good programmer
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JimmyRopes wrote:
From what?
Anything with big teeth and a bad attitude, generally. ;)
JimmyRopes wrote:
I was going to make a snide remark here but it would probably give you a headache so I won't.
Snide doesn't usually work on me. :)
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
Snide doesn't usually work on me.
That's why I didn't do it. :-D
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
Think inside the box! ProActive Secure Systems
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes -
devvvy wrote:
Is it true, best programmers are generally unemployed?
No. There are good and bad programmers who are unemployed. There are good and bad programmers who are employed.
Kevin
I agree with Kevin's comment. However, I think the question in general is vague. Good can mean anything. Programming is such a wide field that I would argue that no one person can be an expert. Anyone who is good will specialize in certain areas, for instance: prototyping, user interface, database, games, communications, web apps, security and the list goes on. Unless you have created a program in one of these areas and have reviewed other people's code or had your code reviewed, how do you know that the code is actually good? Also, you can be good at working on small projects (lone programmer) but not be able to complete a very large project (i.e. within a team of more than 50 people) and the opposite might be equally true. Good might mean getting something working really quick. For personal use, this is okay, but if it's a commercial application, it should be bug and crash free code. There's also an issue of creating lots of working code versus code that has to be re-used and maintained. Anyways, my original point is what does good exactly mean?
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You're right, my apologies, allow me to better rephrase that .. Some programmers who could perform 'Profitably' with their skills have a hard time keeping a job because they try to market their theoretic potential instead of their actual skills. From a Bosses point of view that's just wrong because the JOB of a programmer doesn't lie within the boundaries of experimentation and learning. That's just my point though, nobody has to agree with that ... :|
I absolutelly agree with that for bosses is only money and more money no matter how you get the work done if the code is a piece-of-crap-unmaintainable-non-future-proof-non-modular-non-scalable or if its the most beautiful and reusable code and scalable and maintainable its the same for them but i think it's very worth investing in experimentation and learning, better trained programmers do better software in less time but no one is wiling to invest on it, look at Microsoft or big companies investing in research that will lead eventually to better and best selling software
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The distractionless environment (e.g. unemployed) might help them concentrate and create great things, but it won't make a mediocre programmer a good one.
patbob
patbob wrote:
The distractionless environment (e.g. unemployed) might help them concentrate and create great things, but it won't make a mediocre programmer a good one.
exactly
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Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
its a sad day when we can't tell what separates this from that.
er... from? There you can have a happy day now. :-D
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
Ba-dum-bum! There you are, it looked like you needed a rimshot after that one.
My other signature is witty and insightful.
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sometimes i thought to myself, for one to be really good programmer, you need to be unemployed. To get away from daily fire fighting, the long hours, the politics. Is it true, best programmers are generally unemployed? (I know one thing they can't be behind bars)
dev
I can certainly understand why you make this assumption. The are those of us with rather programming skills advanced and complex and those of us that can put a screen or two together in order to call it an application or web site. For the most part I've noticed that anything related with computers takes time and effort. Not to mention the occasional ridiculous bug that keeps on appearing or X third-party tool that provokes a deployment error which requires spending more time on a forum trying to fix something that from the most part wasn't even your fault to begin with. On the other hand, from the most part, being employed means that you'll have a problem to solve, a goal to achieve. Sure with leisure time you might spent time learning a new language or keep more up to date with current stuff out there, or maybe even inventing that hot new product or new game everyone will go crazy about. ja!
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Hows about this twisted logic: If you're not good at marketing, you're not good at communicating. If you're not good at communicating, you're never going to understand the user. If you can't understand the user, you're not a very good programmer. Ergo, they're not good programmers.
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Marketing != communicating. There's overlap, sure, but marketing is such a special, niche skill that its practitioners often have to endure years of school in order to master it. Communication is key in many job skill sets, but marketing remains a fairly rare skill for all that.
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I think it's obvious. If you're good, you will be in demand.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. "I am new to programming world. I have been learning c# for about past four weeks. I am quite acquainted with the fundamentals of c#. Now I have to work on a project which converts given flat files to XML using the XML serialization method" - SK64 ( but the forums have stuff like this posted every day )
It would be more accurate to say "if they KNOW you're good, you will be in demand." Nonetheless, there are dozens of reasons why you wouldn't necessarily be in demand despite a killer skill set, most of which boil down to personal incompatibility between yourself and, say, former employers. Word of mouth relies on much more than just the quality of your own work. So does formal marketing.
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Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
I take pride in being an Engineer
That's probably one of the most important aspects of the whole idea. It's the notion that engineering is a discipline that you apply to create work that meets a set of standards. When you do that well, you feel pride in the result.
Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
when the midden heap hits the windmill
I like that variant on the phrase :-D. Gives things a nice sense of scale :laugh:.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^]Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
That's probably one of the most important aspects of the whole idea. It's the notion that engineering is a discipline that you apply to create work that meets a set of standards. When you do that well, you feel pride in the result.
Engineering, is a disciplined, scientific methodology. I've known Surgeons who were great Engineers in the way they actually perform their operations.
Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
I like that variant on the phrase Big Grin. Gives things a nice sense of scale Laugh.
Why thank you! But I'm sorry Gary, I can't take credit for it. Its Terry Pratchett :)
If the post was helpful, please vote! Current activities: Book: The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
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sometimes i thought to myself, for one to be really good programmer, you need to be unemployed. To get away from daily fire fighting, the long hours, the politics. Is it true, best programmers are generally unemployed? (I know one thing they can't be behind bars)
dev
This depends on your definition of "good". Programming all too often involves hours, firefighting and politics. You're not a corporate creature if you don't do any of them. Are you a programmer if you go up on a mountaintop and somehow program without the rest of the world to bother you? To me a good programmer is able to deal with varying situations, adapt to what's going on, learn new programming languages, play nice with other people, etc, all to get a programming task done. Being paid is definitely a good thing.
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Hows about this twisted logic: If you're not good at marketing, you're not good at communicating. If you're not good at communicating, you're never going to understand the user. If you can't understand the user, you're not a very good programmer. Ergo, they're not good programmers.
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Marketing and communicating are NOT identical. I'm very effective at communicating with business people...but selling myself is difficult. I'm hypercritical of myself, and often understate my capabilities because my own measure of them is lower than what my customer might think of them. I'm not alone in this, either - I've met a number of very capable software developers who (like me) are not successful in marketing themselves.
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Good grief, guys. These massively flawed analogies are making Aristotle spin in his grave. I understand where you are coming from with the unemployed bit... I miss the early 80s when I used to rush home from Jr high as fast as I could so I could work on bit blitting in assembler on my Tandy 1000. You are talking about having time to hone skills. Unfortunately everyone (to this point in the thread) has latched on to "employability" which was not the point. As far as having time to hone your skills goes, the state of unemployment is only useful if you don't have to worry about money. A better environment for honing skills is one where you have a job that presents you with challenging coding opportunities and a manager who protects you from the BS that interferes with your ability to code.
BrienMalone wrote:
As far as having time to hone your skills goes, the state of unemployment is only useful if you don't have to worry about money. A better environment for honing skills is one where you have a job that presents you with challenging coding opportunities and a manager who protects you from the BS that interferes with your ability to code.
Amen to this. This is why I endure a nearly 100-mile round-trip commute each day and dismiss other job opportunities, because my manager does just that, as well as presenting me with some of the most sweetly difficult problems you could ask for just often enough to keep me pushed to BE good.
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
That's probably one of the most important aspects of the whole idea. It's the notion that engineering is a discipline that you apply to create work that meets a set of standards. When you do that well, you feel pride in the result.
Engineering, is a disciplined, scientific methodology. I've known Surgeons who were great Engineers in the way they actually perform their operations.
Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
I like that variant on the phrase Big Grin. Gives things a nice sense of scale Laugh.
Why thank you! But I'm sorry Gary, I can't take credit for it. Its Terry Pratchett :)
If the post was helpful, please vote! Current activities: Book: The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
I've known Surgeons who were great Engineers
My daughter's kindergarten teacher was an "educational engineer". The lady was amazing. She could treat every kid as an individual. You could see her evaluating and balancing what she was doing against the results she was getting. I'm also convinced she was the world's first quad-core human, because she could multi-task like nobody's business!
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^] -
sometimes i thought to myself, for one to be really good programmer, you need to be unemployed. To get away from daily fire fighting, the long hours, the politics. Is it true, best programmers are generally unemployed? (I know one thing they can't be behind bars)
dev
It seems to me that most of this discussion didn't address the original question, roughly paraphrased as "do you need to be unemployed to be a really good programmer?" The reasons cited being to get away from the various problems that come with having a job and working with other people. Of course, it might help if we had an idea of what was meant by "a really good programmer." That being said, to my mind, you can't be a really good programmer if it isn't a vocation for you, your primary occupation, the way you answer the question of what you do, and what you are passionate about. As to whether or not that is a job and/or your primary source of income is another story. As for a job, I think its common sense that whether it contributes or detracts to that varies from job to job with too many specifics to give a general answer. For a positive example, at the job where I am currently working it is just me and one other developer and I was forced to learn many new things and develop new techniques and a new understanding of programming that, despite having programmed professionally before, I had never previously developed. Now that I don't know that I'm a "really good programmer," but certainly having a job has moved me in that direction, whereas all the free time in the world before that (I was unemployed for several years before that, and programming applications with the intent to sell) did not. As for a negative real life example, I don't yet have one, but it seems to me that it is possible to get pigeon holed and never develop any new skills. This, of course, is eventually a death sentence in the IT field, which I've seen happen to administrators, but haven't yet had the experience of seeing it happen to a programmer.
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sometimes i thought to myself, for one to be really good programmer, you need to be unemployed. To get away from daily fire fighting, the long hours, the politics. Is it true, best programmers are generally unemployed? (I know one thing they can't be behind bars)
dev
Well, it is simple. Let make a competition... I'll give a task to "best unemployed programmer" and to a software development company. If "best unemployed programmer" complete my task before the company, I'll admit that unemployed programmer are the best. In our country we have proverb: "Two heads think better than one!".
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sometimes i thought to myself, for one to be really good programmer, you need to be unemployed. To get away from daily fire fighting, the long hours, the politics. Is it true, best programmers are generally unemployed? (I know one thing they can't be behind bars)
dev
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Hows about this twisted logic: If you're not good at marketing, you're not good at communicating. If you're not good at communicating, you're never going to understand the user. If you can't understand the user, you're not a very good programmer. Ergo, they're not good programmers.
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MidwestLimey wrote:
If you're not good at marketing, you're not good at communicating. If you're not good at communicating, you're never going to understand the user. If you can't understand the user, you're not a very good programmer. Ergo, they're not good programmers.
I disagree. The OP said programmer, didn't say software engineer. It doesn't take good communication skills to do grunt work. Your project manager will do that part of the job for you. Disclaimer: I do believe that a programmer who understands the user is always superior to one who doesn't. Being good at marketing your skills is not the same as being good at communication. You can work in a university, understand what they talk about, and their needs, but still feel uncomfortable around people and be bad in a job interview. I'd say that if a good programmer doesn't have a job, it means he's not a good programmer (overestimates himself), or he's not trying hard enough, because there are, in this world, a few competent recruiters, who can recognize good programmers and wouldn't let one run if one crossed his sight.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra
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Hows about this twisted logic: If you're not good at marketing, you're not good at communicating. If you're not good at communicating, you're never going to understand the user. If you can't understand the user, you're not a very good programmer. Ergo, they're not good programmers.
10110011001111101010101000001000001101001010001010100000100000101000001000111100010110001011001011
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sometimes i thought to myself, for one to be really good programmer, you need to be unemployed. To get away from daily fire fighting, the long hours, the politics. Is it true, best programmers are generally unemployed? (I know one thing they can't be behind bars)
dev
Good Programmers ... Well if unfortuanitly unemployeed.. they can earn as much as they can... just need a active brain and PR.... he can earn alot