Programming: Intrinsic or Taught
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
Bit of everything, and glad of it. Started at 13 - dad brought a Commodore Pet home for Xmas (yes, I am dating myself), let us play games on it for two days, then took them off and said that if we wanted to carry on playing games, we had to write them. And they had to be structured, and documented. (Guess what his job was?) Self-taught BASIC and machine code as a result (no, not assembler - it didn't have an assembler). School did not have any form of computing as an option. Continued using computers as a tool through sixth form and the first two years of college (aiming at a physics degree). Some actual tuition here in how to use an IBM mainframe and FORTRAN 4 as a physics analysis tool. Final year of college, it finally clicked that maybe computing was a viable career choice in its own right, not just a tool I took for granted for everything else. Swapped to Computer Science, learnt the basics of a dozen or so widely varying languages (enough that from then on you can just pick up almost anything else, was the theory, and yes, even back then, that included what would now be called object-oriented languages), and some excellent tuition in algorithms and basic theory. Yes, surprisingly enough, much of this is still useful. Not so much the piece of paper, but being taught how to think. Mix of self-taught at home (playing with web pages and VRML) and at work (COBOL, PL/1, meeting the horrible results of a 20-year-old program that had been modified continually for its entire life). Some courses that helped, some that didn't, some that were "how to use this specific technology", some that were "how to program". I remember the one about Jackson Structured Programming as being particularly useful at the time, and the ones about Oracle databases and tuning SQL have been of generic use since. I'd say both sides were useful, and either in isolation would be a problem. College did not teach me how to manage programs that had more than 100 lines or so of code: version control and documentation were not mentioned. Self-taught and work did not teach me how to analyse an algorithm and tune it.
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
I started at 9 on ZX80s then ZX81 then Spectrums. Fortunately the manuals for the ZX81 and Spectrum were *superb* in terms of teaching you some actual principles (as was a book on Z80 machine code, by, I think, the same author. I have several innante talents that I think helped me immensely then and now. I read ridiculously fast (up to 1100 wpm!)good memory - ideal for fast learning. I have natural facility for languages, an inbuilt drive to spot the patterns/deduce the rules/simplify - a reductionist tendancy, I suppose. Logic comes easy to me, ditto abstraction. I hate repetition and automatically optimise *any* task (at leasts in my head). I come from a family of (numerically talented) engineers, so maybe there's some design/fault finding abilities there (plus we did all our own car maintenance - awfully akin bug fixing). My dad can be extremely pedantic (partly as humour) so I learned to be rather precise in how I phrased things very early... There wasn't much computing at school, I recall by the time there was one Scotvec (bonus points for anyone who recalls those!) in Computing in Engineering, taught by a Techie teacher - by that point I was much better than the poor guy (I recall correcting a flowchart of his to make the algorithm more general/extensible). I did a 4-year BSc, where I learned many many things that I have since forgotten, but started to develop and become very familar with certain prinicples I use to this day - I have been a (Classic) Test Driven Developer since my *2nd* assignment (you can guess how the first went.... almost late and frantic... just like too many real ones). Set logic was invaluable, as was its companion - database design and SQL (Oracle back then). I did Cobol too. (ah, 4-tape master/detail merges - weirdly actually useful in all sorts of odd circumstances since - not with tapes, of course.) The importance of requirements gathering and documentation was drummed in ... By the time I got my first job (Cobol), I was well on the way to having a good foundation - learning particular languages/frameworks takes time as ever, and I had to pick up OO (was 'faking it' it via interfaces and code generators etc since VB4), I suppose that I feel that the time at uni bolstered an innate talent, giving it a framework to hang subsequent knowledge upon. I think it can really make a difference - especially the database stuff - there are so, so many horribly designed ones out there... So, intiailly self taught, educated, learned on the job. Still learning (it never stops) som
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In my opinion (which probably doesn't have that much value) programming is a mindset, not a skill. I did a 3 year qualification in Mechanical Engineering with Design specilisation, and I am now in Financial programming. Not for a minute do I regret doing the Engineering as it tought me how to think. Maths, Engineering etc are all exactly like Programming, same mindset, same approach. Having an education and experience offer you great tools to be more productive and effective, but true programming (Maths, Engineering etc) lies underneath those...
____________________________________________________________ Be brave little warrior, be VERY brave
yeah - there are lots of engineering grads in financial development - it seems a particularly good match.
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yeah - there are lots of engineering grads in financial development - it seems a particularly good match.
yeah, I've seen many professional engineers and finance people being quite comfortable with writing basic code (vba, sql queries etc) as well, the skills require the same mindset and overlap a lot more than most people think
____________________________________________________________ Be brave little warrior, be VERY brave
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yeah, I've seen many professional engineers and finance people being quite comfortable with writing basic code (vba, sql queries etc) as well, the skills require the same mindset and overlap a lot more than most people think
____________________________________________________________ Be brave little warrior, be VERY brave
Best project manager I ever had was an ex-engineer too. Maybe it was no tendancy to try to micro-manage...
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My favorite was being asked to explain what the ol element was in HTML.
Need custom software developed? I do C# development and consulting all over the United States.
If you don't ask questions the answers won't stand in your way.
Doing a job is like selecting a mule, you can't choose just the front half xor the back half so when you ask me to do a job don't expect me to do it half-assed. -
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
Web Architects
Well that alone should clue you in not to even waste time arguing with them. I'll go out on a limb and claim that 90% of the people who use "Web Architect" as a title don't know what the hell they're talking about.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh
Jim Crafton wrote:
Well that alone should clue you in not to even waste time arguing with them. I'll go out on a limb and claim that 90% of the people who use "Web Architect" as a title don't know what the hell they're talking about.
I would just shorten that up a bit to; "...out on a limb and claim that 90% of the people don't know what the hell they're talking about." I think its still true!
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
Self-taught. No other *formal* education. 1) started with batch files in dos 6.0 2) then VB4 in Win 3.1 (it came with 16 and 32 bit compilers! Wow!) 3) HTML / ASP -- all of that before I graduated HS -- 4) RPG IV / SQL 5) C#...etc... All picked up as they came to me at work. I think a person has to have a certain aptitude in order to handle programming well. And, I think that aptitude may extend into other areas as well, for instance I seem to be able to pick up languages well also. My pig latin is blisteringly fast and speaking it in that manner annoys everyone because heytay an'tcay eepkay upway! ^_^ Oh, and that's not to mention the Japanese and French I am currently working on... Like my retired boss told me: 'There are lots of programmers...but there are few good ones.'
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
I always say that I got my education from Barnes & Noble and the Internet. I do have a 2 yr degree in General Education and have always loved computing. I started at age 9 when my Dad gave me a Commodore 64 and I would read him lines of code from magazines to do the silly little programs the authors would put there for you to type endlessly to produce a text based RPG. Programming is a state of mind, its logic and math. My kids often ask what I do all day and I respond..."You know those word problems you hate so much? That's what I do...ALL DAY!". After 13 years of doing this professionally, I can say that I still learn something new everyday. Which in the end keeps me driven. Self taught = taught by others in an informal environment, in my opinion. I have learned a great deal from articles posted here and other great resources on the Web, and I'm man enough to say that I still haven't got it all. Thanks to MSFT, Sun and Oracle we can all continue to learn something new. Be it a new language, design pattern or tool set because they never seem to happy with mediocrity. In the end you either get it or not. Programming is like mixing drinks! Pour how you feel, you can hit it hard and loose and suffer the consequences...just learn from your mistakes.
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I have the fortune of learning from both, University and Self-taught. However, until I had that AHA moment freshman year I did not really get programming. Sure I could do it and follow the steps but the art evaded me and then it clicked. Anyone can program a computer but you can't teach good programming. Unfortunately, it is a hard thing to evaluate. Programming is a very difficult field to level. To this day I still get into heated debates with supposed Web Architects about why you can't write web based systems that rely on file extensions.
Need custom software developed? I do C# development and consulting all over the United States.
If you don't ask questions the answers won't stand in your way.
Doing a job is like selecting a mule, you can't choose just the front half xor the back half so when you ask me to do a job don't expect me to do it half-assed.Right about the AHA moment. :omg: I had that same thing happen, but not until my sophmore year however. I think to be a good programmer, you have to have the knack for problem solving...and that can't be taught. :-D
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
Both. My post secondary education focused less on syntax, and more on methodology, so I was taught to teach myself further skillsets. Syntax is easy- just hit F1 is what to remember for syntax. LOGIC, especially boolean logic, is harder. It helps if you're already pretty much a black and white thinker- thinking in terms of on or off. Ultimately, if-then-else is the most powerful statement to learn in any computer language. Once you've got the syntax of that, you can do anything.
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
In most cases I would go with the intrinsic argument... I took 1 year of Comp Sci, realized that it was just a glorified math class (the lack of female students didn't help either), and switched to political science! Now I have the pleasure of interviewing junior developers to join my ASP.NET team, and I have found, almost without exception, that the computer science grads are utterly clueless in terms of understanding the user experience, and have no idea about web application architecture (they try to make everything so strictly OOP that it takes them three months to build a login module!) I think part of the problem is that Comp Sci programs do not teach practical things like web application development and user interface development and instead focus on the writing of highly optimized algorithms that are not really relevant in a client-server environment, since the delays caused by an inefficient sorting algorithm in this context are totally unnoticeable relative to the very real problem of network latency and inefficient database queries. Maybe its also that the self-taught developers have a personality more suited to the agile development mixed with cowboy coding methodology prevalent in Web 2.0 shops... you've got to be a pretty rigid thinker to make it through the tedium of Big-O and other such computer science concepts. Interesting, the one exception is the director of my department, who got his Comp Sci degree but far prefers doing creative stuff like wireframing and user experience architecture than writing code at all.
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
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A combination of environment and self-teaching is what develops a good programmer. I have seen people in some good projects dealing with latest and greatest but with no desire to learn on their own by going beyond 9-5. They did not become good programmers. On the other hand I have seen brilliant self-taught programmers however they could not progress beyond because they were not in the right environment with right guidance. They are some things which you can only learn from experience by being in the right environment: writing and designing production style code is one of them. I always considered myself a great programmer till I started interacting with customers. A frog who lives in a well can become a master of his dominion (the well). He can know all there is abut the well but if he constrains himself to the well he will never know about the lake, the river and the ocean.
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
Interesting question. I'm completely self-taught so I can't answer from experience whether programming can be taught. My guess is that someone with good problem solving skills plus an interest can be taught how to program. Book learnin' does have its place, and I think my early years (starting in '71) could've benefitted from study of operating system architectures. But on the other hand, I understood the first computer reference manual I read and the learning process continues, as it should. I also believe that being "taught" doesn't necessarily mean limiting one's self to the ever-changing latest patterns and practices. In my opinion, the best programmers glean the best bits from all they encounter, and hopefully they read a lot, and simply deliver working code. Oh, and let me dispel an enduring myth...proficiency in math is not required! I am totally math-phobic and never understood the link between the so-called logical nature of mathematics and programming. What this means is that if I need a hashing or encryption algorithm, I call on someone who knows that stuff!
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
Nearly everyone who has a desire to learn how to program can do so (with varying degrees of success). The thing that I have learned is that there are those who have a natural ability to think logically and can break down complex problems into smaller, more manageable chunks. These individuals (and they are not always programmers, or even technical for that matter) will be the ones that have a greater likelihood of success. Logical thinking can be taught, but it is a matter of retraining the individuals thought process - which is no small feat. Those who have this innate logical thought process have a much higher ceiling, and schooling or experience can enhance it; those without it start off at a lower ceiling. Furthermore, experience, not college, is the greatest teacher. No amount of schooling can completely prepare you for the rigors of development in a mission critical environment. Great programmers were not born great, they were born with an aptitude and desire for programming, but they are a product of the mentorship and environment that they came from. The best programmers I have worked with can all point to a single, more senior programmer who taught them the intricate details of software development somewhere in their past. Add to that the experience of working with great teams on successful (or even disastrous) projects and you have the perfect recipe for terrific programmers. Finally, and this can not be taught, the most critical piece of the puzzle is passion and desire. The individual who is internally motivated to learn new techniques, new technologies and better, more efficient ways of development will always be a star. Even the most skilled programmer in a team will quickly be left behind in our ever-changing field unless he/she has a desire to improve their skill set. I would gladly hire someone into my team that demonstrates a passion for their field, a clear, logical thought process and a few years of applicable experience. The education part of the equation simply does not factor into my decisions at all. I have seen too many "career students" with no aptitude to give any weight to the education section of the resume. Give me someone who can and more importantly wants to be taught, rather than someone who knows it all. With that being said, I would describe myself as self taught, but I had a lot of mentors and guidance along the way.
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When I studied programming in college computers were in there infancy. Basically we were introduced to Data Structures which had been around for a long time and breifly reviewed various languages such as: cobol, fortran, PL/1, Pascal and so on. The professors had there own programming styles and methods for developing using flow charts and top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top methodology. From the statement above I would say that I am self taught and am still learning. Mike
"It doesn't matter how big a ranch ya' own, or how many cows ya' brand, the size of your funeral is still gonna depend on the weather." -Harry Truman.
Semper Fi http://www.hq4thmarinescomm.com[^] My Site
Same here. I went to college and studied Math because I liked it but wasn't good enough to major in Physics - which is what I really thought I wanted to do. I hadn't even seen a computer, let alone use one. I met a guy who was taking BASIC and COBOL classes and it sounded interesting so I took the optional Fortran class. That's when I had that AHA moment and knew that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. At that time there weren't really any programming classes that taught how to do it rather than just teaching the language itself. My classes were in Fortran, Algol, data structures using Lisp and assembler. I spent the first 20+ years writing programs in assembler and learning how to do it right by studying how others before were doing it and learning on my own. I think the "still learning" goes without saying - if you aren't still learning programming you're dead or retired (and learning something else).
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
By combining: the love of solving tricky math problems (likely taught too), the knowledge of a language syntax (it needs good references), the ability to have the right tools/platform, ... the birth of a new bright self-taught programmer is natural. In my case, the 3rd factor has always limited my skills... but it is better than nothing. Kerim
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Same here. I went to college and studied Math because I liked it but wasn't good enough to major in Physics - which is what I really thought I wanted to do. I hadn't even seen a computer, let alone use one. I met a guy who was taking BASIC and COBOL classes and it sounded interesting so I took the optional Fortran class. That's when I had that AHA moment and knew that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. At that time there weren't really any programming classes that taught how to do it rather than just teaching the language itself. My classes were in Fortran, Algol, data structures using Lisp and assembler. I spent the first 20+ years writing programs in assembler and learning how to do it right by studying how others before were doing it and learning on my own. I think the "still learning" goes without saying - if you aren't still learning programming you're dead or retired (and learning something else).
Earl Truss wrote:
I think the "still learning" goes without saying - if you aren't still learning programming you're dead or retired (and learning something else).
Technology is changing so fast that if you don't continue learning you get left behind. Once I started programming I never looked back or regretted it! Mike
"It doesn't matter how big a ranch ya' own, or how many cows ya' brand, the size of your funeral is still gonna depend on the weather." -Harry Truman.
Semper Fi http://www.hq4thmarinescomm.com[^] My Site
