Software Development: The Great Equalizer
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Thanks...yeah let's just leave it there.
The less you need, the more you have. JaxCoder.com
sorry I get emotional with certain things.
mov ax, [feelings]
xor ax,axThere. :laugh:
Real programmers use butterflies
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What makes you think your post could get flamed? It was interesting to read about your experiences, and your observations make sense. I would say that programming is always mostly self-taught. University can inform you of techniques (data structures, parsing, state machines...), but it's mostly a case of the more code you write, the better you get, so long as you strive to make your code easy to maintain and evolve instead of just dropping it once it works.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.Greg Utas wrote:
What makes you think your post could get flamed?
My experience has been that some college-educated folks can be a little dismissive of the self-taught, and the self-taught are sometimes defensive as a result. Taking the middle ground means you disagree with most.
Greg Utas wrote:
the more code you write, the better you get
Very true. You learn the "why" of writing code in a particular fashion, as expressed in the mental scar tissue from excruciating debug sessions.
Greg Utas wrote:
make your code easy to maintain and evolve instead of just dropping it once it works.
That's been one of the great things about switching from defense contracting to commercial development. With defense contracting you wrote an application, delivered it, and you were done. I have commercial applications now that I've been developing, maintaining, and enhancing for 20 years. Going back to code you wrote 20 years ago can be a humbling experience :sigh: .
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Greg Utas wrote:
What makes you think your post could get flamed?
My experience has been that some college-educated folks can be a little dismissive of the self-taught, and the self-taught are sometimes defensive as a result. Taking the middle ground means you disagree with most.
Greg Utas wrote:
the more code you write, the better you get
Very true. You learn the "why" of writing code in a particular fashion, as expressed in the mental scar tissue from excruciating debug sessions.
Greg Utas wrote:
make your code easy to maintain and evolve instead of just dropping it once it works.
That's been one of the great things about switching from defense contracting to commercial development. With defense contracting you wrote an application, delivered it, and you were done. I have commercial applications now that I've been developing, maintaining, and enhancing for 20 years. Going back to code you wrote 20 years ago can be a humbling experience :sigh: .
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
With defense contracting you wrote an application, delivered it, and you were done.
I've never worked on defense contracts, but this still comes as a total shock. What customer who's happy with software never asks for another release with more features?! If these folks just issue an RFP to build the same thing again, with more features added, it would explain a lot about their budgets. Tell me I'm missing something here.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
I grew up kinda hard, with untreated mental illness and spent some time on the streets as a homeless teen, got my GED as a result and never went to college. But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old. When I was 18 I went from being homeless to moving in with my b/f in seattle and from there straight to Microsoft. I started taking senior and lead positions before I was 20. Outside of software development, for example when I moved from Seattle to rural Washington state where there were not development jobs I drove a cab, jockeyed cash registers, and even worked on a farm. I'm not qualified to do anything skilled but write software. I can't tell you how grateful I am that this industry values talent over credentials. I'd be in a very different position today if it weren't for that. I have a friend I grew up with who never launched into a software career despite us programming together but his primary interest is language so I guess I understand - I learned C++, he learned Latin. I have another friend who I came up with together and helped him get into development, and then he moved to NYC and got rich, and he has a similar background as me, except not crazy. None of these people have degrees. Both are ridiculously intelligent. But it makes me think, you know? I count myself fortunate, and I am grateful not just for me, but for anyone like me who found their way despite lack of opportunities and access to "white collar" work generally.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
With defense contracting you wrote an application, delivered it, and you were done.
I've never worked on defense contracts, but this still comes as a total shock. What customer who's happy with software never asks for another release with more features?! If these folks just issue an RFP to build the same thing again, with more features added, it would explain a lot about their budgets. Tell me I'm missing something here.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.Greg Utas wrote:
I've never worked on defense contracts, but this still comes as a total shock
The last three years I worked as a contractor would appall you. One project, two years worth, developed a simulation that at completion was run for two weeks to accumulate some data and then shelved. A second project which took 18 months never ran at all, but delivery was accepted anyway. A third project I wrote a final report which was disseminated to interested parties and that ended it. While commercial development has its downsides, at least my stuff now gets used.
Greg Utas wrote:
Tell me I'm missing something here.
This was back in the 1980's so things may be different now. At the time though I read a report that claimed less than 2% of software created for the DoD (based on dollars spent for development) was still in active use 12 months later. Most of that was in deployed weapons systems and avionics. The rest of it was spent on hopeless MIS projects that tried to automate processes in a 'business' (e.g. defense) that deliberately let experienced employees leave, either at the 4 or 20 year mark. My running joke at the time was "I may be a whore, but at least I ain't cheap."
Software Zen:
delete this; -
What's GED ?
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
It's a high school equivalency "diploma" you can get via exam in lieu of finishing school. Part of the problem with me staying in school is there was a truancy law on the books which would have landed me in juvenile detention a lot because I wasn't able to show up for all of my classes every day because I had to worry food and a place to sleep. So to avoid jail, I dropped out. Basically it's a way to test out of high school so you're not quite as bad off as if you had just stopped going.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I grew up kinda hard, with untreated mental illness and spent some time on the streets as a homeless teen, got my GED as a result and never went to college. But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old. When I was 18 I went from being homeless to moving in with my b/f in seattle and from there straight to Microsoft. I started taking senior and lead positions before I was 20. Outside of software development, for example when I moved from Seattle to rural Washington state where there were not development jobs I drove a cab, jockeyed cash registers, and even worked on a farm. I'm not qualified to do anything skilled but write software. I can't tell you how grateful I am that this industry values talent over credentials. I'd be in a very different position today if it weren't for that. I have a friend I grew up with who never launched into a software career despite us programming together but his primary interest is language so I guess I understand - I learned C++, he learned Latin. I have another friend who I came up with together and helped him get into development, and then he moved to NYC and got rich, and he has a similar background as me, except not crazy. None of these people have degrees. Both are ridiculously intelligent. But it makes me think, you know? I count myself fortunate, and I am grateful not just for me, but for anyone like me who found their way despite lack of opportunities and access to "white collar" work generally.
Real programmers use butterflies
Thank you for your post! It brought up such an interesting discussion and I feel truly humbled by the diversity of experiences that developers come from. Compared to what some of you guys have been through, my life seems the pinnacle of boredom: saw a book about a new thing called "programming" when I was 15 and, for some strange reason, decided that's what I do in my life. Luckily I found some guys who would pay me a decent wage for doing that. Many years later I still don't know to do anything else. Talk about being monomaniacal :laugh: .
Mircea
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Greg Utas wrote:
What makes you think your post could get flamed?
My experience has been that some college-educated folks can be a little dismissive of the self-taught, and the self-taught are sometimes defensive as a result. Taking the middle ground means you disagree with most.
Greg Utas wrote:
the more code you write, the better you get
Very true. You learn the "why" of writing code in a particular fashion, as expressed in the mental scar tissue from excruciating debug sessions.
Greg Utas wrote:
make your code easy to maintain and evolve instead of just dropping it once it works.
That's been one of the great things about switching from defense contracting to commercial development. With defense contracting you wrote an application, delivered it, and you were done. I have commercial applications now that I've been developing, maintaining, and enhancing for 20 years. Going back to code you wrote 20 years ago can be a humbling experience :sigh: .
Software Zen:
delete this;The last time someone asked me to defend my lack of a degree was in an interview. I asked him to defend him getting one, given the way IT is taught in uni. Because it was at that point that I decided I really didn't want to work at Expedia. Gee, glad I didn't. They don't exist anymore. And I'm okay with that. When people have degrees, I am that much more careful about screening them for experience if I'm in charge of putting together a team, because I've had a lot problems with people coming straight out of college totally unprepared for working on a professional software team. They might know algorithms, but they don't necessarily understand all the coding techniques that you just pick up organically. With the self taught ones, after a few questions, the only thing I had to worry about was if they could work on a team. Problem is, they usually couldn't, so it became a matter of how quickly they could learn. Experience at the end of the day is what it all comes down to. Each path has its downsides, and I have my biases. I'm a black sheep developer. I'm creative, but not methodical. I'm not a math whiz, but I love language. I'm kinda a weirdo in any given dev house in terms of the sort of code I am good at and what sort of direction a project will take if I'm leading it. I like other black sheep. But there needs to be very few of them on a team for the team to be successful. The black sheep may or may not have went to school, but in terms of programming, they learned most of it themselves, and they don't do it like other people do. I value the "white sheep" professionally, especially when I'm putting a team together because they work well on teams and their work is reliable and consistent. Their creations are more easily understood by others as well, but my heart is not with them, if I'm being honest. More of them I've found, have come up in CS through academia. Now, those are just broadly general observations. People are complicated, and any attempt to boil them down is going to be silly on some level, but the above way of looking at things has served me professionally, so I stick with it. :)
Real programmers use butterflies
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I grew up kinda hard, with untreated mental illness and spent some time on the streets as a homeless teen, got my GED as a result and never went to college. But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old. When I was 18 I went from being homeless to moving in with my b/f in seattle and from there straight to Microsoft. I started taking senior and lead positions before I was 20. Outside of software development, for example when I moved from Seattle to rural Washington state where there were not development jobs I drove a cab, jockeyed cash registers, and even worked on a farm. I'm not qualified to do anything skilled but write software. I can't tell you how grateful I am that this industry values talent over credentials. I'd be in a very different position today if it weren't for that. I have a friend I grew up with who never launched into a software career despite us programming together but his primary interest is language so I guess I understand - I learned C++, he learned Latin. I have another friend who I came up with together and helped him get into development, and then he moved to NYC and got rich, and he has a similar background as me, except not crazy. None of these people have degrees. Both are ridiculously intelligent. But it makes me think, you know? I count myself fortunate, and I am grateful not just for me, but for anyone like me who found their way despite lack of opportunities and access to "white collar" work generally.
Real programmers use butterflies
I don't think you can go that route today, there is too much focus on qualifications and too many get rich quick brats. I had a similar route except I am mentally eminently stable and grounded despite running away from a dysfunctional family at 15, working approx 20 different jobs till I discovered software in my 30s (in the late 80s). Worked as a consultant (quote, build and chase the invoices) till I worked out that contracting you did not have to do the fucking paperwork involved in running your own business. Ended my career as a highly paid and valued developer at one of Asia's top banks. Today that path is not possible. Have not coded in 2 years, it turns out I was a tart (please forgive the gender reference), only into it for the money.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Thank you for your post! It brought up such an interesting discussion and I feel truly humbled by the diversity of experiences that developers come from. Compared to what some of you guys have been through, my life seems the pinnacle of boredom: saw a book about a new thing called "programming" when I was 15 and, for some strange reason, decided that's what I do in my life. Luckily I found some guys who would pay me a decent wage for doing that. Many years later I still don't know to do anything else. Talk about being monomaniacal :laugh: .
Mircea
That's not that far off from how I picked it up, except i was a bit younger. My parents bought an Apple ][gs in 1986 and it came with a programming manual for Applesoft BASIC. I read it because I read while eating otherwise the act is boring. Not very mindful of me, but then I'm not a buddhist so it's fine. It converged with my problem of circuit building. I took things apart and made things with them but to do anything serious in terms of building gadgets required money i didn't have at 6 and 7 so software allowed me to build things without continually shoveling more money at Radio Shack.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I don't think you can go that route today, there is too much focus on qualifications and too many get rich quick brats. I had a similar route except I am mentally eminently stable and grounded despite running away from a dysfunctional family at 15, working approx 20 different jobs till I discovered software in my 30s (in the late 80s). Worked as a consultant (quote, build and chase the invoices) till I worked out that contracting you did not have to do the fucking paperwork involved in running your own business. Ended my career as a highly paid and valued developer at one of Asia's top banks. Today that path is not possible. Have not coded in 2 years, it turns out I was a tart (please forgive the gender reference), only into it for the money.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
hah it's fine. I'm not sure. The last four clients I've had didn't even ask for a resume. One of them scouted me from my articles here. Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but I think if you have talent and a little luck you can maybe still pull it off, even if the culture has changed. You may not be able to work at Microsoft anymore without a serious CV but I don't know - i'd like to think they'd still hire anyone that had the endurance for a 4 hour panel interview with whiteboarding. I've done that.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I don't think you can go that route today, there is too much focus on qualifications and too many get rich quick brats. I had a similar route except I am mentally eminently stable and grounded despite running away from a dysfunctional family at 15, working approx 20 different jobs till I discovered software in my 30s (in the late 80s). Worked as a consultant (quote, build and chase the invoices) till I worked out that contracting you did not have to do the fucking paperwork involved in running your own business. Ended my career as a highly paid and valued developer at one of Asia's top banks. Today that path is not possible. Have not coded in 2 years, it turns out I was a tart (please forgive the gender reference), only into it for the money.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
My first software job was 40 years ago. Curiously, my take is that it's easier to get a job without "qualifications" these days, though there's a lot of "certification" horseshite. But in 1981, everyone expected a degree. It might not be in computer science, because there weren't enough of us. But engineering, mathematics, or physics would do, especially if you'd done a bit of programming. I used to say that the problem with our software was that we had too many straight engineers, and it was comparable to someone landing a job designing circuits because they'd played around building speaker systems in their garage.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
The last time someone asked me to defend my lack of a degree was in an interview. I asked him to defend him getting one, given the way IT is taught in uni. Because it was at that point that I decided I really didn't want to work at Expedia. Gee, glad I didn't. They don't exist anymore. And I'm okay with that. When people have degrees, I am that much more careful about screening them for experience if I'm in charge of putting together a team, because I've had a lot problems with people coming straight out of college totally unprepared for working on a professional software team. They might know algorithms, but they don't necessarily understand all the coding techniques that you just pick up organically. With the self taught ones, after a few questions, the only thing I had to worry about was if they could work on a team. Problem is, they usually couldn't, so it became a matter of how quickly they could learn. Experience at the end of the day is what it all comes down to. Each path has its downsides, and I have my biases. I'm a black sheep developer. I'm creative, but not methodical. I'm not a math whiz, but I love language. I'm kinda a weirdo in any given dev house in terms of the sort of code I am good at and what sort of direction a project will take if I'm leading it. I like other black sheep. But there needs to be very few of them on a team for the team to be successful. The black sheep may or may not have went to school, but in terms of programming, they learned most of it themselves, and they don't do it like other people do. I value the "white sheep" professionally, especially when I'm putting a team together because they work well on teams and their work is reliable and consistent. Their creations are more easily understood by others as well, but my heart is not with them, if I'm being honest. More of them I've found, have come up in CS through academia. Now, those are just broadly general observations. People are complicated, and any attempt to boil them down is going to be silly on some level, but the above way of looking at things has served me professionally, so I stick with it. :)
Real programmers use butterflies
honey the codewitch wrote:
The last time someone asked me to defend my lack of a degree was in an interview.
An interviewer who asked me to defend anything about my professional background would get to watch my ass sashay out the door. That's unprofessional in the least and possibly illegal depending upon how the question is phrased.
honey the codewitch wrote:
When people have degrees, I am that much more careful about screening them for experience
We've had something of a hiring boom lately. After almost ten years of our team shrinking from 17 down to 5, we're finally starting to build back up. Our first hire was a graduate from 2018 with two years experience at a couple of jobs. We ignored it. Our interview was centered around the questions "was he teachable?" and "could we work with him?". The answer was yes to both. We've thrown him into the pool, and he's been given responsibility for a couple parts of the product, one simple, one fairly critical. The critical part he's taking over from a guy who's retiring in June, so there's some time for knowledge transfer. The youngster may be useful in six months or so. We're also looking to hire someone as a backup for me, largely they can take some of my workload. I tend to be an easy choice for a lot of the oddball jobs, because everyone else is on a critical path item. While this makes me look oh so valuable :rolleyes: it annoys the shit out of me because, like Harry Callahan, I get every dirty job that comes along. This person we'll look especially hard at the experience because we're looking for a skill set. Academic background for this is almost immaterial. For the entry-level guy, the experience wasn't important because we assumed he wouldn't have any that was relevant. The academic background gave us a certain assurance that he/she was familiar with important concepts, but that was all. My backup guy on the other hand it's all experience. We're looking for certain skills, and those are only acquired by doing the job. Technical hiring's a PITA. In my case we write job requirements, they get sent to an agency, they filter and send us resumes that match, we pick the ones that are interesting (if any), round and round we go. There's something of an art to specifying the requirements so that you're specific enough to get those that might be useful, but not so particular that there are never any matches. There's a company a
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honey the codewitch wrote:
The last time someone asked me to defend my lack of a degree was in an interview.
An interviewer who asked me to defend anything about my professional background would get to watch my ass sashay out the door. That's unprofessional in the least and possibly illegal depending upon how the question is phrased.
honey the codewitch wrote:
When people have degrees, I am that much more careful about screening them for experience
We've had something of a hiring boom lately. After almost ten years of our team shrinking from 17 down to 5, we're finally starting to build back up. Our first hire was a graduate from 2018 with two years experience at a couple of jobs. We ignored it. Our interview was centered around the questions "was he teachable?" and "could we work with him?". The answer was yes to both. We've thrown him into the pool, and he's been given responsibility for a couple parts of the product, one simple, one fairly critical. The critical part he's taking over from a guy who's retiring in June, so there's some time for knowledge transfer. The youngster may be useful in six months or so. We're also looking to hire someone as a backup for me, largely they can take some of my workload. I tend to be an easy choice for a lot of the oddball jobs, because everyone else is on a critical path item. While this makes me look oh so valuable :rolleyes: it annoys the shit out of me because, like Harry Callahan, I get every dirty job that comes along. This person we'll look especially hard at the experience because we're looking for a skill set. Academic background for this is almost immaterial. For the entry-level guy, the experience wasn't important because we assumed he wouldn't have any that was relevant. The academic background gave us a certain assurance that he/she was familiar with important concepts, but that was all. My backup guy on the other hand it's all experience. We're looking for certain skills, and those are only acquired by doing the job. Technical hiring's a PITA. In my case we write job requirements, they get sent to an agency, they filter and send us resumes that match, we pick the ones that are interesting (if any), round and round we go. There's something of an art to specifying the requirements so that you're specific enough to get those that might be useful, but not so particular that there are never any matches. There's a company a
Wow the formatting on your message is broken. I had to read it through email. I'm laughing at the last sentence though. :laugh:
Real programmers use butterflies
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I grew up kinda hard, with untreated mental illness and spent some time on the streets as a homeless teen, got my GED as a result and never went to college. But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old. When I was 18 I went from being homeless to moving in with my b/f in seattle and from there straight to Microsoft. I started taking senior and lead positions before I was 20. Outside of software development, for example when I moved from Seattle to rural Washington state where there were not development jobs I drove a cab, jockeyed cash registers, and even worked on a farm. I'm not qualified to do anything skilled but write software. I can't tell you how grateful I am that this industry values talent over credentials. I'd be in a very different position today if it weren't for that. I have a friend I grew up with who never launched into a software career despite us programming together but his primary interest is language so I guess I understand - I learned C++, he learned Latin. I have another friend who I came up with together and helped him get into development, and then he moved to NYC and got rich, and he has a similar background as me, except not crazy. None of these people have degrees. Both are ridiculously intelligent. But it makes me think, you know? I count myself fortunate, and I am grateful not just for me, but for anyone like me who found their way despite lack of opportunities and access to "white collar" work generally.
Real programmers use butterflies
It makes me sad for the rest of the world... We developer have it easy, but the rest of the world is struggling. And here, in Australia, most good job is government related... I wish the world were better for everyone! Nay, sometimes I wonder why it is not already... We are a long way from 1600 BC! :O
A new .NET Serializer All in one Menu-Ribbon Bar Taking over the world since 1371!
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I grew up kinda hard, with untreated mental illness and spent some time on the streets as a homeless teen, got my GED as a result and never went to college. But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old. When I was 18 I went from being homeless to moving in with my b/f in seattle and from there straight to Microsoft. I started taking senior and lead positions before I was 20. Outside of software development, for example when I moved from Seattle to rural Washington state where there were not development jobs I drove a cab, jockeyed cash registers, and even worked on a farm. I'm not qualified to do anything skilled but write software. I can't tell you how grateful I am that this industry values talent over credentials. I'd be in a very different position today if it weren't for that. I have a friend I grew up with who never launched into a software career despite us programming together but his primary interest is language so I guess I understand - I learned C++, he learned Latin. I have another friend who I came up with together and helped him get into development, and then he moved to NYC and got rich, and he has a similar background as me, except not crazy. None of these people have degrees. Both are ridiculously intelligent. But it makes me think, you know? I count myself fortunate, and I am grateful not just for me, but for anyone like me who found their way despite lack of opportunities and access to "white collar" work generally.
Real programmers use butterflies
honey the codewitch wrote:
But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old.
"You find that that fire is passion and there's a door up ahead not a wall" -- Lou Reed - Magic and Loss
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto
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honey the codewitch wrote:
But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old.
"You find that that fire is passion and there's a door up ahead not a wall" -- Lou Reed - Magic and Loss
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto
+1 for the Lou Reed reference.
Real programmers use butterflies
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+1 for the Lou Reed reference.
Real programmers use butterflies
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It's a high school equivalency "diploma" you can get via exam in lieu of finishing school. Part of the problem with me staying in school is there was a truancy law on the books which would have landed me in juvenile detention a lot because I wasn't able to show up for all of my classes every day because I had to worry food and a place to sleep. So to avoid jail, I dropped out. Basically it's a way to test out of high school so you're not quite as bad off as if you had just stopped going.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I grew up kinda hard, with untreated mental illness and spent some time on the streets as a homeless teen, got my GED as a result and never went to college. But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old. When I was 18 I went from being homeless to moving in with my b/f in seattle and from there straight to Microsoft. I started taking senior and lead positions before I was 20. Outside of software development, for example when I moved from Seattle to rural Washington state where there were not development jobs I drove a cab, jockeyed cash registers, and even worked on a farm. I'm not qualified to do anything skilled but write software. I can't tell you how grateful I am that this industry values talent over credentials. I'd be in a very different position today if it weren't for that. I have a friend I grew up with who never launched into a software career despite us programming together but his primary interest is language so I guess I understand - I learned C++, he learned Latin. I have another friend who I came up with together and helped him get into development, and then he moved to NYC and got rich, and he has a similar background as me, except not crazy. None of these people have degrees. Both are ridiculously intelligent. But it makes me think, you know? I count myself fortunate, and I am grateful not just for me, but for anyone like me who found their way despite lack of opportunities and access to "white collar" work generally.
Real programmers use butterflies
I grew up in a home (family, not foster), but I surely do have a heap lot of emotional baggage (including having spent a couple weeks of my life in a psychosomatic clinic and a couple years more with regular counseling to get to gripes with life). I managed to finish school & university, but I've studied physics, not informatics. I work as a programmer now and one of the dudes at the company once told me that they didn't really want to hire me (for not having the right field they're looking for), but they were really desperate. On the other hand, some educated-in-informatics co-workers of mine are way worse learners, than I am. That kind of guy who say "I've learned to do it like that half a century ago", utterly ignoring all the progress made in said half century. I love programming for, among other reasons, similar to yours: you can do that stuff self-taught. I never needed a single cent to get into it, IDEs are free, learning resources are free, all that's left is the own will to learn and to think.
