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Have you noticed any desire to program more since you started coming here?
(I'm in a similar situation) I've learned bits of PHP and Java in the past, but I wouldn't call it being a programmer. Thanks to HN, I've decided to properly learn to program. I'm buying a book on Python ( http://amzn.to/bUMPCP ), and I'm taking C++ in the upcoming semester.
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That's actually a good but controversial point. My employer has recently made a number of changes that measurably increased the odds and ease with which users achieved their goals, but were met with widespread user unhappiness. Similarly, there was one recent feature I was involved in that was universally lauded as being a fun little easter egg, yet wasted several million hours of productivity worldwide. It's an inte…
> Similarly, there was one recent feature I was involved in that was universally lauded as being a fun little easter egg, yet wasted several million hours of productivity worldwide. Pac-man?
About 10 years later I found Hacker News after watching a talk by Jessica Livingston and then reading Founders at Work. A few years into getting my news everyday from HN, I have learned Java, built a few programs in VB, and built a couple scripts in Ruby, and am starting to dive into Rails for a startup that I'm doing some initial modeling/planning for.
When I am with "business people," I become the "tech guy." When I'm with a bunch of alpha-geeks, like at Founders and Hackers the other week, I am suddenly a "business guy." Seems I wear a different hat depending on the crowd.
I think I enjoy the challenge of both startup marketing, sales, etc., but also really like spending time finding programming solutions to the business problems we have. Like the other day I wrote a Ruby script to help automate a process that they were doing manually where I work. It saved the team hours and hours of busy-work every month, and felt really good to build. So it was trivial to many here, but solved a problem and forced me to learn more about Ruby. And I liked it.
Anyway, I guess I'm saying that I see business in general as a big exercise in problem-solving, and I enjoy that process immensely. Whether I happen to be using a Ruby script or my background in sales/marketing to do it, I don't care. I like the creativity and stimulation that come with both.
I code, but it hasn't been advantageous to call myself a programmer for a while now.
I code, but it hasn't been advantageous to call myself a programmer for a while now.
This tallies with my pet hypothesis about programmer career paths. It is commonly observed that programming is a young person's game: there are lots of teenage and twenty something programmers but fewer and fewer as you look at older and older age groups. This is sometimes blamed on age discrimination, and sometimes on the idea that programming is an exceptionally terrible career. My hypothesis is that the "problem"…
We (Python Ireland user group members) recently held our own PyCon and I got chatting to a recruiter who confirmed what I was already thinking: that the "recession" hasn't really affected software devlopment jobs. Apparently there are loads of development jobs out there that pay above average.
But, like you said, few of them have "programmer" job titles.
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Have you noticed any desire to program more since you started coming here?
(I'm in a similar situation) I've learned bits of PHP and Java in the past, but I wouldn't call it being a programmer. Thanks to HN, I've decided to properly learn to program. I'm buying a book on Python ( http://amzn.to/bUMPCP ), and I'm taking C++ in the upcoming semester.
b.Do these exercises for some extra oomp - http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/exe.... there are some video lectures if required
They're much more better and practical than any ole paperback.
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I call myself a coder because I write code. I don't hack, crack, or (verb)script-kiddie, so I won't refer to myself as a hacker, cracker, or script-kiddie.
*sigh I would hope people would understand the title of hacker on this website. Hint it has nothing to do with security