Programming. People treat it like a career, but fact is that unless your really good at it, your not going to make any money from it. I’ve found programming to be far more like art than work anyway.
Maybe I’m biased since I recently started working as a software dev, but you don’t need to be really good to get a job as a programmer. I’m evidence of that.
It is a career, for sure. It can be hard to get into, but I’ve been in the industry for a long time and I have worked with people who have been paid a developer’s salary for years who were unbelievably bad at their jobs.
I used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.
I’d say there are a lot of developers who are barely competent at copy/pasting code from stack overflow until it works. Maybe 10-20% of the people in SMEs are that. The majority are pretty decent, but kinda lazy. Then there are the incredibly competent and hard-working people who are like gold dust. A really good developer who isn’t a complete drama king/queen, has good communication skills and just gets on with their work instead of getting sucked into personal pet projects is incredibly rare.
I used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.
Are you sure you managed the team? I’m joking, but how did this person get through an interview, let a lone survive so long working as a dev?
Haha, it’s a fair comment - it’s a team I inherited, it wasn’t my hiring decision. I don’t know what the interview process was like before me, but I’m guessing it was a very old fashioned “where do you see yourself in 5 years” affair.
I’m pretty sure that they just muddled through by copy/pasting stuff seemingly at random and tinkering until it worked. Which can be a good way to learn, for sure, but it’s not really what you want from a professional developer, full time.
The guy who managed the team before me didn’t believe in object oriented design, and not in a cool Haskell way, in a really old fashioned “I can do everything with batch scripts” way. The team was using a programming language that was so old that they were using dosbox to compile it because the compiler was a 16-bit application.
Yeah, it was called DataFlex. The vendor has released new versions of it called Visual DataFlex (VDF) and then renamed VDF back to DataFlex, but this language was what we called “character mode” DataFlex. It’s still used by the company as their main data entry application even today and a lot of their processes still are written in DataFlex. A lot of the work that my team did was rewriting a lot of the old crap in C#, but there was just so much of it built up over the decades.
Not sure where you’re from, but here in the states, if you have a basic ability to code from a bootcamp or even self taught with a portfollio, you’ll pretty easily get hired making anywhere from 45-55k a year. And after about 2-4 years, you’ll pretty easily be making 70-90k sometimes more depending on where you live.
You can still use programming to leverage your current position.
If you work admin in an office and are able to automate a bunch of workflows with some simple scripts, you’ll have more leverage when salary raises start to get discussed.
Will your code be at the level a professional programmer would produce? Probably not, but you’re not competing with one.
In an interesting and challenging field, yes, you need to be really good at it because everyone wants to do it. But if you are willing to work on anything, like an ASP.NET Web Forms site built in 2005, that the business is entirely dependent upon to function in even the most basic capacity, with more technical debt than anyone would ever care to deal with, and no time allowed to refactor, you can make quite a nice living.
I consider programming skills a very valuable skill that unlocks many career options, but if your job is morning but pure programming, yeah most people are not cut out for it.
That’s why I switched sides. From programming myself to developing functions and writing requirements which someone else can implement into code. :)
I could do some programming (did embedded C), but surely I wasn’t the very best in it. So now I’m the guy who defines what a small (but essential) part of SW has to do which will run in hopefully a few million cars in a couple of years. :) Much more fun (and money).
Programming. People treat it like a career, but fact is that unless your really good at it, your not going to make any money from it. I’ve found programming to be far more like art than work anyway.
Maybe I’m biased since I recently started working as a software dev, but you don’t need to be really good to get a job as a programmer. I’m evidence of that.
Or any job. You underestimate how much any job is just being decent enough rather than amazing all of the time.
Yes I am fully aware of that. My point was that programming is just like any other job unlike what the guy I responded to seems to think.
Reading this, I’m not able to interpret what emotion applies here.
Edit: How do I upload a gif without it turning into a giant webm player view? I had to hot link that to get it to not be annoyingly huge.
Sorry I typed this in a hurry. I just disagree with the statement and tried making a joke.
I got the joke, my response was in extension to it :)
damn dude know your audience, you’re on Lemmy lol
It is a career, for sure. It can be hard to get into, but I’ve been in the industry for a long time and I have worked with people who have been paid a developer’s salary for years who were unbelievably bad at their jobs.
I used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.
I’d say there are a lot of developers who are barely competent at copy/pasting code from stack overflow until it works. Maybe 10-20% of the people in SMEs are that. The majority are pretty decent, but kinda lazy. Then there are the incredibly competent and hard-working people who are like gold dust. A really good developer who isn’t a complete drama king/queen, has good communication skills and just gets on with their work instead of getting sucked into personal pet projects is incredibly rare.
Are you sure you managed the team? I’m joking, but how did this person get through an interview, let a lone survive so long working as a dev?
Haha, it’s a fair comment - it’s a team I inherited, it wasn’t my hiring decision. I don’t know what the interview process was like before me, but I’m guessing it was a very old fashioned “where do you see yourself in 5 years” affair.
I’m pretty sure that they just muddled through by copy/pasting stuff seemingly at random and tinkering until it worked. Which can be a good way to learn, for sure, but it’s not really what you want from a professional developer, full time.
The guy who managed the team before me didn’t believe in object oriented design, and not in a cool Haskell way, in a really old fashioned “I can do everything with batch scripts” way. The team was using a programming language that was so old that they were using dosbox to compile it because the compiler was a 16-bit application.
Name the language, mate. This sounds a bit too insane to be true.
Yeah, it was called DataFlex. The vendor has released new versions of it called Visual DataFlex (VDF) and then renamed VDF back to DataFlex, but this language was what we called “character mode” DataFlex. It’s still used by the company as their main data entry application even today and a lot of their processes still are written in DataFlex. A lot of the work that my team did was rewriting a lot of the old crap in C#, but there was just so much of it built up over the decades.
Not sure where you’re from, but here in the states, if you have a basic ability to code from a bootcamp or even self taught with a portfollio, you’ll pretty easily get hired making anywhere from 45-55k a year. And after about 2-4 years, you’ll pretty easily be making 70-90k sometimes more depending on where you live.
I sucked balls at programming and made six figures.
You can still use programming to leverage your current position.
If you work admin in an office and are able to automate a bunch of workflows with some simple scripts, you’ll have more leverage when salary raises start to get discussed.
Will your code be at the level a professional programmer would produce? Probably not, but you’re not competing with one.
Hell the ability to write a basic sql SELECT statement alone opens a lot of doors.
proceeds to learn sql
By the way, SQL, sequel, or squeal?
(personally, I use sequel)
Can you please define that? Being the Internet, some define it as US$1 or US$250,000.
Maybe if you are a freelance programmer working out of a coffee shop…?
Skilled work often is an art.
In an interesting and challenging field, yes, you need to be really good at it because everyone wants to do it. But if you are willing to work on anything, like an ASP.NET Web Forms site built in 2005, that the business is entirely dependent upon to function in even the most basic capacity, with more technical debt than anyone would ever care to deal with, and no time allowed to refactor, you can make quite a nice living.
I consider programming skills a very valuable skill that unlocks many career options, but if your job is morning but pure programming, yeah most people are not cut out for it.
That’s why I switched sides. From programming myself to developing functions and writing requirements which someone else can implement into code. :)
I could do some programming (did embedded C), but surely I wasn’t the very best in it. So now I’m the guy who defines what a small (but essential) part of SW has to do which will run in hopefully a few million cars in a couple of years. :) Much more fun (and money).