341–350 of 406 posts
It was 2011, a childhood friend visited me after 10 years. We talk about the old days, we laugh, I even tease her husband sitting next to me, smiling politely. She excuses herself leaving the men alone to bond. "So, what do you do?" He asks after a long 5 second. "Oh, I'm a programmer." I say with pride. To be sure I add, "A computer programmer." I make it a habit to add this because regular people have a hard time u…
Sounds legit...
>"They found that they had to take calculus" ...On that note: When I enrolled at the University of Maryland in 1985, it was still at the height of the fad, and the CS department actually had so many hopeful undergrads signing up to be CS majors that they had to filter them out and discourage them somehow. They came up with this idea they called "Programming Calculus" that they taught with this language called "CF Pas…
I mean, of the millions(?) of programmers out there churning out code, how many % of them actually prove their programs correct?
Despite what all the academia-types say, I firmly believe that programming is at most 50% math/logic, and the other 50% is literature or "writing skills". The ability to express ideas in text form that is easy for people to read and understand is one of the most crucial skills to have as a coder.
The point is, this aspect of programming is so neglected that people readily accept gatekeeping of aspiring programmers by scaring them away with advanced maths, but nobody ever told you that if your writing skills suck (even in English or your native language), you might end up a bad programmer...
Not one hour of college after graduating high school in 1982 and I’ve been working in IT non-stop. Calculus? Physics? Ridiculous.
Academia's gotta keep a tight grip on that knowledge. Can't possibly be successful without the gatekeepers.
Now...I have improved my knowledge of complex data structures like graph traversal, but it's rare this knowledge is needed in every day business-oriented development.
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What about the half million total comp and the part where you can retire in your thirties? If anything, I bet younger me would do even better than I did if he were to start today.
Can I have one of those? That seems to be available only in US for handful of VERY vocal people.
It’s not easy, and you may need to actually go to the place where those jobs are. But each of those companies will hire thousands of people at those compensation level in the next year. And the people they hire were in no way exceptional (or different to you) before they started down the path to getting where they are now.
There’s no reason you can’t be one of them.
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If there’s anything I’ve learned it is that you should always make your own mistakes. Your parent’s mistakes don’t even make sense any more 30-40 years down the line. My father pushed me into EE. I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK. Ended up supporting a bunch of Sun machines for other EEs which was more fun. So i learned Perl one w…
Why is EE so bad? On the surface it looks like a degree with a strong grounding in mathematics, exposure to programming, the discipline of engineering, and a diverse range of applications across industry. It kind of seems like the ideal degree if you want to hire someone. I'm always baffled when I hear stories like this.
>"They found that they had to take calculus" ...On that note: When I enrolled at the University of Maryland in 1985, it was still at the height of the fad, and the CS department actually had so many hopeful undergrads signing up to be CS majors that they had to filter them out and discourage them somehow. They came up with this idea they called "Programming Calculus" that they taught with this language called "CF Pas…
This corroborates my long-term suspicion -- all those talk about provably correctness of programs is basically a way to gate keep people from entering the industry. I mean, of the millions(?) of programmers out there churning out code, how many % of them actually prove their programs correct? Despite what all the academia-types say, I firmly believe that programming is at most 50% math/logic, and the other 50% is lit…
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Government employee in Canada here. The pay itself is not necessarily the best, but top notch benefits, generous vacation (maybe a moot point in Netherlands but definitely not here), a rock solid pension make it a lot closer than the salary number alone. There's also the fact that the number of hours worked is always fair, and that you can move within the public service very easily.
How many big projects are handled mostly "in house" by the government in Canada. And for the outsourced ones, how much input / leadership do the internal government people have? Because it is largely the outsourced big projects where our Government fails.
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Im especially glad I’m not British - in America my $150k TC out of undergrad was mediocre.
Bearing in mind that 30k a year goes a lot further given that there's no need for health insurance and student loans are effectively just a 6% tax on earnings above 27k until either your loan is repaid or it's been 30 years since graduating. While it's true that UK salaries are quite a bit lower than other countries if I'm honest if I earned £150k a year the only difference in how I live my life would be that I'd be…
For what it’s worth I can’t afford a Tesla either making $200k now and live in a 450sqft studio.
I don’t hear much about it these days, but circa 2004 when I was going into computer science I had multiple teachers and a guidance counselor warn me that all the jobs would be going to India and tell me I should pursue something else. This seemed to be very much the prevailing wisdom of the time. I pursued it anyway as it was my passion. I was one of five students in my program that had been a huge multi-campus prog…
Actually, I was trying to find out the number of programmers world-wide the other day, and many US-based analysis were saying the same thing: "programmer jobs in the US will drop in the next 10 years as jobs move abroad". For example [1], but many more with the same gist. https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/computer-programmer/j...
The BLS statistics have us based “programmer” jobs declining by 9% but “software developer” jobs expanding by 23% on a higher base. The job description is largely the same, although software developers have more design responsibility.
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Speaking of hedgefunds. Those are unlikely to hire embedded software developers but they may need a lot of "basic coders" and they can afford to pay them a lot even if the job is simple.
hedge funds are not uniform enough to have any predictable set of skill requirements some need a node js script, some swear by python because an area of computational finance has gathered around it, some swear by languages closer to the metal, some have use cases that are better off with low latency stacks, others dont some are modifying FPGAs, others have simply negotiated a payout from a court case and will teach y…