[HN Gopher] The Forty-Year Programmer
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The Forty-Year Programmer
Author : revorad
Score : 23 points
Date : 2022-09-02 13:55 UTC (1 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (codefol.io)
| gumby wrote:
| I began as a paid programmer in 1982 (wow, just realized that).
| It's been fun and programming is still one of the most fun things
| I do.
|
| I think a lot of developers are unhappy because they either chose
| the career for the money or because most software development
| today doesn't involve a lot of programming. That is sad.
|
| But there is still a ton which really is simply programming.
| revskill wrote:
| Not much useful stories based on my real life story.
|
| My friends are programmers, too. But they never get to senior
| level programmers, even if they keep working in software
| engineering for more than 10 years, or 20 years.
|
| The reason? They refused to learn unit testing.
|
| They love manual testing, from function to the software.
|
| God bless them.
| holoduke wrote:
| What is a senior developer anyways? I am a around developer,
| but even after 20 years I see people around me much better than
| I am. Still I managed to setup multiple companies quite
| succesfully. But am I a typical senior developer? No I am not.
| I am quite mediocre.
| revskill wrote:
| A senior developer is one who can read, write and TEST their
| own code in an automatic way.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Is it the lack of unit testing or a lack of learning new tools
| and techniques once knowing just enough to get a job?
| revskill wrote:
| Of all basic senior skills, unit testing is the first one
| need to know.
| YZF wrote:
| I'm right about this milestone as well. I started programming
| circa 1980 (BASIC on a Sinclair ZX81). I'm not coding as much as
| I used to or want to these days...
|
| A lot has changed in terms of technology but has it really. The
| industry has changed though. I don't know if this is just my
| narrow perspective but it seems the % of challenging/interesting
| work is much smaller than it used to be.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| % is certainly much smaller: computers are so cheap these days
| that it makes sense to pay people to do boring stuff with them.
|
| However: in absolute terms, I bet there's way more
| challenging/interesting work now than 40 years ago, and in
| geographical terms, there are definitely way more places it's
| possible to do that work.
|
| Food for thought:
|
| > _I suppose the picture of computing is of a topsy-turvy
| growth obeying laws of a commercial "natural" selection. This
| could be entirely accurate considering how fast it has grown.
| Things started out in a scholarly vein, but the rush of
| commerce hasn't allowed much time to think where we're going._
|
| (that sentiment was penned in 1963)
| analog31 wrote:
| I guess I crossed that milestone too, without thinking much about
| it. My brother was in college, taking CS classes, and then my
| high school offered a course in BASIC so I signed up, in 1981.
| Meanwhile, my mom had started taking night classes in programming
| at a community college, and ended up being asked to teach the
| introductory course. We were in the Detroit area, and the car
| companies were using PL/1, so that was what the colleges taught,
| until everybody switched to Pascal. My mom's students were
| getting decent jobs after 1 year in her course. She bought a
| couple of computers out of her own pocket and started a zeroth
| hour programming class at the high school where she was a science
| teacher.
|
| There were lots of family debates about programming. My mom
| thought that the job market for programmers would soon be
| flooded, and that in any event, it was too easy to justify 4
| years of college study. I was interested in a variety of things
| and ended up majoring in math and physics. I got a summer
| internship at a computing facility, and formed the impression
| that an actual programming job would ultimately be boring. But
| programming, in the service of physics and electronics, was
| exciting! At my college, the professors who embraced personal
| computers and were doing cool things with them, were in the math
| and science departments.
|
| Of course that's all hindsight, but interesting to see how my
| opinions have held up over the years. I think programming turned
| out to be harder than imagined, for people to learn, and we don't
| know precisely why. Views about how programming requires this or
| that kind of thinking, don't seem to hold water. Yet there's a
| shortage of programmers relative to investor interest in software
| development.
|
| Is it boring? Was I right about that? I watch the programmers at
| my workplace doing their jobs, but at the same time, maybe they
| think my job is boring. That's a matter of personal preference,
| and all jobs have some amount of drudge work.
|
| I'm still interested in programming, but on my own terms. I'm one
| of those dreaded "scientific" programmers, who uses programming
| as a problem solving tool, rather than for creating software for
| widespread use.
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