141–150 of 332 posts
The question is : Is that hardwired or is programmable? I discovered early in my life that by changing the perspective of a problem you could transform something dull and tedious into something exciting and highly interesting. For example , when I learned to visualize mathematical problems I become much better at solving them. Mindmaps, and memory tools can make someone who struggle(and suffers as for example when he…
I like debugging, it can be incredibly satisfying.
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Is it always intimidation, though? I find programming unimaginably boring.
It probably depends on the type of programming and the challenge it presents. A typical month, for me, has probably 5% exciting programming work. The rest is just tedious churn that you inevitably have to do to support the exciting bit.
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You're supposed to come up with something that feels like work to other people .
I read "net news" - a lot. So much so that people comment on it. I always wondered if there was any value in "here's what is hot" in the tech world - like a personal link aggregator. Yeah, I could share/blog/tweet (and I do, but not much) but often the things that are interesting later aren't things I share right away. Still trying to solve that problem.
Among many others, I managed to positively affect my company this way by pointing my boss in the direction of good solutions and clarifying which of his ideas are actually feasible.
Reading HN never seems like work. I feel like I could do it all day.
I was thinking the same thing about socializing with tech people, then I remembered that the heuristic was an logical conjunction. It both has not seem like work to you AND seem like work to other people. Of course, for a lot of people uninterested in tech and programming, reading HN would seem like work. And, for many tech people, socializing also seems like work. So I guess it's a matter of what group you're compar…
This excerpt - "what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually." is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in m…
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It probably depends on the type of programming and the challenge it presents. A typical month, for me, has probably 5% exciting programming work. The rest is just tedious churn that you inevitably have to do to support the exciting bit.
Maybe you just need to work on something you actually care about. There are a lot of hard and interesting problems which need programmers working on them, but boredom is understandable if you are just churning out the one-million-and-oneth generic web app.
At my last job, I was brought on into a role of leadership and immediately had all of it usurped by my boss (formerly doing my responsibilities) upon my first couple of this-is-unexplored-territory-so-I-stepped-on-a-rake mistakes. Looking back, I was checked out by April (and I started in February).
"Checking out" for me is hard to see until I'm not checked-out anymore. I can't even feel it in the moment, because I still like to argue and I still want to do capital-R Right, but my brain stopped really working for a while. My mental health followed. What few good projects I did and was proud of felt more like the work of other people (even though in retrospect I more than carried my weight) or were things I built out of spite to prove that, no, I really did know what I was talking about, jerks.
Of course, they're not jerks, and I'm friends or friendly with even the folks in my management chain now that I no longer work there. (Getting a 50% raise to leave didn't hurt.) But I can't be a meat puppet, it's not in my nature, and I feel like that's the case for most of the really really good programmers I know.
Is it common for programmers to dislike debugging? I'm stunned. I never considered the possibility, it's always been something I enjoyed. I don't believe it impacts you either way in terms of capability but I imagine it impacts your desire to continue.
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I think that I have a reasonable aptitude for maths and I like solving problems, but I always felt like textbook problems more-or-less consisted of plugging the numbers into a standard template. Maybe my education was uniquely terrible but I'm surprised that there are people who can blast through textbooks and enjoy doing it.
If you know SICP, I think it's a good example of a textbook with nice problems. My math textbook in French education system were to a similar level of quality. The first two problems were usually to make sure you understood the basic of the chapter, but the others were much harder or opened new perspectives, or used very different context. It was a real pleasure to read the textbook and the problems.
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> Programming, maths & science, etc. are acquired tastes. Not things you can enjoy from the get-go. I dunno, I enjoyed all three from the get-go. Ballroom dance I suspected I would enjoy, but it took me a while to get to the point where it wasn't just work to do it (even though I enjoyed watching it.) I know plenty of people for whom those things are flipped. I don't think "what you can enjoy from the get-go" and "wh…
In my case, I didn't expect to enjoy learning Paraguayan traditional dancing, but it sure was fun and I'm glad I tried it. Like another poster pointed out, it's the hard work that comes first (overcoming the fear, or plugging away at the books), then comes the satisfaction. I think it must feel lonely being a great mathematician for example, knowing that everyone else has settled for less, and that only you and a few…
Only recently have computer proofs become somewhat accepted. The holy grail is still to find simple proofs to interesting problems to enlighten people.