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The Apprentice Programmer

tobi.lutke.com

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Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#141

Post by ahoyhere »

burkean wrote: post #101
kostya-kow wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with you. You expressed exactly what I was thinking. I am 15, and I am planning to drop out of school. It is extremely frustrating trying to persuade my parents that dropping out of school doesn't mean I am giving up on life, and that I am not a failure. I cannot function in this artificial society that exists in schools, and I learn much better by myself. Finishing school would be complete waste o…

> There are always exceptions, but you will have to be exceptional in their eyes. This is spot-on. People take certain prejudices to their modelling high school dropouts. These are formed by the sheer repetition of observation. Dropping out is something Bad Students do. It's low status. Even an average student who drops out will have the story of their life coloured in terms of: 'he could have done _even_ better if h…

I think you're overstating the risk and need to be exceptional, actually. For the kinds of jobs we're talking about.

# of employers who asked why I didn't list any high school on my resume: 0. # of clients who asked where I went to school: 0. I may be exceptional now, but I wasn't always, and I still got good jobs.

I either put nothing about education at all on my resume, and explained that I left college because xyz, or jokingly put "The School of Hard Knocks" and that worked for me.

FWIW I have done everything from working for a local software dev co., to consulting for Pepsi, and I was employed as a consultant for Bear Stearns ("hired" by their staffing agency — it's a weird setup), with these (lack of) credentials. Never had a problem.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#142

Post by hso9791 »

kostya-kow wrote: post #47
ahoyhere wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a bias if you look at dropouts as a homogeneous group, because they aren't. It's just as ludicrous to predict the same outcome for someone like me, who was always way ahead and bored to death of school, and a poor kid from the city or country who couldn't read at grade level. I doubt Tobi ever had reading comprehension problems and I bet he was passionate about his hobby leading up to his track switch. A…

I completely agree with you. You expressed exactly what I was thinking. I am 15, and I am planning to drop out of school. It is extremely frustrating trying to persuade my parents that dropping out of school doesn't mean I am giving up on life, and that I am not a failure. I cannot function in this artificial society that exists in schools, and I learn much better by myself. Finishing school would be complete waste o…

If you do drop out, make your plan B now.

Priority one should be to be self-sufficient. It might be hard to get sufficient wages at that wage, and as a dropout, but this needs to happen.

If you end up in an unstructured environment, chances are you'll lose track of what you wanted to do. So - even if it's totally unrelated to what you want to do for the future - work like your life depends on it. It will give you a feeling of worth, and give you habits that will eventually make you the right man for the job that you want.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#143

Post by walshemj »

keithpeter wrote: post #130
walshemj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah you mean the Torry plan to bring back the 11 plus and ship off poor kids to dumbed down Modern Apprenticeships so they can stack shelves at safeway.

No, I mean the real apprenticeships with companies like Siemens and GKN that you need a minimum of 5 GCSEs to get onto, and that lead to BTEC National Diploma then HND qualifications with 1 year degree conversion. I accept your point that the word 'apprenticeship' has been made meaningless by our Present Leaders but there is some good stuff out there as well.

But that is NOT an apprentice that is a Technician (aka Associate professional) doing the a traditional day release course (ONC/HNC/BTEC) for Technicians which is how I came into IT.

Clever apprentices would only go on to do this after doing there 4/5 years.

And ok my BTEC was a some what specialized one (mech eng with Thermofluids) but we looked down on the "apprentices" form the local Garages.

Though I suspect (borrowing John Cleses line) alowing "jumped up F%^&*ing Caterers" to devalue the term that fight is lost.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#144

Post by Surio »

genwin wrote: post #140
Surio wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. >> Still, jumping ship might be easier wry smile . Nothing wrong with what you've said. But come to think of it, you've endorsed rachel's POV regarding the building up of resentment with this answer. If jumping ship is the kind of disruption one has to make for what amounts to "convenient excuses" (and the manager goes on to pay 3x more to "worthless" network engineers -- read her reply above),…

I meant that jumping ship might be easier at any company. Businesses put rigid limits on raises. If you want to make a market rate it's best to get it when hired.

Ahhh. It's clearer when you put it like that. However, not everyone pulls an ace out of a card every time, time after time. ;-)

Net result, arbitrary excuses/comparison tactics like what OP points out, is actually more common than one would like it to be.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#145

Post by lsc »

pkolaczk wrote: post #131
lsc wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's certainly possible to obtain this knowledge on your own with serious self-study. But it's a hard route (albeit one getting easier thanks to Coursera et al.) Now, what little math and theory I have learned, well, really, what anything I've learned... I've found that it's dramatically easier to learn from books than from a lecture. First, people talking? really, really slow. I ain't no speed-reader, but I can man…

"relational databases are incredibly easy to tune and improve"... only as long as they are on a single beefy server. When it is not enough, and very often it is not enough, things start to become very hairy up to the point where you have to rewrite your application using a proper NoSQL solution and with some people who understand databases a little better than "See ma, I put SQL here and it automagically evaluates...…

servers up to 512GiB ram, these days, are pretty cheap. that is /big/

The thing is? last I looked, none of the NoSQL databases handle multi-master replication, either. In all cases, if a server goes away, you have issues. With SQL, you promote your most up to date read-only replica to read-write master, re-point the other slaves and run. With modern SQL databases, you can even control how out of sync you allow your read-only replicas to be (to the point of making it so the transaction isn't complete until it's been written not only to the master, but also to the slave... of course, that costs time. It's a tradeoff you can tune, depending on how much your data matters.)

Now, if you just need more write-performance than a single beefy server with 512G ram and a bunch of SSDs can bring (which is a lot) then you shard. At that point, you are pretty much where most NoSQL systems are, except that most sql engines come with a bunch of neat tools for finding slow queries (and for figuring out how to make those queries fast without changing the php) that the nosql stuff seems to lack.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#146

Post by keithpeter »

walshemj wrote: post #143
keithpeter wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I mean the real apprenticeships with companies like Siemens and GKN that you need a minimum of 5 GCSEs to get onto, and that lead to BTEC National Diploma then HND qualifications with 1 year degree conversion. I accept your point that the word 'apprenticeship' has been made meaningless by our Present Leaders but there is some good stuff out there as well.

But that is NOT an apprentice that is a Technician (aka Associate professional) doing the a traditional day release course (ONC/HNC/BTEC) for Technicians which is how I came into IT. Clever apprentices would only go on to do this after doing there 4/5 years. And ok my BTEC was a some what specialized one (mech eng with Thermofluids) but we looked down on the "apprentices" form the local Garages. Though I suspect (bor…

"But that is NOT an apprentice that is a Technician (aka Associate professional) doing the a traditional day release course (ONC/HNC/BTEC) for Technicians which is how I came into IT."

Actually, it is. The Ordinary National Certificate was replaced with the B/TEC National Diploma half a decade before I came into teaching in 1989. You must be a mature person!

And yes, the whole program takes 4 to 5 years. With another couple of full time years for degree top up.

Those programmes do still exist but I agree entirely with your point about the shelf-stacking and mickey mouse stuff the current administration are bringing in (as their political forefathers did in the 1980s).

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#147

Post by keithpeter »

meaty wrote: post #73
walshemj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah you mean the Torry plan to bring back the 11 plus and ship off poor kids to dumbed down Modern Apprenticeships so they can stack shelves at safeway.

You hit the nail on the head. Except they also have the "back to work scheme" which means they don't even have to pay them to stack shelves in safeway (or Morrisons as it now is).

Yes, that 'scheme' has lost me a really good student who was attending a college course off his own bat. He has been required to waste his time totally in a mickey mouse scheme that won't get him anywhere. We will try to catch him up when he is let out.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#149

Post by tamersalama »

ismarc wrote: post #54
dxbydt wrote: post #38

I simply do not understand this anti-college anti-credentialling sentiment. I am featured in the latest Hacker Monthly ( print version of HN). So they asked me for a bio. I wrote something about how I learnt everything in college...am not a hacker...and that you should go to grad school if you want to get better at CS. So they edited out all of the pro-college stuff and just said this guy is data scientist. You don't…

I'm of two minds of this. 1) I'm very much NOT anti-college/anti-credentialing. 2) I don't see your average business application software developer having any need for a degree in CS. I believe the anti-college/anti-credentialing stance is primarily how people are sold on degrees. People are told they will get better jobs and make more money if they get one. However, no one really takes the time to tell them that jus…

> ... vast majority of the technology related jobs are the modern day equivalent of 'blue collar' work ...

That's certainly how most of tech-workers are treated. However - should they? Even for non-degree bearers (or those like me transitioned from other fields), it's a highly creative non-mechanical work. The notion of treating tech workers as blue-collar ones is I think stemming from the black-box sophisticated nature of work (and perhaps introversion of many in the business) which the industry bike-shed into previously known moulds.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#150

Post by meaty »

keithpeter wrote: post #147
meaty wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hit the nail on the head. Except they also have the "back to work scheme" which means they don't even have to pay them to stack shelves in safeway (or Morrisons as it now is).

Yes, that 'scheme' has lost me a really good student who was attending a college course off his own bat. He has been required to waste his time totally in a mickey mouse scheme that won't get him anywhere. We will try to catch him up when he is let out.

That sucks. My nephew managed to get out of it by calling his manager at Tesco "fucking spineless arse licking cunt". Worked wonders. He now fixes laptops at the local computer shop for a reasonable amount of cash.
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