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Advice From An Old Programmer

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Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#71

Post by dxbydt »

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…

>"Theoretically a relatively smooth transition is possible because there are 'quant developer' jobs out there."

Quant-Developer is a weighted sum of q% quant and d% developer. Ideally you'd like q to be high and d to be small. What happens in practice is that many companies will hire a quant developer, throw 90% of d at you and keep you enticed with some 10% q. This is rather sad, but I have seen this happen to more than half of the graduating class of 2011. Perhaps 5% of my classmates are doing 100% q. Another 20%, including myself, are remarkably lucky to be doing 80%q , 20%d. But the rest of my classmates are stuck with 80%d 20%q, and even the q is watered down cookbook solutions. And this is the case with University of Chicago graduates, so you can imagine what goes on with grads of non-top-10 quant schools. There are companies in the chicago area (morningstar, for eg., and even much of cme) which advertise for quant developers but give you 99%d, 1%q ! What they really want is an sql guy who maintains the securities database and writes stored procedures, but they will go ahead and call you "quant developer" anyways. Its a rather shady practice imo. Sadly, the worst offenders are startups in finance. I spoke to one who asked me a ton of interesting quanty questions straight out of Mark Joshi...but when it came to the actual job I'd be doing, the CTO says (actual quote) "you don't need anything more than mean and variance, we are all generalists here". Then why do you want a guy with a math masters and a cs masters and a quant masters...just hire a high school student.

Your best bet is to stick with IBs & large banks. They have tons of really interesting ( and really hard ) math problems to work on, they aren't going away anytime soon,and they will pick up the tab for your math phd costs ( or lightweight garbage like series 7 and cfa, if pde ain't your thing).

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#73

Post by aangjie »

kstenerud wrote: post #43
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…

I'm also 37, and have been programming a similar amount of time (15 of those years professionally). I've worked in 2 person, 10 person, 20 person, 30 person, 50 person, 300 person, and 5000 person organizations. What I've discovered is this: In larger organizations, you get respect by being the "answer" guy. If everyone's coming to you for advice, you become more important. In small organizations, you get respect for…

> Wish to belong This is a fairly hard thing for me to do, because every faction i have been part of or tried to be loyal, to have limits on what beliefs can be questioned and what are not open to be experimented with. There comes a point where i disagree and have trouble stopping myself from experimenting. So loneliness is not a problem for me. But i have a very limited/narrow interest in being important. To some extent the admiration of peers feels good, but not much. So at this point, i find myself a little lost as to what do i want to move forward towards. Made worse, by i have trouble just enjoying when am not sure what am working towards. UPDATE: Eeks,sorry if it's turned to a ramble.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#74

Post by edwinnathaniel »

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…

In some fields, given a CIO title is akin to being demoted. Nobody wants to be the head of the IT operations because the money is somewhere else (sales and marketing).

Some people argue that IT provides efficiency and in some cases increase revenues as well. The hard cold truth is this:

1) It's hard to measure $$$ from IT projects

2) It becomes internal politics: it shifts the balance and nobody wants IT to have more power.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#75

Post by mseebach »

loso wrote: post #61
mseebach wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft is not responsible for people hating to type commands in the command line, early computing is. In the past you were forced to type commands to get anything done and a lot of people hated it. The introduction of the GUI made things "easy" for most people.

No, they didn't invent it, and for the most part, GUIs are leaps and bounds better than CLIs.

What I'm opposing is the notion that commands and text files are something to be scared of and shun, when there's nothing so hard in it that most regular office workers couldn't pick up the basics on a three day course. And Microsoft pushed that agenda very hard.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#76

Post by kls »

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…

One of the greatest companies that I ever worked for trained every employee to use Access and to solution for themselves, we had a system that monitored level of usage of an access solution as well as how much revenue it was responsible for. At a certain threshold the solution was deemed business critical and the access solution was used as a prototype for the developers to implement on a more robust solution. It was like working requirements and the whole thing ran very smoothly, needless to say it fundamentally changed my view of stakeholders solutioning for themselves. I also started to see the issue as a management problem and not a technical one, with the proper processes in place, people are empowered.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#77

Post by JVIDEL »

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect

Last time I went to a startup meetup the people who could code were a very small minority, and they were always surrounded by others trying to poach them for their startups.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#78

Post by oconnor0 »

This ("the language you use doesn't matter") has never made sense to me. I get that what we produce is of value to others while the tools we use isn't of value & doesn't - directly - matter.

But, I know that certain languages are closer to how I want to think & how I want to be able to solve problems while other languages inhibit that or restrict the ways I think about & am able to express problems.

I only have about a half dozen years of professional experience so perhaps I am simply naive here.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#79

Post by kstenerud »

aangjie wrote: post #73
kstenerud wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also 37, and have been programming a similar amount of time (15 of those years professionally). I've worked in 2 person, 10 person, 20 person, 30 person, 50 person, 300 person, and 5000 person organizations. What I've discovered is this: In larger organizations, you get respect by being the "answer" guy. If everyone's coming to you for advice, you become more important. In small organizations, you get respect for…

> Wish to belong This is a fairly hard thing for me to do, because every faction i have been part of or tried to be loyal, to have limits on what beliefs can be questioned and what are not open to be experimented with. There comes a point where i disagree and have trouble stopping myself from experimenting. So loneliness is not a problem for me. But i have a very limited/narrow interest in being important. To some ex…

It sounds like you're comfortable as a loner then. That gives you immense possibility, but also makes it harder to choose.

My advice: Just pick something interesting and go with it. If it doesn't work out, pick something else. Fear of failure is worst in people who haven't failed yet, and that fear will impede you far more than actual failure ever could (I've had a few spectacular failures in my lifetime, to the point of being reduced to the clothes on my back, and each failure made me more fearless).

You don't need the respect of others when you're making your own path.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#80

Post by j45 »

This is brilliant advice.

"What I discovered after this journey of learning is that it's not the languages that matter but what you do with them."

For those developers who have only discovered the nirvana with one, or two languages, and love their rails, djangos, closures to death, just know that if one exists, there's always the possibility that there's more.

Just because you aren't aware of them doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Get building. Customers simply don't care what you code in, and very few languages give an overall edge to developing, most languages have very capable frameworks that all have their pros and cons that even out.

The question is, can developers stop foaming at the mouth and seeing the world just one way? Seems a little fanatical.

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