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The Big Programming Thread - Page 1024

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Thread Rules
1. This is not a "do my homework for me" thread. If you have specific questions, ask, but don't post an assignment or homework problem and expect an exact solution.
2. No recruiting for your cockamamie projects (you won't replace facebook with 3 dudes you found on the internet and $20)
3. If you can't articulate why a language is bad, don't start slinging shit about it. Just remember that nothing is worse than making CSS IE6 compatible.
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Manit0u
Profile Blog Joined August 2004
Poland17243 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-18 05:05:33
November 18 2020 04:51 GMT
#20461
On November 18 2020 12:12 WarSame wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 18 2020 07:29 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
On November 15 2020 12:44 WarSame wrote:
The situation definitely doesn't sound easy, especially with a kid in the picture. I was privileged to be able to attend University full time without worrying about the finances, living with my parents(who are great to get along with), and with getting to hang out with my friends and family, and play sports. At the times in my life when that hasn't been the case my grades have dropped sometimes by 20%.

The lockdowns are frankly going to be huge mental health killers.

Generally speaking, i don't think this kind of comfortable , cozy environment you describe is the best for growing into a well rounded professional software maker. I notice you're in Canada. The University of Waterloo produces top notch software engineers by the truckload and the environment is the opposite of the conditions you describe. Most students live in three or four cities over four years. They do not live with their parents, and they move a dozen times in four years.

Why not? I don't see how moving many times and spending a lot of your time and effort doing so will make you into a better developer.


It really depends on what you want to do as a developer. For 90% of the software development jobs you don't really need any degree, you just need to know how to code (and they don't teach you that at the uni), so depending on your plans for the future, financial situation and general point of life you're in, attending a university might actually be detrimental to you as it's several years where instead of gaining a hands-on work experience (and this is the most important thing 99% of the time) you'll instead be learning stuff you probably won't use.

I'm not saying having a CS/math/physics degree is bad (sometimes it's necessary). I'm just saying that you should maybe first spend some time pondering what kind of software development you're into most. Better yet, maybe trying a few internships/courses in different dev areas so you can find out if it's really what you want to do. Then you can make a more informed decision instead of going into it blindly. Also, you can always do uni later if the need arises with weekend courses etc.

Edit:

Having CS degree was super important in the past, where programming languages were few and far between, there was no Internet so knowledge sharing was harder etc. Right now you can easily do stuff like creating a procedure that will calculate the distance between 2 points based on their GPS data and taking into account difference in elevation and curvature of the earth by just using Wikipedia. I did that, no problem, and I have a degree in sociology. Prior to that I had no idea what arcus tangent was (I knew there was such a thing but didn't know what it was). Now I'm again clueless about that since I forgot everything I learned when doing this procedure since apart from this 1 time 5 years ago I didn't have to use trigonometry for work even once.
Time is precious. Waste it wisely.
JimmyJRaynor
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
Canada16679 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-18 05:24:37
November 18 2020 05:16 GMT
#20462
On November 17 2020 19:43 Manit0u wrote:
Ahh, the casettes for C64. I remember those!

the 1541 5.25 inch floppy disk drive rules!
On November 18 2020 13:51 Manit0u wrote:
I'm not saying having a CS/math/physics degree is bad (sometimes it's necessary). I'm just saying that you should maybe first spend some time pondering what kind of software development you're into most. Better yet, maybe trying a few internships/courses in different dev areas so you can find out if it's really what you want to do. Then you can make a more informed decision instead of going into it blindly. Also, you can always do uni later if the need arises with weekend courses etc.

The university i mentioned facilitates this process by having you go through alternating 4 month terms of school and 4 month terms of full time work. The student probably gets between 2 and 3 weeks off each year in the breaks that occur in April/May , August/September, and December/January. It is a lot more like the real world.

This process makes it far more likely one can put together a practical game plan for their career development while under 20 years old.
Ray Kassar To David Crane : "you're no more important to Atari than the factory workers assembling the cartridges"
Acrofales
Profile Joined August 2010
Spain17970 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-18 10:50:07
November 18 2020 10:40 GMT
#20463
On November 18 2020 13:51 Manit0u wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 18 2020 12:12 WarSame wrote:
On November 18 2020 07:29 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
On November 15 2020 12:44 WarSame wrote:
The situation definitely doesn't sound easy, especially with a kid in the picture. I was privileged to be able to attend University full time without worrying about the finances, living with my parents(who are great to get along with), and with getting to hang out with my friends and family, and play sports. At the times in my life when that hasn't been the case my grades have dropped sometimes by 20%.

The lockdowns are frankly going to be huge mental health killers.

Generally speaking, i don't think this kind of comfortable , cozy environment you describe is the best for growing into a well rounded professional software maker. I notice you're in Canada. The University of Waterloo produces top notch software engineers by the truckload and the environment is the opposite of the conditions you describe. Most students live in three or four cities over four years. They do not live with their parents, and they move a dozen times in four years.

Why not? I don't see how moving many times and spending a lot of your time and effort doing so will make you into a better developer.


It really depends on what you want to do as a developer. For 90% of the software development jobs you don't really need any degree, you just need to know how to code (and they don't teach you that at the uni), so depending on your plans for the future, financial situation and general point of life you're in, attending a university might actually be detrimental to you as it's several years where instead of gaining a hands-on work experience (and this is the most important thing 99% of the time) you'll instead be learning stuff you probably won't use.

I'm not saying having a CS/math/physics degree is bad (sometimes it's necessary). I'm just saying that you should maybe first spend some time pondering what kind of software development you're into most. Better yet, maybe trying a few internships/courses in different dev areas so you can find out if it's really what you want to do. Then you can make a more informed decision instead of going into it blindly. Also, you can always do uni later if the need arises with weekend courses etc.

Edit:

Having CS degree was super important in the past, where programming languages were few and far between, there was no Internet so knowledge sharing was harder etc. Right now you can easily do stuff like creating a procedure that will calculate the distance between 2 points based on their GPS data and taking into account difference in elevation and curvature of the earth by just using Wikipedia. I did that, no problem, and I have a degree in sociology. Prior to that I had no idea what arcus tangent was (I knew there was such a thing but didn't know what it was). Now I'm again clueless about that since I forgot everything I learned when doing this procedure since apart from this 1 time 5 years ago I didn't have to use trigonometry for work even once.

Heh, we have an SQL procedure that does that for us Then again, great circle distance is rather important when our main business is selling flights

E: and I forgot what I mainly wanted to respond to. I agree that a degree is not really necessary for most entry level CS jobs. In fact, I spent most of my time as a lecturer wondering why the hell anybody would (1) do these courses, and (2) hire people who did these courses.

That said, so many jobs that shouldn't require a bachelor's degree, do require it (at least, in the "requirements"... whether they *actually* require it will all depend on the company). It's crazy how badly uni prepares students for an entry level CS job, and how companies keep insisting they need people with a BSc/engineering degree instead of picking up people with an affinity for coding. The only thing the degree does is show you are (1) at least somewhat conformist with the system, and (2) able to apply yourself towards a nebulous goal for a long period of time. I guess these are skills most corporate environments want, but a BA in Russian Literature would probably serve point (2) even better

Gives me an idea. If I ever need to write the requirements for some junior programmers, I will request a BA in Anthropology or a related subject. And other than that, 10 years of prior experience coding in Lisp, of course.
Manit0u
Profile Blog Joined August 2004
Poland17243 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-18 13:29:29
November 18 2020 13:28 GMT
#20464
On November 18 2020 19:40 Acrofales wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 18 2020 13:51 Manit0u wrote:
On November 18 2020 12:12 WarSame wrote:
On November 18 2020 07:29 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
On November 15 2020 12:44 WarSame wrote:
The situation definitely doesn't sound easy, especially with a kid in the picture. I was privileged to be able to attend University full time without worrying about the finances, living with my parents(who are great to get along with), and with getting to hang out with my friends and family, and play sports. At the times in my life when that hasn't been the case my grades have dropped sometimes by 20%.

The lockdowns are frankly going to be huge mental health killers.

Generally speaking, i don't think this kind of comfortable , cozy environment you describe is the best for growing into a well rounded professional software maker. I notice you're in Canada. The University of Waterloo produces top notch software engineers by the truckload and the environment is the opposite of the conditions you describe. Most students live in three or four cities over four years. They do not live with their parents, and they move a dozen times in four years.

Why not? I don't see how moving many times and spending a lot of your time and effort doing so will make you into a better developer.


It really depends on what you want to do as a developer. For 90% of the software development jobs you don't really need any degree, you just need to know how to code (and they don't teach you that at the uni), so depending on your plans for the future, financial situation and general point of life you're in, attending a university might actually be detrimental to you as it's several years where instead of gaining a hands-on work experience (and this is the most important thing 99% of the time) you'll instead be learning stuff you probably won't use.

I'm not saying having a CS/math/physics degree is bad (sometimes it's necessary). I'm just saying that you should maybe first spend some time pondering what kind of software development you're into most. Better yet, maybe trying a few internships/courses in different dev areas so you can find out if it's really what you want to do. Then you can make a more informed decision instead of going into it blindly. Also, you can always do uni later if the need arises with weekend courses etc.

Edit:

Having CS degree was super important in the past, where programming languages were few and far between, there was no Internet so knowledge sharing was harder etc. Right now you can easily do stuff like creating a procedure that will calculate the distance between 2 points based on their GPS data and taking into account difference in elevation and curvature of the earth by just using Wikipedia. I did that, no problem, and I have a degree in sociology. Prior to that I had no idea what arcus tangent was (I knew there was such a thing but didn't know what it was). Now I'm again clueless about that since I forgot everything I learned when doing this procedure since apart from this 1 time 5 years ago I didn't have to use trigonometry for work even once.

Heh, we have an SQL procedure that does that for us Then again, great circle distance is rather important when our main business is selling flights

E: and I forgot what I mainly wanted to respond to. I agree that a degree is not really necessary for most entry level CS jobs. In fact, I spent most of my time as a lecturer wondering why the hell anybody would (1) do these courses, and (2) hire people who did these courses.

That said, so many jobs that shouldn't require a bachelor's degree, do require it (at least, in the "requirements"... whether they *actually* require it will all depend on the company). It's crazy how badly uni prepares students for an entry level CS job, and how companies keep insisting they need people with a BSc/engineering degree instead of picking up people with an affinity for coding. The only thing the degree does is show you are (1) at least somewhat conformist with the system, and (2) able to apply yourself towards a nebulous goal for a long period of time. I guess these are skills most corporate environments want, but a BA in Russian Literature would probably serve point (2) even better

Gives me an idea. If I ever need to write the requirements for some junior programmers, I will request a BA in Anthropology or a related subject. And other than that, 10 years of prior experience coding in Lisp, of course.


Anthropology is a neat idea. Some recent studies in the UK have shown that people who finished humanities actually make better programmers for the most part.

Personally I'd hire more people who have a degree in philosophy since logic takes up a big chunk of their courses and it makes it much easier for them to grasp the basic concepts (FizzBuzz is popular interview question for a reason). Also, they're good at reasoning about abstract stuff and have more soft skills as a bonus.
Time is precious. Waste it wisely.
WombaT
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
Northern Ireland25031 Posts
November 18 2020 14:14 GMT
#20465
On November 18 2020 22:28 Manit0u wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 18 2020 19:40 Acrofales wrote:
On November 18 2020 13:51 Manit0u wrote:
On November 18 2020 12:12 WarSame wrote:
On November 18 2020 07:29 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
On November 15 2020 12:44 WarSame wrote:
The situation definitely doesn't sound easy, especially with a kid in the picture. I was privileged to be able to attend University full time without worrying about the finances, living with my parents(who are great to get along with), and with getting to hang out with my friends and family, and play sports. At the times in my life when that hasn't been the case my grades have dropped sometimes by 20%.

The lockdowns are frankly going to be huge mental health killers.

Generally speaking, i don't think this kind of comfortable , cozy environment you describe is the best for growing into a well rounded professional software maker. I notice you're in Canada. The University of Waterloo produces top notch software engineers by the truckload and the environment is the opposite of the conditions you describe. Most students live in three or four cities over four years. They do not live with their parents, and they move a dozen times in four years.

Why not? I don't see how moving many times and spending a lot of your time and effort doing so will make you into a better developer.


It really depends on what you want to do as a developer. For 90% of the software development jobs you don't really need any degree, you just need to know how to code (and they don't teach you that at the uni), so depending on your plans for the future, financial situation and general point of life you're in, attending a university might actually be detrimental to you as it's several years where instead of gaining a hands-on work experience (and this is the most important thing 99% of the time) you'll instead be learning stuff you probably won't use.

I'm not saying having a CS/math/physics degree is bad (sometimes it's necessary). I'm just saying that you should maybe first spend some time pondering what kind of software development you're into most. Better yet, maybe trying a few internships/courses in different dev areas so you can find out if it's really what you want to do. Then you can make a more informed decision instead of going into it blindly. Also, you can always do uni later if the need arises with weekend courses etc.

Edit:

Having CS degree was super important in the past, where programming languages were few and far between, there was no Internet so knowledge sharing was harder etc. Right now you can easily do stuff like creating a procedure that will calculate the distance between 2 points based on their GPS data and taking into account difference in elevation and curvature of the earth by just using Wikipedia. I did that, no problem, and I have a degree in sociology. Prior to that I had no idea what arcus tangent was (I knew there was such a thing but didn't know what it was). Now I'm again clueless about that since I forgot everything I learned when doing this procedure since apart from this 1 time 5 years ago I didn't have to use trigonometry for work even once.

Heh, we have an SQL procedure that does that for us Then again, great circle distance is rather important when our main business is selling flights

E: and I forgot what I mainly wanted to respond to. I agree that a degree is not really necessary for most entry level CS jobs. In fact, I spent most of my time as a lecturer wondering why the hell anybody would (1) do these courses, and (2) hire people who did these courses.

That said, so many jobs that shouldn't require a bachelor's degree, do require it (at least, in the "requirements"... whether they *actually* require it will all depend on the company). It's crazy how badly uni prepares students for an entry level CS job, and how companies keep insisting they need people with a BSc/engineering degree instead of picking up people with an affinity for coding. The only thing the degree does is show you are (1) at least somewhat conformist with the system, and (2) able to apply yourself towards a nebulous goal for a long period of time. I guess these are skills most corporate environments want, but a BA in Russian Literature would probably serve point (2) even better

Gives me an idea. If I ever need to write the requirements for some junior programmers, I will request a BA in Anthropology or a related subject. And other than that, 10 years of prior experience coding in Lisp, of course.


Anthropology is a neat idea. Some recent studies in the UK have shown that people who finished humanities actually make better programmers for the most part.

Personally I'd hire more people who have a degree in philosophy since logic takes up a big chunk of their courses and it makes it much easier for them to grasp the basic concepts (FizzBuzz is popular interview question for a reason). Also, they're good at reasoning about abstract stuff and have more soft skills as a bonus.

I’d largely agree, I guess it’ll depend on the environment you’re in as well. I was sitting around trying to run the intern route and they pushed up the requirements to needing a degree for the vast majority of them, some in literally any subject.

With Covid coming it kind of made my mind up to just do the degree, I mean the job market won’t be great, social life won’t be great. So being minus a year isn’t too bad as it’ll be almost cancelled out. Have some interviews coming up for summer jobs open to first year students, then it’s second year and third year is a full year’s work placement.

So I could end up with more useful experience by doing a degree that I think should be technically unnecessary, but does open certain doors.

If it were up to me and employers don’t continue to insist on degrees, universities should drop exclusive teaching with accreditation and also offer accreditation in a stand-alone basis

Get a guided syllabus of material and then pay to sit the exams on them. Get that bit of paper much faster, if you’ve got the chops. Any decent hobbyist or old person like myself looking to retrain wouldn’t be financial and time-locked for multiple years that way.

C’est la vie I suppose, world isn’t always sensible!
'You'll always be the cuddly marsupial of my heart, despite the inherent flaws of your ancestry' - Squat
Blitzkrieg0
Profile Blog Joined August 2010
United States13132 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-18 16:52:38
November 18 2020 16:41 GMT
#20466
On November 18 2020 22:28 Manit0u wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 18 2020 19:40 Acrofales wrote:
On November 18 2020 13:51 Manit0u wrote:
On November 18 2020 12:12 WarSame wrote:
On November 18 2020 07:29 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
On November 15 2020 12:44 WarSame wrote:
The situation definitely doesn't sound easy, especially with a kid in the picture. I was privileged to be able to attend University full time without worrying about the finances, living with my parents(who are great to get along with), and with getting to hang out with my friends and family, and play sports. At the times in my life when that hasn't been the case my grades have dropped sometimes by 20%.

The lockdowns are frankly going to be huge mental health killers.

Generally speaking, i don't think this kind of comfortable , cozy environment you describe is the best for growing into a well rounded professional software maker. I notice you're in Canada. The University of Waterloo produces top notch software engineers by the truckload and the environment is the opposite of the conditions you describe. Most students live in three or four cities over four years. They do not live with their parents, and they move a dozen times in four years.

Why not? I don't see how moving many times and spending a lot of your time and effort doing so will make you into a better developer.


It really depends on what you want to do as a developer. For 90% of the software development jobs you don't really need any degree, you just need to know how to code (and they don't teach you that at the uni), so depending on your plans for the future, financial situation and general point of life you're in, attending a university might actually be detrimental to you as it's several years where instead of gaining a hands-on work experience (and this is the most important thing 99% of the time) you'll instead be learning stuff you probably won't use.

I'm not saying having a CS/math/physics degree is bad (sometimes it's necessary). I'm just saying that you should maybe first spend some time pondering what kind of software development you're into most. Better yet, maybe trying a few internships/courses in different dev areas so you can find out if it's really what you want to do. Then you can make a more informed decision instead of going into it blindly. Also, you can always do uni later if the need arises with weekend courses etc.

Edit:

Having CS degree was super important in the past, where programming languages were few and far between, there was no Internet so knowledge sharing was harder etc. Right now you can easily do stuff like creating a procedure that will calculate the distance between 2 points based on their GPS data and taking into account difference in elevation and curvature of the earth by just using Wikipedia. I did that, no problem, and I have a degree in sociology. Prior to that I had no idea what arcus tangent was (I knew there was such a thing but didn't know what it was). Now I'm again clueless about that since I forgot everything I learned when doing this procedure since apart from this 1 time 5 years ago I didn't have to use trigonometry for work even once.

Heh, we have an SQL procedure that does that for us Then again, great circle distance is rather important when our main business is selling flights

E: and I forgot what I mainly wanted to respond to. I agree that a degree is not really necessary for most entry level CS jobs. In fact, I spent most of my time as a lecturer wondering why the hell anybody would (1) do these courses, and (2) hire people who did these courses.

That said, so many jobs that shouldn't require a bachelor's degree, do require it (at least, in the "requirements"... whether they *actually* require it will all depend on the company). It's crazy how badly uni prepares students for an entry level CS job, and how companies keep insisting they need people with a BSc/engineering degree instead of picking up people with an affinity for coding. The only thing the degree does is show you are (1) at least somewhat conformist with the system, and (2) able to apply yourself towards a nebulous goal for a long period of time. I guess these are skills most corporate environments want, but a BA in Russian Literature would probably serve point (2) even better

Gives me an idea. If I ever need to write the requirements for some junior programmers, I will request a BA in Anthropology or a related subject. And other than that, 10 years of prior experience coding in Lisp, of course.


Anthropology is a neat idea. Some recent studies in the UK have shown that people who finished humanities actually make better programmers for the most part.

Personally I'd hire more people who have a degree in philosophy since logic takes up a big chunk of their courses and it makes it much easier for them to grasp the basic concepts (FizzBuzz is popular interview question for a reason). Also, they're good at reasoning about abstract stuff and have more soft skills as a bonus.


I feel like this is just a feedback loop from people believing the meme that everyone should get into coding because it makes a lot of money. Your philosophy major is interested in logic and gets into coding because it is mostly problem solving. Your local university churns out comp sci majors who can't even write fizz buzz because people just want to make a lot of money.

In the next generation or two we'll probably see a world where everyone learns programming and it will be a common skill like reading.
I'll always be your shadow and veil your eyes from states of ain soph aur.
Manit0u
Profile Blog Joined August 2004
Poland17243 Posts
November 18 2020 18:43 GMT
#20467
Well said. I've got plenty of friends who envied my salary and asked me to teach them programming. I tried, they just couldn't do it. Unfortunately programming is not for everyone and regardless of schooling it seems that your brain has to be wired a certain way and have a propensity for problem solving that most people lack. Sure, you can finish your courses at the uni or wherever but doing that doesn't actually make you a programmer.

I also remember doing courses for interns and most of them decided it's actually too hard for them (they had to do a rather basic full-stack web app from scratch with my assistance) and dropped out. Reality checks are good.
Time is precious. Waste it wisely.
JimmyJRaynor
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
Canada16679 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-19 01:16:17
November 18 2020 23:43 GMT
#20468
Mental toughness is part of being a good programmer. Everything you do is abstract and no one can really see the hard work you put in. YOu have to be mentally tough to take the cheap shots and keep moving relentlessly forward. And, if you are very talented and average people with bad intentions get a sense of that .. they'll go into turf protection mode and lob artillery shots at you when you're not in the room. Fortunately, wise old CIO's and project managers can see through that BS.

The school I talked about .. where you move every 4 months for 4.6 years.. its brutal. You get told 10+ times per year in job interviews .. "you're not a good fit". I got chewed out a couple of times in job interviews for poor grades in my "breadth" courses. It is a brutal gauntlet to run through... in the end... it builds a tough as nails mindset. You've been to the IT puppet show.. and you've seen the strings. All these experiences build mental toughness and a killer instinct you'll never get from a traditional university computer science program.

As an aside, I spend time getting to know people who have "bullet proof confidence". I study their habits.

RTS games require mental toughness. You can carefully craft and hone a really cool build order. And, just get absolutely fucking crushed. Likewise, you can destroy an opponent whom you are in reality only slightly better than. Does that win
over-feed your ego and make you lazy?. or do you keep your head down ... and keep on grinding?
Ray Kassar To David Crane : "you're no more important to Atari than the factory workers assembling the cartridges"
Starlightsun
Profile Blog Joined June 2016
United States1405 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-19 06:30:07
November 19 2020 06:25 GMT
#20469
On November 19 2020 03:43 Manit0u wrote:
Well said. I've got plenty of friends who envied my salary and asked me to teach them programming. I tried, they just couldn't do it. Unfortunately programming is not for everyone and regardless of schooling it seems that your brain has to be wired a certain way and have a propensity for problem solving that most people lack. Sure, you can finish your courses at the uni or wherever but doing that doesn't actually make you a programmer.

I also remember doing courses for interns and most of them decided it's actually too hard for them (they had to do a rather basic full-stack web app from scratch with my assistance) and dropped out. Reality checks are good.


I wonder if there is science that backs up the "don't have the brain for coding"? I seem to be one of those people, it's really hard for me to go very deep into abstract problems. Things like visualizing how data is stored in arrays or predicting what a nested loop will do is painful for me but I'm guessing that's really basic stuff.
Manit0u
Profile Blog Joined August 2004
Poland17243 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-19 08:17:22
November 19 2020 07:48 GMT
#20470
On November 19 2020 15:25 Starlightsun wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 19 2020 03:43 Manit0u wrote:
Well said. I've got plenty of friends who envied my salary and asked me to teach them programming. I tried, they just couldn't do it. Unfortunately programming is not for everyone and regardless of schooling it seems that your brain has to be wired a certain way and have a propensity for problem solving that most people lack. Sure, you can finish your courses at the uni or wherever but doing that doesn't actually make you a programmer.

I also remember doing courses for interns and most of them decided it's actually too hard for them (they had to do a rather basic full-stack web app from scratch with my assistance) and dropped out. Reality checks are good.


I wonder if there is science that backs up the "don't have the brain for coding"? I seem to be one of those people, it's really hard for me to go very deep into abstract problems. Things like visualizing how data is stored in arrays or predicting what a nested loop will do is painful for me but I'm guessing that's really basic stuff.


I'm almost certain there were studies into that. I think that you need some penchant for logic, pattern recognition etc.

Here are some articles on the subject:
https://medium.com/javascript-scene/are-programmer-brains-different-2068a52648a7
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-programming-affects-brain/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scientists-begin-looking-_b_4829981

It seems that the most influential thing in programming is being fluent in your native language first and foremost (even according to Djikstra) as reading source code is the most common activity you're doing. Studies show that usually the most engaged parts of the brain are the ones responsible for language processing while parts responsible for maths are barely used.

So, you can probably get better at programming by just reading fiction books and playing an instrument
Time is precious. Waste it wisely.
Silvanel
Profile Blog Joined March 2003
Poland4725 Posts
November 19 2020 08:06 GMT
#20471
It takes a little time getting used to it, You will get better with time. Also You should try to write code in such a way that is easy to understand --> its generally not a good practice to nest many loops inside each other.
Pathetic Greta hater.
Manit0u
Profile Blog Joined August 2004
Poland17243 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-19 08:53:23
November 19 2020 08:19 GMT
#20472
Languages that support functional style do help with reduction of nested loops since you can do stuff like
enum.filter.map.reduce
instead of doing 2 loops and additional variable assignment. It's also much easier to read, comprehend and reason about.

On November 19 2020 17:06 Silvanel wrote:
It takes a little time getting used to it, You will get better with time. Also You should try to write code in such a way that is easy to understand --> its generally not a good practice to nest many loops inside each other.


Worst case I've seen with such stuff was 7 nested loops and loops lower in the hierarchy throwing exceptions that were being caught by loops higher up to continue. Shit was insane.
Time is precious. Waste it wisely.
Acrofales
Profile Joined August 2010
Spain17970 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-19 10:35:18
November 19 2020 10:27 GMT
#20473
On November 19 2020 17:19 Manit0u wrote:
Languages that support functional style do help with reduction of nested loops since you can do stuff like
enum.filter.map.reduce
instead of doing 2 loops and additional variable assignment. It's also much easier to read, comprehend and reason about.

Show nested quote +
On November 19 2020 17:06 Silvanel wrote:
It takes a little time getting used to it, You will get better with time. Also You should try to write code in such a way that is easy to understand --> its generally not a good practice to nest many loops inside each other.


Worst case I've seen with such stuff was 7 nested loops and loops lower in the hierarchy throwing exceptions that were being caught by loops higher up to continue. Shit was insane.

I have to say that your anecdotal encounters with remarkably shitty code are always amusing. How do you keep finding code that is *so* bad? :D

You either work in remarkably shitty companies, or have been tasked with remarkably shitty jobs with ancient legacy code written by people who learned to code in COBOL and brought all their shitty practices over to non-shitty languages.

E: actually, didn't you do a lot of php? I take it back. PHP is another language that almost teaches you to use bad coding practices. It improved, but anything from mid 2000s is going to be absolutely horrendous (and probably written by someone whose prior experience with any type of coding was writing excel macros).
Manit0u
Profile Blog Joined August 2004
Poland17243 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-19 10:57:16
November 19 2020 10:53 GMT
#20474
The loops with exception control flow was a piece of software written in Java and used by national airlines...

I have some PHP horror stories too if you want

I've seen a 30k lines of code class being extended several times and each class that extended it had 15-30k lines of code and was itself extended by similarly large classes, each calling parent's constructor at different points in their own constructors.

I've had to reverse engineer 5k lines of code script written by non-programmer that was full of global variables that stored data in arrays that were being manipulated, reversed and overridden in multiple nested loops etc. etc.
Time is precious. Waste it wisely.
WombaT
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
Northern Ireland25031 Posts
November 19 2020 12:00 GMT
#20475
On November 19 2020 19:53 Manit0u wrote:
The loops with exception control flow was a piece of software written in Java and used by national airlines...

I have some PHP horror stories too if you want

I've seen a 30k lines of code class being extended several times and each class that extended it had 15-30k lines of code and was itself extended by similarly large classes, each calling parent's constructor at different points in their own constructors.

I've had to reverse engineer 5k lines of code script written by non-programmer that was full of global variables that stored data in arrays that were being manipulated, reversed and overridden in multiple nested loops etc. etc.

Hey at least that gave you something to do.

How the fuck do such things happen haha?
'You'll always be the cuddly marsupial of my heart, despite the inherent flaws of your ancestry' - Squat
Manit0u
Profile Blog Joined August 2004
Poland17243 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-11-19 13:02:29
November 19 2020 12:33 GMT
#20476
Lazy devs. Devs that think they're super clever when they're not and are trying super hard to create code that only smart people like them will understand. And devs that perhaps think that if they write unintelligible spaghetti code they will become indispensable and they'll be able to work on it for years on end. Beats me.

The big classes thing was when the lead dev on a project decided that in MVC you have "controller", not "controllers" so there can be only one and all routes were going through the same controller that was extended multiple times to facilitate different clients using the app because why would you create separate repos for them? Also, I think this app used HMVC too (was a long time ago and I've repressed those memories)...

It baffles me to this day.
Time is precious. Waste it wisely.
tofucake
Profile Blog Joined October 2009
Hyrule19030 Posts
November 19 2020 13:44 GMT
#20477
Also not experienced enough devs. Lots of companies think that it's totally fine to pay some fresh, naive college grad $30k/year to develop their entire enterprise solution instead of hiring a proper team
Liquipediaasante sana squash banana
Silvanel
Profile Blog Joined March 2003
Poland4725 Posts
November 19 2020 14:32 GMT
#20478
Intrestingly enough i am a philosophy major (and also got degree in materials engineering but thats kinda beside the point). I must say that our second year logic course was much harder than all the math i had on Technical University.
Pathetic Greta hater.
WarSame
Profile Blog Joined February 2010
Canada1950 Posts
November 19 2020 14:53 GMT
#20479
Formal logic courses will prepare you for a surprisingly large amount of the work involved in software development. If I look back, Formal Logic, Hardware Architecture and Data Structures and Algorithms were the 3 most useful courses I took. The rest were generally just knowledge on top of those core classes.
Can it be I stayed away too long? Did you miss these rhymes while I was gone?
Manit0u
Profile Blog Joined August 2004
Poland17243 Posts
November 19 2020 15:11 GMT
#20480
Damn, it seems one of my dreams might come true as I have a chance to be working on AWS lambdas with Rust. Amazeballs.
Time is precious. Waste it wisely.
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