I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

school takes the creativity out of programming.

you want to try something new?
sorry, can't have that. functionality = priority.

school takes the choice out of programming.

- you're gonna use x language
- with x api
- in x environment
- and make it in x way
- because if you don't, your gonna fail x assignments
- because programming is about getting the job done, with no creativity

yeah fuck you too

school takes the cleverness out of programming

you get a turn left function. it turns a 'turtle' left any amount of degrees that you pass it, you have to make a turn right function to turn right 90 degrees. well, if you thought turning left -90 degrees was a good idea to make a turn right function, then fuck you. you have to turn left three timeswith the default 90 degrees instead because it's more practical/logical.

fuck that.

anyone else hate the movements to get programming into schools?

rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:

in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).

my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.

but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.

i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.

i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.

my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.

I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".

i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.

literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.

she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.

i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".

I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".

never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.

i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.

I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.

I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.

most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.

when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.

happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.

also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.

After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:

Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.

But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

Some of these things have been probably mentioned already in some way, but I'd like to add my two cents nevertheless
I grew up in Germany and have been in the German school system for my whole "school career" and what I always missed was a computer/programming related subject. (A real one, not this thing where they teach how to use MS Office) Something that would have pushed me a bit more into this world of technology and programming way earlier, because I didn't know which possibilities I had. It doesn't happen often that I think that something is better in Slovakia but I have to say that in Slovakia they are teaching CS in standard schools from the age of 11or 12 I think. I don't exactly know what they teach there, maybe it's shit, but it's something at least. I know that most people swear on teaching themselves programming and all but there are people like me who struggle with that.
Then of course I'd like to see the teaching get better. They should teach the useful stuff and focus on practical experience.

Teach programming languages practically. You can’t make a person learn to program when they’re just sitting in a lecture hall staring at the board. Sure, you can teach them concepts like classes/OOP/etc., but you can’t throw 20 lines of code up on the screen and expect everyone to understand it and be able to replicate it or tailor it to their needs.

It’s like learning a language. You can learn the concepts of e.g. tenses in Spanish by sitting in a classroom, but you don’t really know it until you’ve used it in real-world situations. You need practical experience building stuff in a programming language to *really* understand it.

I have a serious question.
I particularly address Italian ranters.

It's about time to decide what faculty/"subject" I should go to, and I'm uncertain between "Informatics" and "Informatic Engineering".

Does someone know what the differences between the two are, and, given that I want to do as much programming (and so practical stuff instead of theorical stuff) as possible, which of these two faculties should suit me best?

If you're not from Italy, but from other countries, of course that shouldn't stop you from posting a response, if you want to.
How do Universities work there?
Are they like ours, in Italy, or does it work differently?

Thanks for your patience. 💙

Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.

I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.

After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.

But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!

Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.

If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.

And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.

So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.

How ignorant we all are about the world. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a fact. After a four year degree I've learnt so much, how a computer works from the physical phenomena on the hardware level to the inner workings of an OS to the highest level abstractions of modern web development, a wide array of programming languages covering several different paradigms, mathematics from calculus to statistics to algebra, how to work with databases, how to administrate a server, how to build a website, and much more.

And that's just in a degree. I have knowledge in one domain and I wouldn't even call myself an expert in it. Medicine, physics, biology, the hundreds of branches of engineering from civil to nautical to aerospace to automobile, to geology to meteorology to astronomy, to the practical application of this knowledge in hundreds of trades. There's so much more to know in so much depth and only recently have I realized how little we all know on an individual level.

Finding this out has been a mixed bag, on the one hand it's made me value what I know and what others can teach me a hell of a lot more, on the other, knowing that people haven't realized this and adamantly discuss and impose from a position of ignorance isn't very nice.

tl;dr I know that I know nothing

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

Question:
I am planning to learn machine learning and deep learning. I am quite comfortable programming in c++ and python, what would you recommend would be a nice starting point with more attention towards practical stuff.

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

Man I hate programming tests that have no practical application. I'm not doing one yet, just saw an example question that made me go...ok...I kinda get what you want but..why would you EVER need this. Googled and the consensus is that..*drum roll* you wouldn't ever need it because it's only useful to see if someone can solve it in an interview.

Why not give actual problems or at least actual test cases of things that way you can see if people can solve actual real life problems. Wouldn't that prove that people can reason their way through things or not? See if they can provide a good solution for something that someone else has already encountered instead of some nonsense that wouldn't have an actual practical application?

Maybe it's just me but if you give me a problem that sounds like it's useless for some reason my brain just goes, "Ah this sounds like it's useless, better not actually devote all my brain power to this"...

Its good and practical but those who aim to fill gaps in the programming industry by trying to produce "programmers on demand" via a several month long bootcamp are complete idiots. Nobody can learn to develop a well structured application that's easy to maintain in a couple of months, either that is frontend or back end. We are trying to be engineers , not just solve problems.

Apparently, a lot of people here are complaining about the fact cs classes (and I'm talking about uni here) are way too much theory and far too less teaching practical things. And don't get me wrong, I don't like viewing cs only from a theoretic point of view either, BUT I think cs education is made to teach you how solve complex cs problems by yourself and give you the tools on how to learn about these things in the future. And this is very much theory.

CS is the science part, so don't wonder if there's a lot of theory in it. If you only want to learn how to program, maybe you should take programming courses instead.

In school though, cs education should be less theory and more doing practical (funny) things, programming, "how does the internet work", "why I should not give my credit card details to random strangers on the internet", things like that.

I like being diverse in what I can program. I like software development, web development, networking programming, I’m starting to get into embedding programming and using lower level languages like C/C++ (I’ve used them before but not for anything practical) and I enjoy the diversity. It makes me feel good knowing I can extend my programming knowledge.

Also I like having project ideas lined up so I know what I want to do next. And if I don’t finish one I know is easy but I can’t figure out, I CANT MOVE ON! I have to finish it. It’ll drive me fucking nuts.

Back when I was a total noob at programming probably 6-7year back. I once fucking try to memorize even-odd number program for the practical test because I was unable to understand anything related programming.

It was like - read 20times the include statement and try to remember what was in between < >.

I totally feel embarrassed now after looking back, that silly me didn't even try programming properly.

While teaching theory is actually good, it doesn't mean that there is no room for any practical education either. Students needs to be exposed to modern programming languages like Python, Ruby while at the same time be trained in the pioneers of programming like C, C++, Java. It is only then would they be able to make informed decisions on who they really want to be. If you had one practical lab session on C and Java and then the rest of the semester about HTML, students would end up moving away from programming.

Concepts like programming and networking concepts should be included whereas ancient technologies like programming micro-processors (x386, x486, etc) should be excluded. Who programs x386 and x486 micro-processors anymore? While the understanding of how micro-processors and other low-level components in the computer systems work is very essential, doing practicals on them isn't really a good use of students' time, energy or effort.

React has been a gateway into the practical functional world.

Having a crack at Clojure/Om/Datomic, and then recognising the roots of functional and immutable programming that I've seen before.

I have a lot to learn.

Looking forward to grasping macros fully. Walk before I run though

I work with statistics/data analysis and web development. I study these subjects for almost a decade and now I have 4 years of practical experience.

This information is on my LinkedIn profile and from time to time tech recruiters contact me wanting to have an interview. I always accept because I find it a great way to practice interviews and talking in English, as it isn't my native language.

A remark that I always make to my colleagues wanting to start doing data analysis related work is that it may seem similar to development, but it's not. When you develop, your code work or not. It may be ugly, it may be full of security problems, but you almost always have a clear indication if things are functioning. It's possible to more or less correlate experience using a programming language with knowing how to develop.

Data science is different. You have to know what you are doing because the code will run even if you are doing something totally wrong. You have to know how to interpret the results and judge if they make sense. For this the mathematics and theory behind is as important as the programming language you use.

Ok, so I go to my first interview for a data science position. Then I discover that I will be interview by... a psychologist. A particularly old one. Yeah. Great start.

She proceeds to go through the most boring checklist of questions I ever saw. The first one? "Do you know Python?". At this point I'm questioning myself why I agreed to be interviewed. A few minutes later, a super cringy one: "Can you tell me an example of your amazing analytics skills?". I then proceed to explain what I wrote in the last two paragraphs to her. At this point is clear that she has no idea of what data science is and the company probably googled what they should expect from a candidate.

20 minutes later and the interview is over. A few days later I receive an email saying that I was not selected to continue with the recruitment process because I don't have enough experience.

In summary: an old psychologist with no idea on how data science works says I don't have experience on the subject based on a checklist that they probably google. The interview lasted less than 30 minutes.

Two weeks later another company interviews me, I gave basically the same answers and they absolutely liked what they heard. Since that day I stopped trying to understand what is expected from you on interviews.

I studied computer game development at a university that had pretty low standards. It was perfect for a slacker like me. I enjoyed it. Maybe it was implied that you'd have to study on your own and that completing the courses wasn't enough to make you a competent developer, but maybe I'm a bit slow or something because that never occurred to me until after we were finished.

I was taught enough programming and database stuff to land me an entry position job at a consulting firm before I was able to complete my thesis. Technically I dropped out, I guess, since I don't have a diploma.

I built a portfolio consisting of different projects/essays I'd completed/wrote for different courses. That, together with my charm and boyish good lucks made me get the job.

Anyways, even though I learned more practical stuff my first year on the job than I did my 3 years of uni it was a very good experience. It helped me understand what I was interested in so that I could pursue that later and some of the people I got to know would help my career later.

I mean, if education wasn't free (except living expenses, books, etc) I'd might say that I had been better off just taking a year of egghead/udemy/Indian Guy On YouTube classes to learn what I needed to land myself a job. But I'd need to know which courses to take so I'd probably find a group of courses that someone else put together. I guess it would be nice to take those classes with other people so that you can work together, learn from each other, and make some friends and connections as well. Oh, that sounds kinda like uni ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't know if this can be classified as a legit "regret" or not, but anyway (hence no wk78 tag).

I've always chosen to focus more on the theory behind computers and computing rather than on practical dev skills. Not saying that the more theoretical things aren't fun - concepts from theoretical CS and maths still regularly blow my mind, as do the more "esoteric" languages like Haskell, Idris, and Coq. However, after seeing you fine folks here at dR talk about practical development, it feels like there's a whole world of stuff that I've missed about computers and programming, especially web programming. I think I'll tackle that next when I have some free time, maybe spend some time learning PHP to see what all the hate's about... (really though, it must do something right if it has such a huge userbase, plus, I think devRant uses it too...?)

Anyway, just wanted to say that you folks are really cool and an awesome source of inspiration. Best community ever.

Even though I’ve been working through a C# book about WinForms, which I’m half way done with, I still don’t feel like I’m working productively and I hate the negative feeling it’s giving me.

It’s going to sound stupid but it’s making me feel like I’m not spending enough time programming even though I’ve been programming quite a bit this week. I mean the small apps aren’t practical they’re just for learning how it all works but still. Im not reading the book for learning the programming logic it’s for the WinForms knowledge.

I think it’s just that I want to make progress on my main project and just have a 4+ hour coding session.

A previous rant made me start doubting my choices.

I just graduated from college (but college here is probably not what you call college. You choose whether you do one more year and gain the 'x technician' certificate or you do two years and get the 'practical engineer' degree)

Hope you understand it.

Anyway, so I continued 1 year (I skipped 1 year so it's like I did the whole two years) and I have a practical engineer degree in electronics.

I love programming and really want to work in the field but (since I know nothing about the market) I don't even know if I'll get a job without going to university and getting a degree (which I want to get, I want to learn Software Engineering though, not CS)

So now to my question, do you guys truly think getting a degree will be a waste of my time?

tl;dr I want to get a Software Engineer degree, but a lot of posts say it's a waste of time. Who agrees and who doesn't?

I am a programming teacher in a local university, I started five years ago, but in this semester I feel very tired, the students don't want to learn. I tray many methodologies and practical protects but the interest show by they is very low. the worst thing is that in anonymous evaluation I get good score but my objective is that students become in a great programmers ¿any advice?

So this is something that happened in the first year at college.
I was at one of the top 50 engineering colleges in my country. To get admission here one needs to get a good score in the qualifying exams.
Now we had a cs related course in the first year which covered basic programming and coding concepts.
So in the first practical session we had to just write a hello world program in C.
The guy next to me for this session was the class topper who had secured the highest marks in the qualifying exams.
Now, as most of us know that program has a line that is:
printf("Hello World!"); or a variant of this.
This guy gets stuck while writing this line, so I ask him if I can help him.
He turns to me and said, " Man, I'm trying to get this comma to go up but it's not working"
Extremely confused I look at his terminal, only to realize that he was pressing shift+, and trying to get the " sign.
That guy went on to finish with a 4.0 gpa and is currently doing his masters.
Although hilarious, this serves as a very good lesson to all the beginners out here.
If you learn from your mistakes and improve you can definitely succeed in your life!
Just remember to actually look at the full keyboard though!

Hey,
I studied law first and got a retraining about Java from my company for 6 months (just very basic concepts about servers, databse,.. besides java). I really enjoy programming now and that is what I want to do. Do you guys think I need to study computer science to become a good programmer or to change my employer (payment here is really moderate ~ 30k € max ,after taxes, but safe work and good payment after retirement) ? Is there any international certification that should be enough ? Just dont know if it could be a waste of time, becouse I am at a spot to just get practical experience.
Any opinions of you pros ?

Big thanks in advance :)

I'm quite confused about job market here in germany. Beside studies I'm working in a data center and have already some practical knowledge about programming stuff and managing applications. Although many companies I apply for say I need more experience. How the hell should I collect it if I don't get the chance to do so. Do you have seen this in other countries as well?

Is it just me or are books on algorithms split between being too simplistic and being too detailed to be practical. I read Donald Knuth's book "The Art of Computer Programming Vol.1" read about 10% of it , which is like 3 chapters. I really enjoyed those chapters, Knuth's is such a genius but then the rest of the book was so complicated that the introduction and definition of terms was longer than some whole chapters in the same book. I decided to look for another, found a really good one, but it was analyzing algorithms in Java, sigh, I hardly code in Java so it was exactly easy for me to follow when he keeps mentioning the "comparable" attribute on sorting algorithms. I then got another really followed it till the keep on referencing indicator variables, I had read 3 books now and had not had of these indicator variables. Am sure they are not that common in the Computer Science literature so I was left wondering why I had to learn to analyze code with indicator variables though it was not a standardized in the "Computer Culture" would I be the only one who does this?.. I hence gave up on learning algorithms till I got that book that was just right for me

Hello coders!
I'm a student expected to graduate in about two months.
I (Allhamdolillah) already have an offer for a job in a company with good repo; they usually work in web (python technologies)
As of now, I'm doing an internship at a totally new company (separated from a famous company too but not very famous itself) as an ERP technical consultant (internee). They also have put forward a job offer.
I am hell confused to decide one.
I joined it coz I was curious about ERP. But their offer is a lot less then the other one.
I have decided two pathways.
1) Python web > Cloud > Data Sciences
2) ERP (either NAV or AX)
Any suggestions from the experienced? What should I prefer? A good company? A good package? Take risk?

Things that might help you guys to help me:

I like python a lot, it was my best selling gig on fiverr. But (apparently with no practical knowledge) I'm not much excited about web as of now.
ERP is a gooood field I know that.
It's fun sometimes irritating though.
Though sometimes I feel like I will get stuck in that field...
I have a strong technical background and have won many programming competitions(university level/national level/even stood runnner up, 2 times in ICPC regionals).

Learned almost entirely from online tutorials, and this was starting 12+ years ago.

What little official education I had was barely any practical programming.

I keep getting emails from my programming teacher to "do more challenge programs!" Outside of the homework where I already have to do this shit

I think I'm gonna take this weekend to do the whole workbook they provided and see what they say then. Probably that I'm not learning properly.

I don't dislike this form of practical learning. I'm sure it's very representative of work programming, because the biggest challenge of these programs is mainly the bugs VB Net provides..

My vague naive extreme understanding of interview questions are on a spectrum from situation a to situation b.

But what should the industry be doing? Is the industry just going wrong blindly copying big N companies hiring process without the same rationale? (e.g. they need computer scientists able to deal with problems specific to them at their size and that often means creating new tech, unreal problem solving abilities and cuh-rayzee knowledge)

a) stupid fucking theoretical shit that some people argue you won't ever need to be doing in practice for most companies, while giving you no ability to google, leetcode hard problems kind of stuff

b) practical work similar to what you'd be doing on the job, small bugs, tasks, pair programming on site with your potential future coworkers

Lots of people hate option a because it's puzzle/problem solving that isn't always closely related to what's on the job. Whiteboarding is arguably very much a separate skill. (Arguably unless it's like a big N company where you want computer scientists to deal with specific problems that aren't seen elsewhere, and you're making new tech to deal with your specific problems.)

We could go to the extreme of Option b, but it tends to trigger people into shitfits of "NO, HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME DO REAL WORK, BUT NOT PAY ME FOR IT AT THE INTERVIEW STAGE"

That's before we get into how to execute option b whether or not it's being given as a take home assignment (which is a huge pain in the ass and time sink, among other issues) vs a few hours at the potential workplace working with some of the future potential coworkers and soaking in the work environment (you have to figure out how to take the time off then)

Is it really just poor execution overall for the wrong use cases for the majority of the industry? What should the industry be doing in which cases.

Then this is all before HR screening with shit like where they might ask for more years of swift experience than its existed.

Oh my gosh, no one really knows here what is programming. Even teachers, which claim to be professionals in the subject doesn't know shit except for the basic theory. Nothing in practice.

It was evidenced by the largest job skill competition of Finland (Taitaja) that's for my-aged students (18). And yeah it's not higher education studies, just second degree, but that's where you should get the necessary practical skills for your work life.

The category I participated was website development, which is the only software development category.

It was a public event that is focused on showcasing different jobs. Well, what do programmers do, a viewer may ask. Even the responsible teachers and juries couldn't really answer properly. They just showed the specs we were following to create the crappiest of websites the short period of development time.

So we consume coffee and produce HTML, is that accurate representation of the whole industry?

All the other winners of different categories get a lot of job offers from companies when they win. I won gold last year (bronze this year) and I didn't get a single offer. Who would be interested in human HTML generator who can only make static websites anyway?

Programming is about problem-solving, not about graphic design and writing content.

And just to give you an idea the scale of the competition: last year I made a total of ~2000€ for the victory. And it is super easy if you just know what you are doing. That being graphic design and the making of a static page with a pinch of functionality.

I know this is a recurring question. What language to learn in 2018?
Kotlin, scala, elixir, rust, go, ...?
I need something practical and preferably a language that at least partially supports functional programming patterns. Oh and also I don't want to learn Haskell. Thanks.

Bsc Computer science (I've seen the maths in that course,it's a bit crazy but the programming modules is what I love)
or
BCom information systems (less complex maths,not much programming and a lot of finance and business based modules)but I can take a post graduate straight up programming and software dev course after that
Or
BTEch IT applications development(very practical experience on programming languages) plus in my second year I get industry experience.
Confused
Which one??

I just got accepted for computer science .wow.this is going to be a good year. hopefully they let me do all my practical programming assignments in java.and hopefully a cs degree in South Africa holds up in other countries.