Learning to code is not so hard, but learning to code well is extremely hard - almost impossible. I have been doing software development years and years also in some well known companies and I am not sure if I have yet met a good developer.
Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
51–60 of 270 posts
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#52For me, by far the hardest part was finding the time. Learning to code on nights and weekends, when you've spent your most productive and focused hours at your job, is a nightmare. It wasn't until I was actually hired as a dev that I started to hit a steep learning curve, and I attribute much of that to spending 50 of my best hours/week coding, rather than maybe 20 of my worst.
Yes, end of the day learning is hard as heck.
YMMV, but I find if I have a solid hour in the morning I can gear up pretty quickly.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#53Learning to code is not hard. At all. Not relative to things that actually are hard. Having trained as an electronic engineer, programming is by far one of the easiest things I've ever done, by an order of magnitude. You can tell by the number of teenagers that can code, how many teenagers can design a nuclear submarine? That is much harder to learn.
I think it depends how you define "coding". Writing a compiler for C++ from scratch for instance isn't the same feat as coding a bubble sort in php. Besides, nobody designs a nuclear submarine anyway. I assume it's always a team work. It involves a lot of knowledge that not a single individual possesses.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#54It's an ad. At the end: Our core program is specifically designed to bridge this whole process. ... Sign up below. Worse, the training just creates junior web developers. There's a glut of junior web developers. The concept of Ruby on Rails was to make the whole process of web site development a tutorial-level job from start to finish. How did that work out?
It's content marketing, a bit different from advertising. It only works if the content is good (which it is in this case)
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#55"... was convinced that the seemingly normal programmers I ran into were actually sociopaths who had experienced, then repressed, the trauma of learning to code." It's true. The saddest part is that we forget who we were before we crossed over, and lose the ability to sympathise with people who haven't been through it.
I sympathize if I detect that they're genuine in their desire to learn and improve themselves. As for the others, the ones that just want to "get by", they don't get much of my sympathy. And that is after I try my best to inspire in them a sense of self-improvement when it comes to programming. Alas, not everyone has that outlook on programming, but rather just see it as a dumb-tool to muddle over some arbitrary problem someone dreamt up in some ivory room, somewhere.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#56When I was in college, one CS professor explained the difficulty of coding to me in terms of discreteness vs continuity. In the real world, things are continuous. If you accidentally build your structure with 9 supports instead of 10, then you only lose 10% of the strength of the structure, more or less. The strength varies continuously with the amount of support. But if you're writing a 10-line program and you forge…
That's closer to the definition of instability than it is discontinuity.
"In mathematics, a continuous function is, roughly speaking, a function for which small changes in the input result in small changes in the output." [1]
I could clarify and say that the change doesn't have to be unboundedly large in absolute terms, but rather relative to the change in input. (i.e. a jump discontinuity from 0 to 1 is not absolutely unbounded, but it is relative to an arbitrarily small change across the jump.)
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#57For me, by far the hardest part was finding the time. Learning to code on nights and weekends, when you've spent your most productive and focused hours at your job, is a nightmare. It wasn't until I was actually hired as a dev that I started to hit a steep learning curve, and I attribute much of that to spending 50 of my best hours/week coding, rather than maybe 20 of my worst.
I have the same issue. I've set aside 10pm-2am every weekday to learn how to code, plus entire Saturdays and Sunday mornings. I can, at most, manage 20-25 hours, usually when I'm already bogged down. I've been toying with the idea of quitting everything and going all-in for 3-6 months. Would that be 100% retarded or just about 70% retarded? I can live with 70%.
You'll want to account for this all-in time on your resume. (Unemployment gaps are a red flag to companies.) You could put together a company of your own, for example, and frame all your study time as product/service development.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#58As a self taught developer, I'm so thankful I first thought I wanted to be a designer. HTML and CSS made sense to me (the backend, even frontend js, forget it. I'd try to hack around it) and I sought deeper knowledge on the subject. Build systems and preprocessors were a gateway to command line tools and good organization skills.
Once I was thrown into full stack development, I at least had something to lean on while the backend programming caught up with the frontend. Then I started applying the things I learned programming backend applications to frontend applications (where do I keep all this state?). I think I spent a lot of time in the desert of despair wrt. certain types of programming but was never entirely there.
I think it's important to have something to feel confident in while you struggle.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#59Having taught many non-programmers to start their programming journey, this article rings very true. The "cliff of confusion" he describes is a function of the Dunning-Kruger effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect ), which indicates that you don't know how bad you are at something until you get better at it. As an educator, the challenge is to make that cliff as unscary as possible and ch…
Totally agree. Helping novice programmers through that time of "Oh my god, I know nothing, I will never be good at this" as their world is expanding is crucial. I think having a support system can make a big difference here -- and it might last months or even years until you feel confident enough to work full-time, when you'll re-enter the desert (since the tools your job uses probably include at least one thing you're not familiar with).
One thing that I think separates senior engineers from juniors is a level of confidence and willingness to tackle the unknown and learn new things, tempered by pragmatism that they don't all need to be tackled and learned right away.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#60Many of the coders I know (which is mostly folk in their 40s) never learned from scratch. More often, we started in support roles, and slowly worked into the code. First, learning to read it to help troubleshoot issue, then making basic changes, and slowly picking up more and more of a specific codebase. Once the basics were understood, we'd start making basic apps on our own, often while still supporting more comple…
I'm 37 and my first programming job after college was doing support & custom integrations for a larger product (which I wasn't allowed to change). I'd already been programming since 8 and knew BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, sh, Perl, Java, etc., but I had only taken a few CS classes and majored in English. It was a great chance to learn new things, e.g. SQL, and there was a ton of variety, autonomy, responsibility, and client interaction. Even the bad parts (Excel files, CORBA over firewalls, backwards intransigent IT departments) were great learning experiences. After maybe a year, having proven myself, I switched over to the web development wing of the company.