11–20 of 268 posts
There are plenty of smart programmers, and there are plenty of problems that would benefit from smart programmers, but the vast majority of problems just need a spark of creativity and a lot of hard work from a person with a reasonable base of knowledge.
I've always had a more narrative approach to coding. Until I read some of the stuff Larry Wall (Perl) has written about how he thinks, I'd assumed I was a giant freak. Not at all.
> I’ve been programming for 18 years now. Then congratulations, you are a programmer! Despite what you'll hear from people peddling various flavors of Kool-Aid, "programmer" isn't a personality type. It's a job description. If you program, you are a programmer, end of line, full stop. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
> I’ve been programming for 18 years now. Then congratulations, you are a programmer! Despite what you'll hear from people peddling various flavors of Kool-Aid, "programmer" isn't a personality type. It's a job description. If you program, you are a programmer, end of line, full stop. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
This also applies to:
- Having a Github page
- Contributing to Open Source Projects
- Knowing (or not) a certain language
- Knowing (or not) a certain technology
- Knowing one of the latest fads
Of course, this affects whether you can work on certain projects or not, but not that "every programmer knows that" is a fallacy (except for something really fundamental)
I know this is a "me too" post, but that's kind of what you're looking for.
Puzzles are a terrifically poor way of judging whether a candidate will be good at performing the most common form of programming there is: solving meaningful problems, often business or interface ones, in a simple and readable way. Your primary audience for this type of programming is other humans. I'll take a good writer over a puzzle-solver any day. Don't get discouraged if they aren't for you.
Absolutely agree, but I'd extended it to good communicator. Communication touches on so much of what we do as programmers, be it talking to customers, sharing ideas amongst a team or writing code in a way that's readable by others, that it should be a primary concern.