"Worst article ever!"
At what point, in that repetitive myth that keeps getting recycled, do the english majors start taking over? They don't. And they won't. And I want my time back.
Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
171–180 of 231 posts
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#172Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
"He seems to have missed making the point in the title." I think his title was more of a gimmick to catch people's eyes; I think it worked. "I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on technology is laughable" I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job. It's also very difficult…
"I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job. It's also very difficult for many programmers that I've known over the years to step outside of the language that they started with, and start learning and heavily using something new." I'm not so sure. At one of my previous jobs I worked with a lot of…
"They couldn't wait to transition to newer stuff because the old languages were so difficult."
I think this is just yet another really poor excuse for not learning something new, which further reinforces my point. There's no reason that any of them couldn't learn something new right now and years before. It's not like the middle class can't afford a really powerful computer. They've been affordable ever since the late 80's. You don't even need a powerful computer to program and learn something new. Nor do people have to pay to get access to new languages, and other related dev tools. Plus even the OS is free now. All you need is motivation to make time for it.
In their defense, this is a really hard habit to break and what makes it worse is that most people don't realize that they're addicted to one language. As for myself, I'm too addicted to the imperative paradigm even though I get my toes wet with functional from time to time since it's baked in with some of the stuff I use.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#174He seems to have missed making the point in the title. Why would software engineers work for english majors? He thinks that a 20 something english major is a better manager for a software engineer than a 40 something software engineer? Plus he seems to completely miss a separate alternative for software engineers over 35-- start their own businesses. I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on tech…
"He seems to have missed making the point in the title."
I hate to say it, but all Bloomberg editors seem to miss making the point in the title.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#175I think some of the reason for this is that younger people are more likely to start their programming careers with the current "cool" tools/languages whereas the older programmers will have large amounts of experience and therefor be most valuable (and able to command better salaries) maintaining software that is becoming legacy. Take myself for example, I started doing programming seriously around 2001 when PHP/MySQ…
same deal, started in 2001 on LAMP stack 2 years ago woke up and started exploring, Groovy, Ruby, and then, bing, penny dropped, Scala. New life at 40 ;-) In the end you need passion. I would be shocked if I am not coding full-time at 60, nothing grabs me more...
+1 for Scala. It's like Java on Steroids without the verbosity.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#176Maybe this is why so much software these days looks like it was written by unsupervised youngsters. I just wasted a day trying to get ListView's to work in Android only to find out that, well, they don't work, so you need to use something else. Then it took me a couple of hours to essentially duplicate the ListView functionality, except a working version. The thing is developing a GUI framework isn't rocket science,…
What were you trying to do, exactly? I won't jump up on the barricades to defend the honor of the Android SDK, but ListView is a tool in my belt that I use to get real work done. It's certainly not perfect, but sometimes I miss it when I'm working with UITableView over in iOS land. Cursor management is pretty gross, but ListView itself is usually fine. I have worked with some genius older developers. If I could point…
I was trying to use EditText's in ListView items.
The focus handling is completely broken, but nothing in the Android documentation suggested there was anything wrong with trying to do this. It was only after Googling through many posts that I came to the conclusion that ListView's aren't useful for editable fields.
Of course there may be some magic sequence of API calls that will make the focus handling work but it turns out that using LinearLayout's is much easier.
Of course poor API's have always existed but I am distinctly unimpressed with the quality of Android's UI framework compared to others I have used and I find that very disturbing for such a high-profile and important project.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#177He seems to have missed making the point in the title. Why would software engineers work for english majors? He thinks that a 20 something english major is a better manager for a software engineer than a 40 something software engineer? Plus he seems to completely miss a separate alternative for software engineers over 35-- start their own businesses. I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on tech…
> Plus he seems to completely miss a separate alternative for software engineers over 35-- start their own businesses.
That's not a super practical option for most people. Not in a country where giving up your job means giving up your health insurance. Not when you have a wife and kids.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
"He seems to have missed making the point in the title." I think his title was more of a gimmick to catch people's eyes; I think it worked. "I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on technology is laughable" I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job. It's also very difficult…
"I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job. It's also very difficult for many programmers that I've known over the years to step outside of the language that they started with, and start learning and heavily using something new." I'm not so sure. At one of my previous jobs I worked with a lot of…
Good point, but here's the kicker: How many of these older folks couldn't wait to LEARN vs. USE the newer stuff? Too often, I've found that middle-aged programmers in gov't/defense jobs won't learn a language unless its a job requirement. In other words, they don't do any coding as a hobby at home. As other commenters have stated, they would have been able to have home PC's to code on at home since the 80's.
If I didn't do home projects, all I would know would be Java. Hell, I had to teach myself Python at home just to be able to get my boss to allow me to use it for data stuff. Node.js and whatever fun, vibrant open source community is blowing up at the moment? Never if I didn't do it on my own time.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#179The article states: "A large technology company might typically pay new law-school graduates and MBAs salaries and compensation approaching double what they give new master’s degree grads in computer science. " But, from what I've read, those high-paying law school jobs are very few, only for the elite of the elite, and requires the new employee to work insane hours. Same for those MBAs. I'm pretty sure that, on aver…
The author definitely does a little bit of comparing the average case in engineering to the top 10-15% case in law.
That said, the tone rang true for me. I left engineering for law because I didn't want to be a 40 year-old engineer with all of the things that entails. In law the older you get the more valuable your experience makes you. You can be 70 and still practicing law. In engineering you're forced to move into management or business to give the young people a chance to fuck things up.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#180He seems to have missed making the point in the title. Why would software engineers work for english majors? He thinks that a 20 something english major is a better manager for a software engineer than a 40 something software engineer? Plus he seems to completely miss a separate alternative for software engineers over 35-- start their own businesses. I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on tech…
Zuckerberg was at Startup Weekend? Did you mean Startup School?
Yes, Startup School.