[I made a similar reply down below, but I think this belongs here, too.] I've made my living by teaching beginners to code. I have been doing it for the better part of two decades, and I specialize in teaching students that have little aptitude for it. In my experience, many students can learn how to code, but it takes a very long time! For example, I make my students code FizzBuzz. It is literally the 106th project…
Why do you do it, my guess is most people here would never knowingly hire someone who struggled with such a basic concept.
I agree.. I was talking with a CFO about one of his employees, who he called his secret weapon - an accountant with coding skills. The ability to do a regular job plus the ability to code is extremely valuable. In architecture there is a trend of computational design - if you google for 'designed with grasshopper', you'll see some amazing shapes. The best designs don't come from the best programmers, they come from t…
In theory this is true, but in practice a common pattern is that Joe is a superstar accountant/lawyer because he can code and uses that to do his job better. This becomes known to his co-workers and boss. Six months down the road he's spending a huge portion of his week helping Mike with this one little excel macro or Mary with automatically generating contracts. He also gets called in when a message pops up on the s…
Yep, I find myself in a somewhat similar situation. I'm a business analyst who taught myself enough front-end skills to build a JS app that replaces an old legacy application we have. The result saved us dev resources(because it completely avoided the standard waterfall timeline), but has now given way to "if we don't have dev resources, let's give this task to him."
Which is fine, but the tasks that go down that path aren't really enough to point me toward a full-time dev gig. So I'm in a weird middle ground between being a PM/BA/Developer without acquiring full experience in any of the three roles right now.
That being said, if I had to do it again I'd do the same thing. Just not sure how to navigate out of it.
The ill-conceived notion that parents giving children procedural instructions is somehow like programming brings me to a question for you as a teacher. I've noticed that the industry really prides itself on algorithms and this is commonly reflected in interviews. However, it seems to me that merely discussing algorithms, however clever they might be, is actually an intuitive human activity not unlike the example of t…
I think algorithm design is hard. Most students/people can't break down a problem into small enough steps for the computer to do them. Are you familiar with the concept of "chunking" in memory research? Well, computers don't chunk but humans do. Humans tend to think about their algorithms in terms of the chunks they already know, but for computers sometimes each chunk has to be broken down into much smaller sub-steps…
It sounds like what you're describing is not figuring out at a high level what to do, but formalizing that into low-level instructions for a computer. This goes exactly to my point. What I meant by "algorithm design" is strategy selection, which I want to be careful to separate from strategy formalization for a computer. It is the latter that I think laypeople struggle with the most, however, the fascination with algorithms often drives attention to the former. For example, it's easy to be impressed by the cleverness of binary search, but it's actually relatively straightforward to understand as a high-level concept. The harder thing for a layperson is to formalize binary search into a working set of computer steps. I think there is a certain cognitive bias at play, where the formality of fine detail seems lowly and menial, so we want to skip over it, in spite of the fact that it's actually the biggest hurdle for most people to overcome.
[I made a similar reply down below, but I think this belongs here, too.] I've made my living by teaching beginners to code. I have been doing it for the better part of two decades, and I specialize in teaching students that have little aptitude for it. In my experience, many students can learn how to code, but it takes a very long time! For example, I make my students code FizzBuzz. It is literally the 106th project…
Why do you do it, my guess is most people here would never knowingly hire someone who struggled with such a basic concept.
Because my kids keep practicing for ten years after my class before getting jobs.
Many politicians and policy makers think that anyone can become an engineer of any kind with just a course of a couple months. Good example is the politicians who argue that a high influx of Syrian refugees can solve the lack of available IT and mechanical engineers in the Netherlands. It doesn't matter that they don't speak the language, it doesn't matter that they have no engineering education, it doesn't matter that they don't have any experience. Anyone can do it right?
Being an electrical engineer is just connecting 2 wires, right? Being a programmer is just booting up your text editor, right?
Becoming a good programmer doesn't require a degree but it helps to set a good base for your knowledge. On top of that you need thousands of hours of self teaching.
It all depends... The question boils down to "how much of a shit job are you willing to go after"? There's always a few programming jobs that no one wants because the pay is awful and the company/job description is crap (PHP web apps for 28k/year? ROFLOL). But then they act as proof of employability for slightly better companies and soon you have 12-24 months of "professional" experience and landing interviews at OK…
PHP is paradise compared to the bed of glass and nails some of us 30-somethings had to drag ourselves through man. Lotus Domino. Never Forget.
I liken coding to playing a musical instrument. Some people are musically inclined, they can learn easily and fast and they tend to the best. But most people require some level of training complimented by the dedication of what amounts to mostly self-practice. So in a way, you're self taught. The vast majority of people are willing to buy an instrument, just to see if they are musically inclined, but when they find o…
Although I try to be careful with analogies, I do think this is an excellent one, largely because it can help explain why coding can be seen as simultaneously easy and extremely difficult. I remember reading an interview with Andre 3000 a while back about how he composed "Hey Ya!". It turned out (this is all from memory) that the reason he used the chord pattern he chose was because he was relatively new to the guita…