I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

I feel the same way about games that he feels about jigsaws. They're fun enough but they're inherently contrived and produce no real value. I read books and watch movies for narrative experiences. While there's a growing minority of games that have real emotional, sophisticated and even literature-level narratives, at the end of the day, most games require you to solve contrived puzzles to advance the narrative.

On the other end, there are games like that one where you build pieces from blocks and it's a little world, people have expressed their artistic side with whole castles with automations and calculators. These are more like LEGO, Meccano or other tool; they're a substrate, like a programming language, something you build on. I wouldn't call them games.

Although I will grant that games that pit you against or collaborate with other human beings is worth it to some degree, because you're spending time with people (which is why Chess is bloody boring and pointless to play against the computer), it's all noughts-and-crosses with bells and whistles.

Coming back to his point about jigsaws, while it is satisfying to complete one, personally, any time spent putting in active effort (as opposed to passive effort, like in the case of a novel or movie or theatre), I'd prefer to be doing something actually constructive; to produce something real, either artistically (I paint canvases), or technologically (I'm a programmer). Rather than maintaining these “farms” and cyberpet-style games, or the games where you're digging for gold and collecting resources, I'd rather maintain my bike, go grab some materials from the store and do some DIY in my apartment, plant some things in my garden, etc. Whenever one of my gamer friends explains a game to me, I'm thinking more about how I'd make that than how I'd play it. I'm not saying people who like to spend time doing these things are wasting their time, just that I don't share that desire at all.

Puzzles in a job interview are a poor idea. People don't solve puzzles on their job, with their manager watching them do it. They don't get sacked for failing to solve the puzzle (which failing a job interview is tantamount to; your career depends on it). And if they can't solve a puzzle in 15 minutes, they spend all day on it. Or all week. They ask their colleagues for help. If it's too hard, the product manager considers breaking the problem down. Asking contrived puzzles is such a silly idea that I'm biased against companies that try to ask them for job interviews.

I like making things. If I want to make something and I don't know how, I'll figure it out. Call that "solving a puzzle," but it's a very different activity than solving a literal jigsaw puzzle or answering some arbitrary question about rickety bridges.

If you enjoy making things with software, you'll be a decent programmer. If you enjoy puzzles for their own sake, go check out some Martin Gardner books. Those two enjoyments can overlap, but they're not necessarily dependent upon one another.

Love this. I like puzzles (and scifi) and definitely fit the more traditional model of a programmer, though I'm entirely self-taught and didn't take CS in school. I really don't like algorithms that much. What I do enjoy is API design, writing elegant code that is maintainable, and solving the macro, human-scale problems.

Ditto if you don't like Star Wars, XCKD, comic books, etc.

This. So much this.

I'm a programmer who loves 'building the brain'. I've been coding professionally for about 16 years.

I've written some code I'm really proud of. A couple of specific pieces of code are actually used in a LOT of major websites you probably use. Like almost every health care site or major retailer site. I actually find most code written by 'whiz' startups - even successful ones - to be incredibly simplistic. Not a knock on them, just stating this for reference - I have even written some encryption code that gave me headaches to understand but is still in use by a few major financial corporations years after I wrote it. I know I can write some serious code. I studied and work with AI programming in my spare time.

I don't have a GitHub page, nor do I have an interest in having one. I barely have a StackOverflow profile. I post on Hacker News now and again but that's about it.

I don't care about hackathons or solving puzzles.

I hate the term 'nerd' or 'geek'. I am neither and I find the terms insulting. I'm just smart and I like to code. I am not socially awkward. I'm introverted, but I'm not shy. I played football and basketball and I played chess. These concepts are not mutually exclusive.