old Programmer

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Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#51

Post by AznHisoka »

api wrote: post #48

"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." That is the best thing in his advice column. It's hard to pull off though. I started programming at 5 and am at a skill level comparable to this poster,…

With a degree in biology, even with no PhD, it's still vastly useful when paired with programming skills. You have a good high-level overview of the problems in the industry, and that's an important first step.

But it seems like in today's competitive market (especially when it comes to doing a startup), you need 2 degrees. Computer Science is not enough. It's just a set of tools but if you don't have a domain where you can apply those tools, it's useless. It's like knowing how to write. Great! if you don't got anything interesting to say, or expertise in a specific area, it's almost useless. Of course I guess you can write about writing, which is analogous to writing developer tools.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#52

Post by etrain »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #46
edw519 wrote: post #28

Thoughts from an Older Programmer... I've been programming for a very long time. Me too. So long that it's incredibly boring to me. Actually, it's more interesting to me than ever. ...I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how weird they were. I have a cursory knowledge of quite a few myself. But I know one really, really well. Eventually though this just…

> I disagree. I've met a lot of non-programmers who knew a little programming. They were more dangerous than effective. I'm sure you're well aware of this, but there's a ton of opportunity for even very simple programming to help in cases where people have never thought of programming as a possible solution. (This is how I contributed roughly $3MM of value to one company as a kid who barely knew how to program). On t…

Fully agreed here. It's amazing how many people could be replaced (or freed up to do better things) by very simple shell scripts or excel macros. This is where someone who knows a little programming but understands the business process really well can be highly effective.

The danger, in my view, is that these first simple solutions tend to have more and more bolted on to them and over the years maintaining them is more time consuming than the job they were designed to replace. This is when you hire a good programmer or two to fix things.

The trick is figuring out when to pull the plug on the prototype and make things good. I'm reminded of this quote from Mike Lesk about the early days at Bell Labs: "He wouldn’t issue long specifications; he’d lash together some combination of shell scripts and awk code that did roughly what was needed, tell the customers to send him some clerks for a few days, and then have the customers come in and look at their clerks using the prototype and tell him whether or not they liked it. If they did, he would say “you can have it industrial strength so-many-months from now at such-and-such cost”."

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#53

Post by zerostar07 »

edw519 wrote: post #28

Thoughts from an Older Programmer... I've been programming for a very long time. Me too. So long that it's incredibly boring to me. Actually, it's more interesting to me than ever. ...I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how weird they were. I have a cursory knowledge of quite a few myself. But I know one really, really well. Eventually though this just…

Nit-picking, but you could have just mentioned where you disagree without quoting the whole article.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#54

Post by MRonney »

You may find that people treat you harshly because you can create software, maybe using words like "nerd". Maybe you will find that because you can dissect their logic that they hate arguing with you. You may even find that simply knowing how a computer works makes you annoying and weird to them. To this I have one just piece of advice: they can go to hell. :D It was worth it for that alone.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#55

Post by mseebach »

etrain wrote: post #52
SatvikBeri wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree. I've met a lot of non-programmers who knew a little programming. They were more dangerous than effective. I'm sure you're well aware of this, but there's a ton of opportunity for even very simple programming to help in cases where people have never thought of programming as a possible solution. (This is how I contributed roughly $3MM of value to one company as a kid who barely knew how to program). On t…

Fully agreed here. It's amazing how many people could be replaced (or freed up to do better things) by very simple shell scripts or excel macros. This is where someone who knows a little programming but understands the business process really well can be highly effective. The danger, in my view, is that these first simple solutions tend to have more and more bolted on to them and over the years maintaining them is mo…

It's really a tragedy that the same company - Microsoft - is the origin of the only reasonably successful business-focused programming environment (VBA) and the notion that interacting with a computer through any other means than point-and-click - especially typing command and editing text files - is hard and is only for stupid geeks with bad hygiene.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#56

Post by ismarc »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #38

Edw's comment aside, I can understand being bored with programming. After you learn your way around a dozen or so different platforms, if you're not getting bored you might want to check to see if you don't have a bit of Asperger's. But he nails it when he points out that all of this programming talk is bullshit. It's just stuff to chat mindlessly about while you're not helping people. Programming is making computers…

I think a large part of it comes down to why different people like programming. I learned to program when trying to figure out why computers work. I learned to work on cars when trying to figure out how they work. I like building things and I like fixing broken things. Programming happens to be chock full of both, pays well, allows more time to think and analyze the problem and getting paid for it doesn't ruin the enjoyment (for me). I could make more doing something else and I could make more working at companies where I'm not building things, but they aren't what I love doing. Life is too short do not do something you love, it's just a matter of finding something you love to do that you can get paid for.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#57

Post by wahnfrieden »

zerostar07 wrote: post #53
edw519 wrote: post #28

Thoughts from an Older Programmer... I've been programming for a very long time. Me too. So long that it's incredibly boring to me. Actually, it's more interesting to me than ever. ...I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how weird they were. I have a cursory knowledge of quite a few myself. But I know one really, really well. Eventually though this just…

Nit-picking, but you could have just mentioned where you disagree without quoting the whole article.

It might be because he publishes his comments as ebooks and can't use a comment that's too out of context.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#58

Post by nadam »

chollida1 wrote: post #41
nadam wrote: post #7

"People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect" Generally in business, those people whose job title is 'programmer' or 'developer' or 'software engineer' get relatively little respect even with lots of experience. (I am 37 years old and programming since 12) Previously I thought the only way out of this is to become a 'manager', which I never really wanted to do... Rec…

Good luck with the switch. I did this a few years ago and love it. Things you should know depending on what you're doing: Math/Finance - statistics, know stats inside and out. - differential calc and finite difference methods - Black Scholes, Programming - the R langugage - vba, if you don't know R really well then vba can be useful for modelling. VBA is approachable enough that every trader uses it and when they mov…

Thanks!

Currently I am reading these books:

Mark Joshi: The Concepts and Practice of Mathematical Finance

Daniel Duffy: Introduction to C++ for Financial Engineers (I already know C++, but I read this because of the finance related stuff.)

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#59

Post by pyre »

akrymski wrote: post #39
zerostar07 wrote: post #12

I think this piece keeps coming up every so many days. It's a great piece of advice, and i think most developers come to the same conclusion after a few years. I think a useful corrolary from this is "Do not reinvent the wheel all the time by changing programming styles, instead try to extend the frontiers of technology" (I 'm looking at you, web frameworks).

Yep, and it always reminds me of how far Apple came with Objective-C. Microsoft and Google continually push new languages on us, and yet Apple developers used Objective-C for over 16 years just fine, and continue to push technology barriers with it. Apple instead chooses to improve supporting tools - XCode, etc. On the other hand sometimes you have to take a step backward to take 2 steps forward. Sometimes thats a pr…

  > Apple developers used Objective-C for over 16
  > years just fine
The initial release of OS X was March 24, 2001. IIRC, ObjC was not used on MacOS 9. Unless you're talking about the creation of OS X out of NeXT (which Apple purchased in 1996), and therefore Apple employees (not just 3rd-party devs that work on the Apple platform).

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#60

Post by ankurdhama »

Which programming language you learn and use doesn't matter?

Really ?? It doesn't matter for most people because they only know C/C++/C#/Java/JavaScript/Python and other similar language as they all provide same kind of "thinking technique" and you have been programming using same techniques your whole life.

Try to learn languages like Lisp and Haskell and over a period of time they will change the way you think about programming and if something can change the way you think about solving problem, it does matter.

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