Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

vikingcodeschool.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 270 posts

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#21

Post by puranjay »

kcole16 wrote: post #8

For me, by far the hardest part was finding the time. Learning to code on nights and weekends, when you've spent your most productive and focused hours at your job, is a nightmare. It wasn't until I was actually hired as a dev that I started to hit a steep learning curve, and I attribute much of that to spending 50 of my best hours/week coding, rather than maybe 20 of my worst.

I have the same issue. I've set aside 10pm-2am every weekday to learn how to code, plus entire Saturdays and Sunday mornings. I can, at most, manage 20-25 hours, usually when I'm already bogged down.

I've been toying with the idea of quitting everything and going all-in for 3-6 months.

Would that be 100% retarded or just about 70% retarded?

I can live with 70%.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#22

Post by kcole16 »

yaddayadda wrote: post #15
kcole16 wrote: post #8

For me, by far the hardest part was finding the time. Learning to code on nights and weekends, when you've spent your most productive and focused hours at your job, is a nightmare. It wasn't until I was actually hired as a dev that I started to hit a steep learning curve, and I attribute much of that to spending 50 of my best hours/week coding, rather than maybe 20 of my worst.

From the sounds of it, you weren't at Erik Trautman's "Job Ready" point when you were hired (and weren't going to get there without being hired). How did you write your resume and handle interviews?

Very true, I had probably just entered the "Upswing of Awesome".

I had quite a bit of experience with relational databases from my previous job, which I leveraged pretty heavily on my resume. As far as interviews, I was very honest about what I did and didn't know, and passed a coding test by pulling an all-nighter (and taking a vacation day) to learn a tiny bit about Django.

The offer came from a company I had initially reached out to about an unpaid internship, which eventually manifested into a full-time job. We agreed to a three month trial period, and they kept me on afterwards.

There was no doubt plenty of luck involved in the whole process. I sent dozens of cold emails, and offered to work for free several times (thankfully never had to).

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#23

Post by shanecleveland »

"You can make that application work but what's happening beneath the surface? Your code is duct tape and string and, worst of all, you don’t even know which parts are terrible and which are actually just fine."

I commonly get to this point after just wanting to proof out a concept and get something working. And then I realize I need to go back and do the unglamorous work of getting it right. But I learn the most then, and helps enormously on future projects.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#24

Post by shittyanalogy »

Motivation.

If you don't have the motivation you'll never be able to do it. If you can't sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day reading documentation and hunting for syntax errors you're not going to be able to do it. If re-writing algorithms doesn't give you an intrinsic satisfaction, you're not going to be able to do it. No amount of everybody can code tutorials is going to help. They should all be, "how to find the motivation to keep coding" tutorials.

Unrelated, but related to the article, the word sociopath get's misused a lot and this article is no exception. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sociopath

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#25

Post by ibebrett »

This may be thinking back on things with rose tinted glasses, but I learned to code in qbasic when I was 12 or so at a Boys and Girls club after school and fell in love. It was entirely effortless and fun to me. I think the difference is at that point I wasn't trying to program to enter some lucrative career and be a startup guy (where are these "coders" going to be once the market dies down and a new industry is hot? probably trying to do that). For me it was something I loved immediately, and while obviously there are really hard problems, the coding part was effortless

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#26

Post by griffinmb »

puranjay wrote: post #21
kcole16 wrote: post #8

For me, by far the hardest part was finding the time. Learning to code on nights and weekends, when you've spent your most productive and focused hours at your job, is a nightmare. It wasn't until I was actually hired as a dev that I started to hit a steep learning curve, and I attribute much of that to spending 50 of my best hours/week coding, rather than maybe 20 of my worst.

I have the same issue. I've set aside 10pm-2am every weekday to learn how to code, plus entire Saturdays and Sunday mornings. I can, at most, manage 20-25 hours, usually when I'm already bogged down. I've been toying with the idea of quitting everything and going all-in for 3-6 months. Would that be 100% retarded or just about 70% retarded? I can live with 70%.

If you are in a position to quit, I'd put it at 0%.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#27

Post by bshimmin »

jeremysmyth wrote: post #7

Having taught many non-programmers to start their programming journey, this article rings very true. The "cliff of confusion" he describes is a function of the Dunning-Kruger effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect ), which indicates that you don't know how bad you are at something until you get better at it. As an educator, the challenge is to make that cliff as unscary as possible and ch…

Totally unrelated to this, but I was interested to see how often the Dunning-Kruger effect is mentioned on HN, since it seems like the comments on almost anything will inevitably yield some reference to it (the opposite, impostor syndrome, comes up quite often too, but has a more obvious and less interesting name); a quick search yields 730 results for "Dunning Kruger" over all time, and half a dozen in the last week alone... which was perhaps a little less than I was expecting, but still rather a lot.

Totally unrelated to that, Algolia's HN search really is magnificent - supremely fast, accurate, and even quite attractive. Impressive.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#28

Post by lurcio »

puranjay wrote: post #4
parenthetically wrote: post #2

Really good discussion of what falls apart when these "anyone can learn to code!" tutorials leave you high and dry, and how to get past that next huge hurdle of self-sufficiency.

As someone who is currently learning how to code, the author gets it mostly right. For me, the hardest parts of programming as a beginner - understanding OOP, data structures, etc. - didn't really 'click' until I stopped reading tutorials about them and start writing my own programs. The idea of 'objects' and 'instance variables' was mind boggingly confusing at first, but once I stopped worrying about how to make sen…

"To know but not to do is not to know."

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#29

Post by pjbrunet »

It's only hard once you realize the commitment required, partly due to the pace of innovation, the depth and breadth of information available and the fact you're competing with the entire world, not just people in your city/state, and there's nobody regulating the influx of competition. A significant chunk of your life will be spent looking at a screen and there's a chance you could end up with a crippling case of carpal tunnel. It's a sacrifice and most people won't make it. In the same amount of time you RTFM, you could have learned to be a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist and a lawyer. And once you have it all figured out, half of everything you learned gets flushed down the toilet because there's some new platform. If you think it's hard and you're not enjoying yourself, don't even bother, there's easier ways to make money.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#30

Post by microtonal »

puranjay wrote: post #4
parenthetically wrote: post #2

Really good discussion of what falls apart when these "anyone can learn to code!" tutorials leave you high and dry, and how to get past that next huge hurdle of self-sufficiency.

As someone who is currently learning how to code, the author gets it mostly right. For me, the hardest parts of programming as a beginner - understanding OOP, data structures, etc. - didn't really 'click' until I stopped reading tutorials about them and start writing my own programs. The idea of 'objects' and 'instance variables' was mind boggingly confusing at first, but once I stopped worrying about how to make sen…

start writing my own programs

Indeed, you can only get good at programming by doing it.

As someone who learnt programming in the 90ies, one of the difficult things nowadays seems to be that there are so many languages, libraries, frameworks, hypes, etc. Of course, if you know your CS and have experience, most of it are variations on common themes. However, I can imagine that it can be very difficult to focus on one thing and learning it well. There must be many copy & paste programmers out there who never learn anything in depth.

At the beginning of the nineties things were much simpler. If you had a home PC (obviously without internet), you could get started with QBasic, or shell out some money for a compiler and get Turbo Pascal or Turbo C++.

I did quite a bit of Turbo Pascal programming at some point and it was all very understandable. A simple language, a small standard library that's probably all that you'll have, good documentation, and an IDE (which had a very nice debugger and profiler). And you just crafted tools with that.

Post reply on HN