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See also "Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All", by the same author. http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html
I'd personally change that to "human beings need to learn statistics or I will kill them all".
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The mark of whether you "know" a programming language isn't whether you've gone through a tutorial; it's whether you can write useful programs in that language.
Uh yeah, there's this thing called experience which allows me to learn a language well enough to realize it's a total load of bullshit. Haskell was exactly like that.
Really nice effort on this book, I wish I could teleport it back in time to my past self.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre progra…
And by the way, you ever see the kind of code scientists write? You'd burn your eyes out. No, it's not "good code," it's "good science." There's a difference. The humble ones nod their head and say "I don't understand the difference." Good luck finding a company like that (www.aer.com <- John Baldwin's group, they're hiring and have awesome management.)
> People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. Totally
I disagree. People who code in the world of technology companies get respect, and quite a lot of it. Getting paid for your work is a form of respect.
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don't let Zed's online persona (they ZSFA type one) fool you. He's actually a brilliant coder, has done all the things that it sounds like he hasn't and is one of those who I think has actually given more to the community than the "community" has ever given him (I'm making reference to the phrase "give back to the community") Sure, he has a fairly unapologetic and somewhat confrontational nature (much like DHH) that…
Oh, fanboys like you are the worst. His online persona has one truth - he spits into communities. And to compare DHH with Zed is unfair to DHH. DHH never made such idiotic rants like Zed.
Like you I dislike the way Zed has a tendency to group all Ruby people together and target them as a whole, when in reality his complaints would be better directed at a specific subset. I'm a Ruby dev (not a Rails one) and it stings when Zed fires his literary shotgun at Rails, and Ruby, standing next to Rails also gets hit.
But... this isn't about Zed being a dick. I was pointing out that there's also a massive amount of good stuff he's done as well. I'm not a fanboy of his (Zed has fanboys?) but I do have a fair bit of respect for his ability and what he has done, and his writing does nothing to diminish the quality of his work.
The comparison with DHH I thought was positive. DHH has strong opinions and (it appears) an ego to match, but can back it up with code.
If you want to be world champion or mix it up with the legends in Bobby's Room, you need to be a phenomenal player, but being great at poker won't stop you from being broke and miserable. Everyone in poker knows a 'That Guy', a bona fide poker genius who keeps fucking their life up because they care too much about the game. The archetypal example is Stu Ungar; He won three world championships and over $30 million, but died aged 45, penniless and alone in a crappy motel because he just couldn't get his life in order.
Like poker, software is intrinsically meaningful only as an intellectual puzzle. It can be fascinating and beautiful and it can send you mad. Fall into the trap of believing that poker is a worthwhile pursuit of itself and you end up in the trap - living out of your car or on the crappy end of the Vegas strip, some weeks a millionaire, some weeks a bankrupt. You see them come and go, the bright-eyed but slowly dimming college dropouts who could be living the life of Riley if only they knew something outside of poker, if only they stopped trying to beat the hardest games for the sake of it.
Your usefulness as a developer is only indirectly related to your ability to code. There are bona fide geniuses working in poverty and obscurity, there are utterly mediocre programmers doing amazingly useful and important work. Github is overflowing with brilliant, painstaking solutions to problems that just don't matter. Your most important skill as a developer is choosing what to work on. It doesn't matter how lousy a programmer you are, you can still transform an industry by simple merit of being the first person to seriously write software for it. Don't spend good years of your life writing the next big social network or yet another bloody blogging engine. Don't be That Guy.
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I’m not brave enough to speak in extremes/absolutes like "completely wrong" on a topic like this. My experience aligns with his advice. As a finance student, I was selected for a research project because of my database/SQL knowledge, which got me mention in the Journal of Finance when my prof. was published, and which later paid unexpected dividends. Later, knowing to code in a finance/analyst job ultimately position…
But was he a pharmacist that could code, or a programmer who showed up one day and said, hey, need any programs?
Once upon a time, I played poker for a living. The most important thing I learned was that the least important factor in how much I earned was my skill at poker. The most important skill was table selection, my decisions over which games to get involved in and who to sit next to. A close second was managing my resources, making sure I was playing within my financial and emotional means. If you want to be world champi…
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Well, other than that he's completely mistaken about the career advice he offers here. I'd be very curious to know if he's ever been the highly-respected programmer in a science lab, or personally knows anyone who is. My science friends tell me the job doesn't exist; any code that needs writing, a grad student will do it sufficiently well (on top of their lab work) for no more money.
Well, good thing you gave up rather than using code to solve hard problems other scientists in your field can't solve.
Are you talking about anything in particular when you mention that? An example would really help your case here.
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They're social scientists/linguists undergrads first, programmers second, but programming plays a vital role in their academic career. This is only because of the sad state of education where programming is this incredibly rare black magic that less than 1% of the people in your field know. (Mathematicians and Physicists obviously excluded.) But this is changing, it has not been the case in physics since for ever, an…
when everybody is trained with at least a basic ability to program, then your super advantage is gone Yes, but like Math, not everybody can be trained in it. People either get math or they don't. Everybody has to take calculus to become a scientist or a doctor but most people never really get it and forget it shortly after taking the classes. I imagine the same will happen with programming: there will be a few requir…
I refuse to believe this.
There may be some very tiny minority that truly is genetically unable to get math. But for everyone else I believe it is merely difficult. Education is the problem, not genetics.