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Fast Crimes at Lambda School

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Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#61

Post by auggierose »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #50
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…

I was just talking about this idea with my wife. We're both now senior enough in our jobs that we're team/project leads (not managers, just technical leaders of stuff). One of the projects I'm leading is a small R&D effort to see if a new technique will improve one of our core algorithms. And I have a very bright new junior programmer who has been with the company about 2 years and has a little post-college experienc…

Let's face it, most of the time the tools are the problem. That is why, whenever possible, I write my own tools.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#62

Post by salamo »

It's really too bad. Higher ed needs disruption. The problem is, a responsibly-run university is a slow/medium growth enterprise, not an overnight unicorn.

The Vanderbilts and Carnegies of today could do a major public service if they wanted to. Use their names and hire the best researchers in their respective fields and pay them well.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#63

Post by davidw »

borski wrote: post #60
davidw wrote: post #44

I have this sense that the world of tech needs the pendulum to swing back a bit towards geeky hacker types who are in it for the love of building cool things, tinkering, exploring and all that. There is a bit too much of the "bro" side of things - hustlebros and techbros and VC bros and that culture. Where are my people at these days?

Building things. Those geeks don’t market well. Never did. There’s a reason Woz needed Jobs. There is just a lot more noise than signal now.

To build a successful company, you need both, clearly, but it's a balance. And not everything needs to be a successful company. Some things are just for the fun of it. And sometimes those things turn into companies in unexpected ways.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#64

Post by kjkjadksj »

spamizbad wrote: post #45
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…

You underscore the same thing I noticed as well: To have a decent career as a software engineer you need to be a tenacious problem solver. Even the not-so-great devs are tenacious. There are tons of smart, hard-working people who have a mentality of "You should be able to do everything correctly and have it work correctly the first time, or maybe on the second try with some minor adjustments". And I think these peopl…

Software engineering is like digging a hole, where every time you strike your shovel down you either hit a huge boulder or a giant lead lined pipe no one told you was down there. It would take some kind of a mental disability or achieving a state of enlightenment to not be frustrated by being constantly blocked and held down when you want to run, which is the real definition of this job.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#65

Post by paulpauper »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #56
paulpauper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worse than not doing it well. It's more like struggling at the basics. The incentives of these camps favor quantity over quality.

Programming is really not as hard as you're making it out to be. I've taught it to beginners both children and adults and they struggle but they all learn it. Professional software development is quite difficult, but programming is only a portion of why. And even then, software dev is only like the second or third most technically difficult job I've had. Any welder or marine upholsterer or nurse or whatever has about…

Are you doing it one on one or in a classroom setting? In former, I imagine the success rates would be higher.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#66

Post by darkerside »

vasco wrote: post #46
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…

I know of a couple of people I really trust that tried to explain to me how they feel when they try math or programming and it's more like a physical pain almost than frustration. I always also got frustrated and always thought everyone just has to push through it but I wonder if there's something deeper. Those two people really led me to believe some of us have some harder "blockage" than others to get through, and…

I think you're partially right. But the "smartest" of us probably have a combination of high pain sensitivity (motivated to solve the problem) and high pain tolerance (won't give up until they do).

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#67

Post by giraffe_lady »

davidw wrote: post #44

I have this sense that the world of tech needs the pendulum to swing back a bit towards geeky hacker types who are in it for the love of building cool things, tinkering, exploring and all that. There is a bit too much of the "bro" side of things - hustlebros and techbros and VC bros and that culture. Where are my people at these days?

That sort of environment is an artifact of a new technical domain, not unique to programming or because of any characteristics unique to it.

At different times for example it was typical for a doctor, architect, or pilot to be an informally educated enthusiast. As programming has matured into a broadly relevant and economically important domain, the dynamics of who does it and how they learn it change, as it also did in those other fields.

You can lament the change but it's never coming back.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#68

Post by kjkjadksj »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #42
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…

Ah, yeah, I almost forgot about that. I remember students who were frustrated because of some mystery error that plagued them for hours, only for me to take a closer look and figure it out in 5 minutes. It forced me to rethink how we taught students how to read error messages, figure out line numbers and stack traces, and how to ask Google for help.

Well it doesn't help that the stack trace often doesn't follow anything but its own convention, much less the conventions of a basic English sentence. The fact you have to learn to read an error message is damning for whoever thought this would be a good error message, honestly.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#69

Post by darkerside »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #42
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…

Ah, yeah, I almost forgot about that. I remember students who were frustrated because of some mystery error that plagued them for hours, only for me to take a closer look and figure it out in 5 minutes. It forced me to rethink how we taught students how to read error messages, figure out line numbers and stack traces, and how to ask Google for help.

I think you just need to rethink your feedback cadence

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#70

Post by michaelrpeskin »

auggierose wrote: post #61
michaelrpeskin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just talking about this idea with my wife. We're both now senior enough in our jobs that we're team/project leads (not managers, just technical leaders of stuff). One of the projects I'm leading is a small R&D effort to see if a new technique will improve one of our core algorithms. And I have a very bright new junior programmer who has been with the company about 2 years and has a little post-college experienc…

Let's face it, most of the time the tools are the problem. That is why, whenever possible, I write my own tools.

Yeah, for learning that's good. But for novel research, not so much. I do a lot of what I always call "fast math on a computer" because that was a by product of me writing my own tools to solve problems in grad school. I didn't have numpy and only very limited BLAS optimizations existed at the time, so I had to write lots of low level stuff. But the actual novel work was pretty small on top of that.

In my grandparent post I mentioned that I could redo my PhD thesis in about a week of work. Much of that is that I know where the dead ends lie now. But a lot is also that I could just take advantage of numpy and I could just write everything in vector math now and not need to code up my own linear algebra stuff.

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