Ad Exec: Learn To Code Or You're Dead To Me

theodp writes "In a widely-read WSJ Op-Ed, English major Kirk McDonald, president of online ad optimization service PubMatic, informed college grads that he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two programming languages. 'Teach yourself just enough of the grammar and the logic of computer languages to be able to see the big picture,' McDonald advises. 'Get acquainted with APIs. Dabble in a bit of Python. For most employers, that would be more than enough.' Over at Typical Programmer, Greg Jorgensen is not impressed. 'I have some complaints about this "everyone must code" movement,' Jorgensen writes, 'and Mr. McDonald's article gives me a starting point because he touched on so many of them.'"

Comments

Online ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider yourself obsolete, Kirk McDonald.

Re:Online ads?

[ArcadeMan]

You say that like it was easy to remove online ads.

Oh, wait.

O'rly?

[ArcadeMan]

Guy who owns a technical company tells people they're no good to him if they can't be technical.

News at 11.

Re:O'rly?

[ColdWetDog]

Who in the hell wants to listen to an "English major" who runs an online ad service? This guy should be drawn and quartered, not quoted.

Re:O'rly?

[jones_supa]

Like Bill Hicks said it, if anyone is in advertising or marketing, just kill yourself.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no. How about the people in advertising or marketing kill themselves?

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Job creep. This is the kind of who wants people to be able to do much more than their normal job descriptions.

You want to be a graphic artist and create artwork for our ads? That's great! If you can't mark them up in HTML & Javascript, and code the PHP/PERL/Python backend, then GTFO!

You get what you pay for, asshat. If you hire "amateur" or non-programmers to do your programming then enjoy the fruits of your laborers.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want only graphics artists who can program, prepare to have some really shitty artwork. Any artist worth shit is not going to be a programmer because they'll have spent that time honing their artistic skills instead of wasting it on learning how to code.

Re:O'rly?

[ShanghaiBill]

If you want only graphics artists who can program, prepare to have some really shitty artwork.

If you only hire graphic artists that don't have a clue about programming then they will waste a lot of time manually performing tasks that could be easily automated. I once had a GA spend two weeks resizing and changing the background color of several hundred images. I could have written a script to do that in a few minutes, and it could have run in a few seconds. Even if he couldn't write the code himself, if he had a few clues about programming, he would have at least have had the sense to ask for help rather than wasting two weeks.

That was just once incident, but I have seen many like it. In the modern world, nearly everyone should have a basic mental model of how computers work and what they are capable of. They don't need to be coders, but they should have a basic understanding of what coders do.

Re:O'rly?

[TheRaven64]

There's a difference between hiring artists who are good programmers and hiring artists who understand the basics of programming. It amazes me how much time commercial artists waste doing grunt work that can be trivially automated. If you hire only the ones that know a tiny bit of programming then they'll spend a tiny bit of time writing some crappy code instead of a lot of time doing everything by hand.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Any halfway decent image editing software will have batch functions. If your artist didn't know how to do something like that in Photoshop, then they weren't a very good artist. It requires 0 programming knowledge, but it does require knowledge of industry standard art tools.

Re:O'rly?

[TheRaven64]

Most of the artists I know are 3D artists, so no, I don't know much about the 2D packages. All of the 3D ones have scripting interfaces though, and I'm pretty sure Photoshop does (at least on the Mac, it exposes a lot to AppleScript, no idea about Windows).

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't needed to script anything in Photoshop for years. With current versions it's as simple as selecting some options and giving it images or recording actions and having it carry those actions out on multiple files.

I work with both 2D and 3D graphics software and what you're talking about is like the crap I had to put up with back in the 90s. It's not the same now.

Re:O'rly?

[ShanghaiBill]

Bullshit. Any halfway decent image editing software will have batch functions.

Those "batch functions" do not have anywhere near the power and flexibility of even a simple script. For instance, what if the desired size of the image depends on the current background color? What if you have a tree of HTML files that have "height" and "width" tags for a thousand images, and you want to resize each of the images to match the tags, and if necessary, create new images on the fly when there is more than one reference to a single image, but with different heights/widths? Can your "batch function" handle that? If it can, then it must handle loops and branching, which means that writing the batch function IS programming.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you think you can just write a custom program in 10 minutes that will do that for Photoshop files with dozens of layers and effects, you're the deluded one.

Re:O'rly?

[I'm New Around Here]

Yeah. Sorry Mr Jones, but I'm going to go with the AC's version.

Re:O'rly?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Um, no. How about the people in advertising or marketing kill themselves?"

Hahaha! I don't often recommend a mod up for an AC, but this is one of those times.

Re:O'rly?

[spyke252]

Did you know that this is what the GA was working on? It seems this problem could have been solved just as easily with more communication than more programming ability.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

imagemagick

Re:O'rly?

[buybuydandavis]

"Go away, or I will replace you with a tiny shell script."

Much of the "nonprogrammer" work in business is a massive waste of time, transferring information from document A to document B, which *if you think like a programmer*, you'll be looking for a tool to replace. If you don't program, grinding it out by hand seems the natural thing to do.

Re:O'rly?

[Zerth]

You know that Photoshop has an API for javascript, VB, and Applescript?

I used to do exactly that sort of thing for a product photographer. And it didn't usually take 10 minutes, unless you include the time to execute.

I currently do the same for Indesign documents with linked Photoshop artwork. The Indesign part is worse, actually. Makes dealing with effects and layers seem simple.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, friend, do the good folks a favor here. You and I both know what you're talking about, but remember there was a time when you hadn't heard of Bill Hicks?

What your post needs is a link:

http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/revelations.html#By%20the%20way,%20if%20anyone%20here%20is%20in%20advertising...

Re:O'rly?

[JackAxe]

You should look up David Perry -- the creator of Earth Worm Jim -- for starts. He's just one of many very talented artist that know how to program. Interactive/game artists in general, at least the ones I know personally -- including myself, are excellent artists but also decent to adept programmers. Creative types in general are multi-faceted in our skills.

What you stated is true in some cases, but the reality isn't so B&W.

Re:O'rly?

[Pseudonym]

If you want only graphics artists who can program, prepare to have some really shitty artwork. Any artist worth shit is not going to be a programmer because they'll have spent that time honing their artistic skills instead of wasting it on learning how to code.

There is a middle ground, you know.

Nobody would expect an expert chemist to be an expert statistician. They are different jobs requiring different skill sets. But would you hire a chemist who had no understanding of statistics whatsoever?

We are already at the point where pretty much every professional job requires at least some number literacy, and some knowledge of project management, and any number of other things to a not-especially-onerous level of competence. Any artist "worth shit" knows how to create art, but they also know how to manage their time, and how to manage colleagues and clients (and possibly underlings), and how to manage a budget (even if it's only a modest budget). An artist without these ancillary skills, or a lack of willingness to acquire them, is useless.

We are getting to the point where for some professions, code literacy is another one of these required ancillary skills.

Re:O'rly?

[hackula]

As a developer, I hope business analysts start churning out loads and loads of scripts. In ten years, my business will be through the roof! Automating one small task is easy. Creating a scalable and maintainable system... not so much.

Re:O'rly?

[buybuydandavis]

Analysts need to create scripts, use dbases, etc., not to create a long standing system, but to complete the day to day tasks of compiling and reorganizing information for whatever analysis they happen to be performing today. One of, ad hoc methods that get something done more efficiently than cutting and pasting between documents.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

You get what you pay for, asshat. If you hire "amateur" or non-programmers to do your programming then enjoy the fruits of your laborers.

Or skill appreciation. Who says they will be doing the stuff that would normally be sent to a professional programmer?

Someone who is familiar with the basic structure of a computer program and who knows what is and is not possible, is more likely to ask for something possible to code efficiently, than someone who wants the magic box to do what they want, not what they say.

Someone who understands how a program is put together, is more likely to decisively set out what they want, in a clear unambiguous way, and stick to that specification, not try to change it the week before the due date, or call you every week asking if you could add juust this one more thing.

Don't you get tired of trying to pre-empt the next stupid thing some user will do?
Do your date input fields really need that much validation, so that when they type anything into the filed, it comes back with a best guess at what they meant?
Do numeric fields really need a help screen for when someone types "twenty two" instead of 22?

I know.. It's scary.. The idea of people knowing more than the bare absolute minimum for their jobs.. But the thing is.. the world is changing. And being able to do only one thing well is not really enough any more.

Of course.. it also means they will not be fobbed off with poor workmanship.

Scary huh....

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, but again, you need to remember that a "GA" is not someone to traditionally does THAT and to expect them to do that even after 10+ years of experience drastically indicates that they're NOT a GA but instead "SOMETHING ELSE."

Might as well just say, "I'm going to hire someone who can do everything. Literally. Otherwise, you're dead to me."

And this is the issue with programmers: arrogance.

Re:O'rly?

[davester666]

That's just it, killing themselves is a technical process.

I believe the QA department would be more than willing to do it, if you tricked them into thinking they were programmers.

And now we come full circle.

If marketing really DID learn just a smidgen of programming, we wouldn't have to trick the QA department into killing them. Whatever they wrote would be terrible, and we'd have a helluva time trying to stop QA from killing them.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

They would if they were self aware.

Re:O'rly?

[dbIII]

You as well? I had two like that who ended up burnt out and angry over repetitive work that they would have only had to do once if they had even read the manual of the software they were supposed to be "expert" at, or if they had asked for help instead of putting in enough pointless extra time that they quit.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't even need a program.

Just record a macro and play it back over a folder of images you want it to work on. Even Paint Shop Pro has been able to do that for the past decade.

Re:O'rly?

[dbIII]

Depends. It's been a few years but AutoCAD seemed to expose everything to it's lisp scripting, gimp seems to let python scripts automate everything, same with blender. I agree that scripting in such a powerful environment really is programming even if the scripts are very simple.
I've managed to get a few people to use ImageMagik from the command line to resize huge TIFF files from plot scans to a size that's viewable on machines with 4GB memory (stupid software that blows mono out to 32 bit or whatever before showing it). At least in that case while they are not quite doing scripts they are cutting and pasting from their previously used commands in text files so it may not be long now before they write their own scripts.

Re:O'rly?

[DaveV1.0]

No, he is telling the NONTECHNICAL people filling NONTECHNICAL jobs in his pseudo-technical company they are useless to him if they can't do something technical that isn't their job. He is saying this to accountants, HR people, administrative assistants. To make this clear to you, imagine the CEO of a medical laboratory company telling college grad he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two medical diagnostic tests. How about if the CEO of an electronics supply company telling college grad he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity designing amplifier circuits? Or, the CEO of a financial company telling college grad he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two methods of analyzing stock performance. Or, the CEO of a musical instrument company telling college grad he considers them unemployable unless they can play two methods different musical instruments. To put it bluntly, McDonald is an idiot.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what this guy is even talking about. He doesn't talk about what type of position. He can't seriously mean any job. An English major who can't make himself clear.

I agree it can be generally useful. I can run circles around people in certain tasks with certain professions where I have no expertise in at all in the sense that when I do anything, I can write my own scripts and macros to do it, or parts of it for me. I can make the computer work for me, they can't. But there is a limited scope for this. The computer can't always replace me entirely.

It is obviously useful in certain aspect of management any other roles around a product or service some how computer dependent that aren't programming roles. Sales for example should have some idea how your product works. It's capabilities and constraints. The last thing you want is a saleman that doesn't know what he is selling and makes empty promises while failing to present your product's strong points.

The fact that the author seems so general however suggests to me that it simply has a boner for people who know code.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last year we needed to change how a piece of software was configured. The original configuration system was not flexible enough for our needs. While integrating the new configuration system, I created a tool to read the old configuration and generate the new configuration format. A nice simple automation task that even a brain dead code monkey could figure out.

I had a "software engineer" that was acting as a project lead waste three weeks manually updating a set of configuration files because he didn't like the white space. There are five facts that make his actions particularly idiotic. First, when he asked how I knew the files are completely accurate, I mentioned that I had generated the new configuration files from the old system using a script. Second, when he expressed disapproval of how hard it was to read I notified him that the generator could easily be updated with any format he wanted. Third, rather than activating the system with generated files and making them look pretty, he required the files be redone by hand before the new configuration system went on line. Fourth, when he finally finished the configuration used in the previous system had changed considerably making his now "beautiful" files significantly out of date and which caused considerable problems when he switched the systems. Fifth, I could have updated my original generator to build his files in less than a day and the my original generator took about ten seconds to run.

Lesson, just because someone is a programmer doesn't mean they are any more competent at automating their job than the GA you complained out.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe people who want to work for another online ad service - Google, maybe you've heard of it? - would want to listen to him.

Just sayin'.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who in the hell wants to listen to an "English major" who runs an online ad service?

Don't judge a person by what they thought was a good idea at 18.

He also has a point. Working in a technical field and being unable to draft pseudocode is just as crippling as being unable to write. Your ideas are worthless if you lack the tools to express them.

Re: O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in marketing and ive saved hundreds of hours by making a script that reads info off a spreadsheet and puts it into position in graphic design and a varation on that does it in after effects projects. Learning to do simple coding is very usefull. No batch function, macro to date v(that I am aware ofb) cpuld pull that off with such ease.

Re:O'rly?

[tehcyder]

Like Bill Hicks said it, if anyone is in advertising or marketing, just kill yourself.

That would wipe out companies like Google completely then.

Even the geekiest geek spending his free day a week researching pure computer science topics is only there because Google earn enough money from advertising to finance his research.

Re:O'rly?

[minstrelmike]

Shades of E.O.Wilson saying not every college grad needs to understand high-level math; that in fact you're better off partnering with an expert mathematician than trying to become an expert yourself. I guess it depends on whether you want a single, all-in-one employee or a team of employees.

Re:O'rly?

[tehcyder]

Who in the hell wants to listen to an "English major" who runs an online ad service? This guy should be drawn and quartered, not quoted.

But does he run a company that makes money? Because that's all that counts.

It doesn't matter whether he's got a BA in Drawing Fairies or a couple of PhDs in theoretical quantum physics and mechanical engineering.

He is talking about employing non-computer science graduates to work in a non-technical role. If you're selling online advertising (or whatever the graduates are employed to do) it is entirely self evident that some background knowledge of how the web works is going to be your advantage, even if it's just enough to let you bluff your way through presentations to clients.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much of the "nonprogrammer" work in business is a massive waste of time, transferring information from document A to document B, which *if you think like a programmer*, you'll be looking for a tool to replace.

You don't really understand how businesses work, do you?

Any half competent finance director will have automated everything that it is cost effective to automate already. Companies do not exist as job creation schemes. Your assumption that most business tasks can be trivially replaced with a shell script is laughably arrogant, presumably because you are an undergraduate comp sci whizz who has never had a serious job.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fairly typical for musical instrument companies to only employ people that play musical instruments.

Re:O'rly?

[Feyshtey]

Knowing how to do it is not a prerequisite to being a qualified and effective graphic artist.

Re: O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't always trust imagemagick.

Re:O'rly?

[Feyshtey]

What you're saying doesnt even make sense. You're describing real-time image manipulation. That's not graphic design. That's coding. It might fall into the scope of an advanced website developer, but its not something that any rational person would expect an artist to produce. It has almost nothing to do with graphic design, except that maybe you're pulling from a base pool of images provided by a GA.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't find your examples particularly unreasonable. It really isn't so evil to ask that all your employees of your specialized company have at least a basic familiarity with your company's specialization. If this upsets you, there are plenty of other companies to apply to.

Re:O'rly?

[Hognoxious]

I think there's a difference between having some general knowledge about the business you're in and dabbling in the specifics of it.

Would you expect an account at a hospital to know a bit of surgery?

Re:O'rly?

[lsatenstein]

Who in the hell wants to listen to an "English major" who runs an online ad service? This guy should be drawn and quartered, not quoted.

===
When you learn two programming languages, you learn several skills besides the software grammar.
a)You learn to be structured in your thinking
b)You learn to write precisely, and to eliminate redundancy.
c)You learn a skill, that could help you to understand better, how "Scientists" think, as well as understanding how "Artistic" people think. You learn that both are bright and intelligent.

Re:O'rly?

[Hognoxious]

If you hire only the ones that know a tiny bit of programming then they'll spend a tiny bit of time writing some crappy code instead

More likely they'll waste a lot of time writing crappy code that doesn't work anyway.

The assumption that the programming needs to be done by the end user is wrong; in most cases they'd be better learning how to talk to a proper programmer.

Re: O'rly?

[JakeBurn]

You just made my day. Thank you. There really should be a law against anything but simple, factual advertising. Execution for first time offenders.

Re:O'rly?

[Hognoxious]

Someone who is familiar with the basic structure of a computer program and who knows what is and is not possible, is more likely to ask for something possible to code efficiently, than someone who wants the magic box to do what they want, not what they say.

Someone who has done a one credit module of PHP is unlikely to understand what coding efficiently even means.

Also, people who have a dabbler's level of knowledge are prone to delivering a half-assed attempt at a solution rather than a proper description of the problem.

Re:O'rly?

[Hognoxious]

It's fairly typical for musical instrument companies to only employ people that play musical instruments.

[citation needed]

If I had a leaky toilet I'd want someone who knew about plumbing. Can he play the crumhorn? I don't give a fuck.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any half competent finance director will have automated everything that it is cost effective to automate already.

But that doesn't cover companies that don't have a half competent finance director.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Creative types in general are multi-faceted in our skills.

Dude, you're a barista.

Re:O'rly?

[ultranova]

Analysts need to create scripts, use dbases, etc., not to create a long standing system, but to complete the day to day tasks of compiling and reorganizing information for whatever analysis they happen to be performing today.

So they'd better hope said information is in a carefully designed database which makes arbitrary operations easy, supported by a rich set of flexible and reliable tools, otherwise they'll be in a world of pain every single day.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may know that. And maybe is really easy. That doesn't mean that a Graphic Designer needs to know how to do that and do it. Would it be great if that was the case? Yes, but very likely it's not.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

really?

Photoshop is much more powerful in the hands of someone who can automate it.

Re:O'rly?

[Pseudonym]

With respect to E.O. Wilson, he is a relic of a bygone era. Back in his day, biology was stamp collecting. Today, it's a predictive science. I've spent too many hours of my life butting heads with biologists who don't understand even first year undergraduate level statistics but still want to design experiments which give meaningful quantitive results.

(Incidentally, the future is bright, because thankfully, the younger generation gets it.)

The ideal employee is someone who can do one thing extremely well, and known enough in a lot of other areas to know that an expert should be consulted should a problem arise in that area.

Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

These are more fundamental

Re:Basic html and css

[smittyoneeach]

<head></head>
<body>
I am an HTML coder.
There are many like me.
I can has job?
</body>
</html>

Re:Basic html and css

[ArcadeMan]

Your head has no title, no text encoding and your body has no structure whatsoever.

And that's just for starters.

Re:Basic html and css

[game kid]

Gah!!! It's all wrong! Here, lemme help you:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns:fb="http://ogp.me/ns/fb#">
<head><script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.0/jquery.min.js"></script></head>
<body>
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>
I am an HTML coder.
There are many like me.
I can has job?
<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://example.com/" data-send="true" data-width="450" data-show-faces="true"></div>
</body>
</html>

There, now you're ready for today's web.

Re:Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

Your head has no title, no text encoding and your body has no structure whatsoever.

And that's just for starters.

That would make him a 2 year veteran of the web wars. It's time for his 6th raise.

Re:Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

1. HTML is NOT a programming language. (Interestingly, HTML + CSS can be Turing-complete. But it's not fun to use it that way.)
2. You forgot the DOCTYPE and/or XML header. (Yes, XHTML [1.1 || 5] or GTFO n00b.)
3. The only tag absolutely necessary in HTML is the <title> tag! Head? Body? All optional. Seriously! And you forgot that only non-optional one!!

Here, fixed that for ya:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="de"><head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8"/>
    <title>YOU FAIL</title>
</head><body>
    <h1>YOU FAIL</h1>
    <p>Go die in <a href="real-life://backalley?dirtyness=9001&syringes=101">a corner</a></p>
</body></html>

Re:Basic html and css

[smittyoneeach]

Proof link.

Re:Basic html and css

[ArcadeMan]

"You fail" is not in German.

Re:Basic html and css

[tibman]

missing br tags : /

Re:Basic html and css

[I'm New Around Here]

Hey, I took a semester of Pascal back in college. I can pick out your mistake.

You forgot the "include stdio" command.

Also, I just started my new job working for Mr. McDonald's PubMatic as Vice President of Planning.

Re:Basic html and css

[Dracos]

Wrong. Ad code is required to use the evil document.write() wherever possible.

Re:Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean "missing h1 and paragraph" tags, right? :p

Re:Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

you forgot the mvc part. sorry.

Re:Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

Your parenthesis are in the wrong place for your lambda...nice joke though

Re:Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't. Ever.

Re:Basic html and css

[smittyoneeach]

No, that looks right for jQuery. Modern JavaScript feels like falling into rotating machinery.

Re:Basic html and css

[smittyoneeach]

Du hasst mich

Re:Basic html and css

[WoLpH]

I think you forgot about the twitter button

Re:Basic html and css

[luke923]

You must work for Microsoft...

Re:Basic html and css

[luke923]

I agree with the AC -- it's a self-executing function, and the parenthesis is supposed to close out before you pass your params into it.

Re:Basic html and css

[luke923]

BTW, you forgot to mention that there should be copious amounts of eval() littered throughout his code -- sometimes requiring an eval() to invoke another eval(). Ad code has to be the most sloppily written code ever.

Re:Basic html and css

[hackula]

$('body').append('PWEEEEZ!')

Re:Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the DOCTYPE and/or XML header. (Yes, XHTML [1.1 || 5] or GTFO n00b.)

No, fuck XHTML. XML is garbage, and adds nothing to HTML. (Which itself is garbage, as there's nothing useful it can do that you can't do better in TeX.)

And meta tags are bullshit. If you can't set the headers in HTTP, you should kill yourself.

Re:Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

What you state goes for programming also, not only HTML.

Used to be:
void main() { printf("HelloWorld\n"; };

But now it is:
public class Hello {
      public static main(String[] args) {
              System.out.println("HelloWorld");
      }
}

And still Im kind, I could have done that much much worse.

Re:Basic html and css

[worf_mo]

your body has no structure whatsoever.

That's why we're here on /., isn't it?

Re:Basic html and css

[cerberusss]

Fick dich! :-P

Re: Basic html and css

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless they use CodeIgniter, then the models are optional. ;)

Re:Basic html and css

[tibman]

lol, yes. Anything to format the original three lines from becoming one long one.

Re:Basic html and css

[Dixie_Flatline]

Uh, where are the blink tags?

Also, I'm going to have to ask you to make the page say 'Under Construction'.

Thaaaaanks.

Re:Basic html and css

[smittyoneeach]

That'd be greaaaaat.

Dupe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't this PR stunt get posted a couple of months ago?

Moronic

[MrHanky]

There are thousands of occupations with no need for programming skills. Ah, how about nursing, for instance. This is just an ad salesman trying to give off the impression of being relevant in this day and age. He's an ad salesman. An idiot.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

There are thousands of occupations with no need for programming skills. Ah, how about nursing, for instance. This is just an ad salesman trying to give off the impression of being relevant in this day and age. He's an ad salesman. An idiot.

I agree!

I'm a technical recruiter and I can tell you that we need people who can program in askee! Really! Why the other day, I demanded an askee file from a candidate and he sent me a file with a ".txt" extension!

Really?

Are people that stupid?

I asked again, and he sent me a file with an extension of ".asc"!

Come on!

We just can't find qualified technology people!

Finally, this brilliant kid from Deli sent me a ".askee" file.

Finally!

We hired him to program SeeKwell in C+#.

Re:Moronic

[BitZtream]

I can't think of a single job on the planet where I can't come up with a place where coding wouldn't be useful.

You lack imagination and probably aren't going to be worth employing anyway, I'm guessing your comment is a denfensive response to your fear of becoming obsolete.

I'm confident that anyone born after today that can't code is going to be severely unemployable. He'll, even freaking construction works and garbage men could use coding skills to help them with vArious bits of their jobs. It's not all hammering nails and picking up garbage you know ...

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm confident that anyone born after today that can't code is going to be severely unemployable

I really hope this is sarcasm at work. Really.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of a single job on the planet where I can't come up with a place where coding wouldn't be useful.

I can't think of a single job on the planet where being able to keep track of the "n't"s in your sentences wouldn't be useful. Also, just because there are occasions when being able to code would be useful doesn't mean every single person needs to be able to do it.

You lack imagination and probably aren't going to be worth employing anyway

[citation needed]

I'm guessing your comment is a denfensive response to your fear of becoming obsolete.

You do realise that people can comment on matters that aren't directly relevant to them, right?

Re:Moronic

[MrHanky]

Yeah, if I had said coding is never useful in many or most occupations, you'd have a point. I didn't, so you don't. With your reasoning skills, you're certainly an utterly shit coder, imagination or not.

Re:Moronic

[viperidaenz]

Please explain how a garbage man needs to know how to code.

Re:Moronic

[Ironhandx]

Construction Labourers are about the only ones who wouldn't need it at all.

I wouldn't say unemployable without conding skills, but I can see any sort of upwards momentum being severely limited by a lack of coding skills.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

He can develop a genetic program to solve the travelling salesman problem of his pickup route and optimize the amount of time it takes him to complete his run.

Re:Moronic

[ArcadeMan]

I laughed at the "C+#" part.

Re:Moronic

[ArcadeMan]

The garbage man does the route he's told. He's not in charge of the route, the fuel expenses, etc. That's his boss' job.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets say that you are a nurse. Part of your job is to move (one by one) all patients from the hospital database into dead or cured folders, depending on which flag they have on the database.
a) You don't know anything about programming, so you spend an hour every day doing this task.
b) You know a little about programming and you ask from yourself: I wonder could the computer do this task for me.

I'm a programmer and I see the world in a very different way than everyone else. When ever I see people at work, doing anything. I ask myself, could we automate that job or part of it. I think that automating repeating tasks is a very good idea, because it saves money and reduces errors (when properly implemented). We are currently teaching kids at school all sort of things that they often don't need later in life ever again. Why not spend a few hours for programming also?

There are two ways to solve this:
a) Hire a programmer to monitor people when they do their work and ask the programmer if there is something to be improved.
b) Teach non-programmers to view the world like that.

While the a) would perhaps provide better quality in short term, b) has the advantage of being adaptable and it can also help people at home.

Note also that there are many ways of doing programming. You can do it by learning a language, or you can do it by just drag&drop: http://scratch.mit.edu/

Re:Moronic

[tepples]

I can see any sort of upwards momentum being severely limited by a lack of coding skills.

In a tablet-and-smartphone household, how is a high school student supposed to gain access to a user-programmable computer in order to learn to program in order to get a job?

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

He can develop a genetic program to solve the travelling salesman problem of his pickup route and optimize the amount of time it takes him to complete his run.

Since garbage men have been doing just fine for years without doing that, it's not a need. And even if it's useful, that doesn't mean every garbage man has to do it individually.

Re:Moronic

[MrHanky]

Due to the magic of capitalism, most people don't work for themselves (hence the term 'employment' at the root of this discussion), and therefore have a limited set of tasks in their jobs. For instance, a programmer doesn't need cooking skills, despite cooking being of enormous daily importance compared to churning out code. Likewise, most cafeteria personnel does not need to be able to code, as any coding job is done by someone else, preferably someone more skilled at the task. Everyone doing everything is inefficient, as is everyone doing one thing, whether that thing is cooking or coding or laundry or being a doctor or whatever.

Everyone coding in every job is simply not economically sensible. The idea is pure idiocy.

Re:Moronic

[ceoyoyo]

Research agrees with you. Some studies have shown that the majority of jobs could be done more efficiently if people knew a bit of basic scripting. Not much, just a little, to be used to write bits of personal code to make repetitive tasks easier.

When I was in elementary school most people couldn't type well. Now it's pretty much taken for granted that everyone can type. Basic coding skills will be like that in ten years.

Re:Moronic

[mjwalshe]

But I recently in the UK I saw a local agency to me that had for a job for an experienced groundworker aka a navvy that was next to an advert for a php programer the navvys job paid more than the Php Dev ;-)

Re:Moronic

[mjwalshe]

what your Mum didn't teach you to cook?

Re:Moronic

[MrHanky]

Yeah, and if you programmers were half as smart as you think you are, you'd notice that if all employees were to stop and model every little repeatable task on their computers, you'd have lots of employees stopping and modelling all the time. You'd have dozens of different models and no standard for how things should be done. One employee calls in sick, and there's no one to replace her because everyone does the job slightly differently and the whole place is in total chaos. How about leaving the programming to one person who's really good at it, or a small team, and just have the rest of the workforce report their problems to them.

I swear, if you programmers were a little less infatuated with your skill set, and a bit more attentive to how your products actually work, software wouldn't suck nearly as much.

Re:Moronic

[Darkness404]

Exactly. Not everyone is good at everything and the trend towards job creep leads to people who are mediocre in several areas and proficient in none. Sure, coding is useful in advertising, but it isn't crucial, that's what programmers are for. A good programmer will be much more useful creating useful, secure and bug-free code than someone who is a marketing major who learned Java on weekends.

A company who tries to save money by making people go beyond their specialty will end up being outclassed by a company who hires people for their specialty.

Re:Moronic

[MrHanky]

If I were to cook at work, lunch would take an extra 30 minutes.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

That's crazy talk

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you hire me? I have developed a process by which I can store data in both ASCII and UTF-8 encoding, at the same time, without requiring any additional filespace compared to a simple ASCII-encoded document!

Re:Moronic

[hedwards]

Well, to be fair, if you're a programmer, then you should know how to program and if you're asking programmers to program something for you, then you really ought to have at least some familiarity with the process. Makes it a lot easier to negotiate the features and get work done smoothly.

For pretty much everybody else, don't waste your time and energy unless programming is of genuine interest to you.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

b) You know a little about programming and you ask from yourself: I wonder could the computer do this task for me.

And then you buy yourself a huge lawsuit because the person doing programming as a hobby has no idea about how to handle HIPAA regulations in coding, how to handle concurrency when talking to the database, or much about security and opens a nice security hole.

Now orders are messed up, people have died because they didn't get medication because their data was screwed up, and the hospital is facing huge lawsuits.

Kind of as dumb of an idea as allowing the programmers to give IV's and perscribe medications to the patients.

There is a reason people specialize in careers these days.

Re:Moronic

[Ironhandx]

You're missing the point a bit. You don't need to be a programmer for every job, but having a basic knowledge of coding and maybe being able to churn out a perl script can be extremely useful in almost every job. It's also shit thats really easy to pick up.

The same as Word Processing and Spreadsheet skills are pretty well ubiquitous requirements for any job that can use them, I think some small amount of coding will start seeping in as well.

Re:Moronic

[BitZtream]

<sarcasm/>

Sorry, I figured the garbage man part made it obvious

Re:Moronic

[Ironhandx]

This is happening all over the place, big time. No one wants to do physical labor anymore, they're all growing up fucking soft.

I am actually a trained programmer(and actually a pretty good one, top of class, etc). I currently build houses. More money in it.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of a single job on the planet where I can't come up with a place where coding wouldn't be useful.

Sir, I could care less about the relevance of programming to say, a Reiki practitioner, but I am truly in awe of your triple-negative. We see double-negatives all the time, but so seldom does any poster go above and beyond the call of duty to obfuscate his point. The casual reader might miss one of the negatives, cancel the other two, and assume that your statement was a net positive. Well played.

Re:Moronic

[ArcadeMan]

Sure she did!

1. Take package out of freezer.
2. Open package.
3. Put frozen food in microwave.
4. Nuke for five minutes.
5. Remove boiling hot food from microwave.
6. Eat hot food from microwave.
7. Go to the toilet.
8. Vomit
9. Pick up phone
10. Order pizza
11. Profits!

Re:Moronic

[Cederic]

Simple. Don't buy fucking Apple tablets or smartphones.

Actively fucking over your kids is a personal choice, not a societal issue.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

A fucking Pearl script? Are you fucking dense or something? I've been coding for over 25 years and I've never learned Perl.

People would benefit more from learning assembly. Each part is much easier to understand, so at least they would have a basic understanding how computers work. High level languages exist so that it's easier to code programs but it doesn't help understand how computers work.

Hell, I bet 95% of today's programmers would benefit from learning assembly. Then maybe the fucking software bloat would slow down a bit.

Re:Moronic

[tepples]

Where did I say Apple? Windows RT tablets and Windows Phone 8 smartphones are just as restrictive. And what defense should kids have against parents who actively screw them over?

Re:Moronic

[mjwalshe]

Well thats what was sandwich shops and staff canteens are for at lunch time - obviously I meant can you cook for your self at home.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

And what defense should kids have against parents who actively screw them over?

Parents have been doing that for far longer than tablets have existed.

Re:Moronic

[pepty]

I think the real answer is:

c) teach non-programmers to view the world like that so that they can recognize these situations, submit an intelligently written ticket that actually explains the problem, and have the presence of mind to mention possible exceptions (transferred to a different hospital, etc) when talking about the possible solution.

I don't think medical facilities are really willing to pay nurses to write and debug code or scripts. Even if they didn't already cost more per hour than IT, they would take many more hours to solve the problem.

Re:Moronic

[Forever Wondering]

Yep, adguy is a bit moronic. However, nurses do need technical skills. I have a friend who is a nurse. She is also a manager of a department of 100 nurses. They have to train the older nurses how to use email, spreadsheets, etc. because a lot of the data is automated/online.

My friend had to extract data from a database to make a presentation related to future planning. The data extraction necessary was not one of the database's standard reports, so she was doing it manually [cut-and-paste] (e.g. no scripting possible). It would have been trivial to do a database dump in whatever format (e.g. XML--yecch) and write a perl/whatever script to munch the data. Getting her IT department [prodding/cajoling them] to do it would take longer than the time she had. Because I'm a programmer, she asked me if I could help, but immediately after her voicing the question, she and I both realized I couldn't help her because of patient confidentiality restrictions.

If she had been able to program, it would have saved her considerable time.

Re:Moronic

[readingaccount]

Would you hire me? I have developed a process by which I can store data in both ASCII and UTF-8 encoding, at the same time, without requiring any additional filespace compared to a simple ASCII-encoded document!

Sorry, you're overqualified.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

Not with THAT attitude it isn't!
Only those that go beyond their given role and duties deserve a raise, a tip, bonus, reward or even medal.

Just think if Garbage McGee were to come to his boss with a new computer system that optimized the pick-ups by triple, you bet your ass he'd get rewarded for it.
That new pickup would save them buttloads of money, and probably allow them to expand to more areas. Hell if lucky, maybe even recycle some crap with a new recycler system they can afford.

All this lack of imagination. It saddens me.

Re:Moronic

[Rob the Bold]

<sarcasm/>

Sorry, I figured the garbage man part made it obvious

Well, Ed Zern citing non-existent books thought that, too.

Re:Moronic

[JayAEU]

Just get one of these: http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Everybody can afford them and they're programmable to your heart's content.

Re:Moronic

[Ironhandx]

Perl is quick, dirty, and extremely useful in real world situations. Only a mostly out-of-touch-with-reality neckbeard would say that learning ASSEMBLY would have any benefit whatsoever to most normal jobs. Perl, VB .Net and SQL are probably the 3 handiest items to have at your disposal.

Re:Moronic

[readin]

There are thousands of jobs with no need for algebra skills. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of biology. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of great works of literature. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of art. There are thousands of jobs with no need for an understanding of evolution, history, or geography.

Yet we require these classes for pretty much everyone who goes to college.

Computers are such an integral part of life today that everyone should really have a basic understanding of how they work and what they're capable of. Learning a programming language teaches you that.

Requiring two programming languages for an ad agency is nutty, but requiring one programming language for all college graduates is very reasonable.

Re:Moronic

[readin]

I wish I had mod points.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a recruiter ask me repeatedly in an interview about my skills in MVC, for a programming job.

I kept explaining about the OOP experience I had, and how I programmed in an MVC environment using the programming language, but he insisted on me giving him my experiences in MVC.

Dumbfounded, I explained that MVC is a way of programming. He had that epiphany look, then admitted that he had been interviewing people thinking that MVC was a programming language.

Needless to say, they never could find me a job, even though they were hiring for a well-known, national organization.

Re:Moronic

[kermidge]

I think Mr. McDonald should learn how to think before he requires job applicants to almost-learn enough about programming to supposedly be able to think enough about programming to be somehow useful to him in a programming context.

Or maybe I should say that I think Mr. McDonald is in this regard an idiot.

Re:Moronic

[Hast]

SeekWell wouldn't be a half bad name for a language used to access databases.

Re:Moronic

[mjwalshe]

There is a difference between a chippy or a sparky and a navvy though.

Re:Moronic

[Ironhandx]

Oh, of course. The thing is, both of those require as much or sometimes more physical labour than the navvy, plus training, and often some level of intelligence. Its not everyone that can DO the job of a carpenter, welder, metalworker etc. So when anyone who shows some modicum of intelligence is being pushed towards white collar jobs both by laziness and society, the dollar commanded by the tradesmen is just going to keep climbing.

The physical labour aspect also keeps most anyone that wants a quick buck from just jumping straight in.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

b) You know a little about programming and you ask from yourself: I wonder could the computer do this task for me.

And then you buy yourself a huge lawsuit because the person doing programming as a hobby has no idea about how to handle HIPAA regulations in coding, how to handle concurrency when talking to the database, or much about security and opens a nice security hole.

Isn't it enough that the actual developers know about those things? Is the law really stupid enough to require the guy who tells the IT guys "hey, this job is very repetitive, isn't that something the computer could do for me" to know about HIPAA regulations?

Re:Moronic

[chrismcb]

>When I was in elementary school most people couldn't type well. Now it's pretty much taken for granted that everyone can type. Basic coding skills will be like that in ten years.

That is not going to happen, unless basic coding improves. "basic scripting" isn't easy. Its not something people can just pick up on the side. You want people to do repetitive tasks? Then built that ability into your software. Make it easier for them to do it. People don't want to be programmers, and many of them CAN'T be programmers. It is our job as programmers to make their jobs easier.

Re:Moronic

[necro81]

Or you could do like most working stiffs and brown-bag it: make a simple lunch at home and bring it to work with you. Most of my lunches consist of leftover dinners, which I cooked, or a simple sandwich, which I made at home in about three minutes. To prepare and cook a nutritious 8-serving meal, from scratch, takes only slightly longer than the same meal made for 4.

My time is important to me, and I'd rather spend it enjoying my meal, making leisurely use of my lunch break, or making productive use of that time, rather than waiting in line in the cafeteria or a food truck. The notion that my time is important to me extends to the kitchen, too: I enjoy the time I spend cooking for myself and my family, it is time that is valuable to me, not a chore that I begrudge. My money is important to me, too, and bringing lunch costs me about 1/4 what it would to buy it each day.

Re:Moronic

[funky_vibes]

Most software actually used to work pretty well up until the time when non-programmers started using computers, and demanding features.

Non-programmers do not understand how computers work AT ALL, so they try to use them in all kinds weird and random ways.
For a while, it was the job of the UI to pigeonhole users into what they should and shouldn't do.
But that was a long time ago.

Nowadays, a programmers job is sort of running after the users and making their shit not break when they try to smash it.
In the rare event the user gets any kind of productivity out of their task. Again, it's the programmers job to actively make sure the user is hindered from doing anything further that might destroy the result.

How is knowledge a burden? Most people in most positions could probably double or triple their productivity just by knowing how to automate it. Programming is just the tool for automating mind tasks and the strongest form of applied mathematics.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

No joke, about five years ago, a recruiter asked me if I had experience programming in "Dee Oh Ess". I wanted nothing to do with that recruiter or the company hiring.

Re:Moronic

[ArcadeMan]

And his boss would fire him since they now need 66% less employees and he's not in the top 33%.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

She couldn't create a "sample/false" database entry that you could use to develop a script that would manipulate the data to give the desired output, then send her the script to execute on the real thing?

Re:Moronic

[Bigby]

What you meant to say:

I don't need to know how to cook, but I need to know where I can buy food and that food is processed into calories which give me energy every day. I need to know that I can't drink bleach and that pizza every day all day is not that good for me. I need to know that stoves are hot and refrigerators keep things cool/cold.

Likewise, most people should know something basic about computing. They already know things are fragile: You can't throw your phone into a pool or spike it into concrete like a football. But they should probably know more. But coding? No.

Re:Moronic

[tehcyder]

But I recently in the UK I saw a local agency to me that had for a job for an experienced groundworker aka a navvy that was next to an advert for a php programer the navvys job paid more than the Php Dev ;-)

Basic labourers earn fuck all. Maybe if you're a skilled brickie or carpenter or something, but someone who can just carry bricks and shovel sand doesn't get paid that much more than minimum wage. A quick search for unskilled labouring job where I live shows hourly rates in the range of GBP 6.50 to 7.50 and the minimum wage is currently GBP 6.30

Personally, I'd rather get a job sitting at a supermarket checkout or serving burgers, at least you don't have to knacker yourself to do your job.

Re:Moronic

[tehcyder]

I'm a programmer and I see the world in a very different way than everyone else.

Smugly, as though from a great height?

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

People with nursing could use a little technical expertise. Especially if they are involved with clinical trials. They should be able to report problems with clinical trial software technically and be able to describe the steps exactly as to how they reached an error. Now you may say, "I wasn't referring to clinical trials". But the truth is, that's where the money is, and there is NO technical discrimination when choosing nurses to participate. I support the "Everyone must code" movement.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a problem with your friend not knowing how to code, it's a problem with an organization expecting someone who manages 100 people to spend their time extracting data from a database.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

"Only those that go beyond their given role and duties deserve a raise, a tip, bonus, reward or even medal."

They are also kicked out of the union and thus lose their garbage man job.

After all, by going above and beyond, he's making other workers look bad and by trying to maximize efficiency he is taking work away from those with families who need it.

All garbage men are union which is why you'll never see a garbage man use initiative or else they would no longer be employed as garbage men. Unions stymie and punish just the sort of initiative you're talking about.

Re:Moronic

[steelfood]

It's SeeCool, buddy.

It's derived from the experience programmers have with their bosses when using it.

Programmer: See?
Manager: Cool.

Re:Moronic

[Rhacman]

I'd wager that greater than 50% of my body mass was once Craft Mac & Cheese. Not sure if you'd count that as cooking though.

Re:Moronic

[MaerD]

Just use Java, it handles garbage collection automatically.

Re:Moronic

[Feyshtey]

You apparently believe that no profession is of value unless it involves a computer. You are among those millions in this country that have dismissed entire segments of the workforce because you need not be concious of their existence. To you food just magically appears in the grocery store, and if it doesnt otherwise involve your daily life in some way then it's entirely irrelevant. Or is it that if the profession cant make you rich while you sit on your ass it's not worth considering. You also seem quite comfortable with the concept that people who provide you goods or service are not worthy of note.
Horse trainer. Horse Showman. Farmer. Painter (art). Potter. Saddle Maker. Welder. Farrier. Mechanic. Bartender.
(Any of these can certainly make a person a comfortable living.)

But just to prove that your "imagination" is based on fantasy, why dont you descirbe how these jobs would even benefit from coding knowledge:
Police Officer. Soldier. Lawmaker. Lawyer. Dentist. Veterinarian.

And dont give me those weird outside cases where there isnt already a freeware ap that will do whatever you describe, or an application designed for its specific purpose.

Re:Moronic

[Feyshtey]

There are people within 50 feet of me that cant change a toner carteridge in a printer. But you're confident that every brick-stupid idiot in cubes across the country can be taught to code? You might as well try gluing feathers to their ass and teaching them to fly.

Re:Moronic

[viperidaenz]

But you never know exactly when its going to happen. The garbage just hangs around in a big heap until it gets push aside by more garbage.

Re:Moronic

[Samizdata]

Lets say that you are a nurse. Part of your job is to move (one by one) all patients from the hospital database into dead or cured folders, depending on which flag they have on the database. a) You don't know anything about programming, so you spend an hour every day doing this task. b) You know a little about programming and you ask from yourself: I wonder could the computer do this task for me.

Depends. Am I a hot nurse?

If so, I go flirt like a big dog with someone in IT to write the script for me.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

With the possible interactions of modern drugs today, Nursing may need to use software to determine possible prescription conflicts. Software is also rampant in all of the devices used by the nurses. Excel may even be used for data logging and if there's a macro involved, you've just used programming.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

AIDE works on Android.
Mr Lee's C/C++ compiler works on iDevices.

I wouldn't say it's easy to use those devices, but it can be done.

Re:Moronic

[Warhawke]

While I don't dispute your basic premise that programming languages should be taught in curricular liberal arts colleges (and indeed I was required to "learn" one at mine), I would argue that there is more to be gleaned from an understanding of literature or history or geography than there is from understanding a programming language. A programming language teaches you the particulars of how to realize software within the context of that software. You might be able to take away some general concepts regarding how computers work, but understanding how a computer executes software is a far cry from understanding how to read and write code.

Traditional liberal arts courses provide a broader understanding of what defines humanity. There is a breadth and interconnectedness in those courses that is not present in programming languages which are essentially practical knowledge. For example, if a student learns KOBOL, 90% of what he learns will be practically useless today because little of the Framework upon which to hang that knowledge still exists. At best the student could keep the generalized concepts, but that is a negligible portion of the material learned. But if a student reads Faulkner, while there may be significantly less practical application, a much greater portion goes to explain the general repository of humanity and its collective knowledge (southern culture, how we process death, Reformation, how the mentally challenged mind works, etc.). A better solution would be computer literacy courses rather than programming courses. I use my knowledge of geography significantly more than I use my knowledge of Java and C++ on a day-to-day basis. That doesn't mean I shouldn't know about computers generally, but why waste my time learning a practical skill set to glean the global knowledge when so much of the practical material will be useless to me?

Re:Moronic

[ceoyoyo]

Nonsense. I have yet to meet anyone who couldn't pick up enough basic coding, on the side, to make their lives easier. And yes, I've gotten lots of people started, from adolescents to masters students to admins a few years from retirement. Witness the creepy joy when someone goes to an Excel workshop and discovers VB script, as shitty a language as that is. Not to mention the popularity of AppleScript and the number of major pieces of software that have built in scripting (Office, Photoshop, practically everything on a Mac).

Oh, and by the way, people used to say similar things about typing.

There's too much centralization in software, it hurts productivity, and it's frustrating. Software developers are crap at predicting everything everybody is going to need to do and uneducated end users are crap at figuring out overly complex pieces of software that try.

Re:Moronic

[tepples]

Mr Lee's C/C++ compiler works on iDevices.

How does that work at all if iOS's strict W^X policy prohibits creating machine code into RAM and jumping into it?

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditch digger?

Re:Moronic

[funky_vibes]

How about, for each mistake they make, a feather is glued to their ass.
The idiots would be happy flying around and leave the rest of us alone.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the nerd here. We're talking about learning about something to understand how computers work, not to do actual jobs.

Normal people will understand registers and opcodes. It's not much different from a calculator and each component is easy to explain because they're so basic.

Your Pearl, VB.NET and SQL will just confuse people.

And seriously VB.NET? You're just a Microsoft Drone, so shut the fuck up.

Re:Moronic

[mjwalshe]

I wil take a shot of the window with the two adverts and post it up if you like

This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Lendrick]

I've been a programmer for 15 years now, and the absolute worst people to work with are the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge. I don't want to work with a bunch of people who are on top of Mt. Stupid, least of all some exec who thinks a tiny bit of coding knowledge will help you make estimates about how long a bit project will take.

Let programmers program. Be serious about it, or don't do it.

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe if you rephrase it something like -

      maybe you should consider picking up a programming language. it will broaden your
      horizons - in the same way that learning a little bit of a french, or the clarinet, or how to
      graft fruit trees would.

if i paint on the weekends, maybe i can better appreciate the work of the masters. that
doesn't mean i'm a good painter.

i agree that it has little or no bearing on how good you are at your real work (unless you're
a machinist, a spammer, a scientist, or some discipline that uses computers intimately)

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

FTS: "Teach yourself just enough of the grammar and the logic of computer languages to be able to see the big picture." Yeahhhh, I'm gonna have to go ahead & disagree with you there, yeahhhhh. I think we can all remember when we first had a taste of a programming languauge or 2, and there is no way one can "see the big picture" after simply dabbling with a language -- it takes a lot of hours of sustained effort & dealing with many failures along the way before gaining an understanding. This asshat is just trying to sound like a tough guy.

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

... the absolute worst people to work with are the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge.

Like English majors?

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a programmer for 15 years now, and the absolute worst people to work with are the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge.

Dunning-Kruger effect.

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge.

. . . those are the ones who always say something like:

"I have done some programming, so it can't be that difficult to . . ."

. . . insert your intractable problem here . . .

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

the absolute worst people to work with are the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge

I'd say the worst people to work with are any that think they know enough and overestimate their knowledge--including programmers themselves. It's the attitude that makes the difference. Once you think you know it all and become unteachable or inflexible, you are now useless and an obstacle for someone else that needs to get the job done. If you're not continously learning new things, whether about old tools, current tools, or new tools, you're done.

It's not just important to know when to consult an expert in a field that is not your primary, but it is also important to not think you know everything even about your own field of expertise--for all parties involved and for all fields involved. Anyone in any field can learn something from someone in any other field--cross pollination of ideas, concepts, and even information native to someone's own field is always possible.

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[RabidReindeer]

maybe if you rephrase it something like -

      maybe you should consider picking up a programming language. it will broaden your

      horizons - in the same way that learning a little bit of a french, or the clarinet, or how to

      graft fruit trees would.

if i paint on the weekends, maybe i can better appreciate the work of the masters. that
doesn't mean i'm a good painter.

i agree that it has little or no bearing on how good you are at your real work (unless you're
a machinist, a spammer, a scientist, or some discipline that uses computers intimately)

Let me rephrase it: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

While I think that a basic understanding can be valuable in knowing generally what can and cannot be expected from people in other professions, I can tell horror stories. Like the business analyst who found out that core memory does an erase-read cycle and demanded that the COBOL programmers immediately re-initialize all their variables everytime they read them. Or the tech company executive who insisted that customers buy caching disk controllers long after caching had become something built into the drive, not the controller.

Have some respect. Software development is no more an "All You Have To Do Is..." profession than neurosurgery is. A Boy Scout can bandage your finger or write basic HTML, but do you want him manhandling your liver? Too many people stand at the edge of the pond and think it's the same thing as the ocean.

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

That image is from an SMBC comic. Come on, credit where it's due!

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Dracos]

...absolute worst people to work with are the [marketing/advertising people] who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge.

FTFY. And those people invariably think they are omni-gods. I used to work at a place where the marketing director's secret office nickname was "King Dumbshit" (KDS for short), and it was painfully apropos.

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Common Joe]

least of all some exec who thinks a tiny bit of coding knowledge will help you make estimates about how long a bit project will take

I read the article (and committed a sin, I know), and I had to laugh when I read this bit in the article. Most managers and most programmers can't estimate how long it will take for a small project much less a project of some size.

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Common Joe]

Don't forget the part where he is encouraging everyone to learn APIs and dabble in Python. Is he friggin' serious? Python wasn't designed for the casual computer user. I also like how he doesn't specify how much to learn or where to focus that learning. Just learn 2 languages. I started learning Java, C#, and Oracle years ago. There's always something new.

This guy is a fucking idiot

[redmid17]

That is all, and I say that as someone who knows more than one programming language.

Re:This guy is a fucking idiot

[mwvdlee]

Pretty much every programmer I've met knows more than one language.
I have used atleast several dozen, "know" about 5 or 6 and have forgotten a couple as well (and am an expert in none).
Learning a programming language is easy. Knowing how to solve a problem is hard.

Re:This guy is a fucking idiot

[PolygamousRanchKid]

and have forgotten a couple as well

. . . I have used some languages that I wish I could forget . . .

Re:This guy is a fucking idiot

[redmid17]

Yeah I'm not trying to say I'm a badass or anything. Just that knowing a programming language is only useful if you're going to use it* *the programming

Re:This guy is a fucking idiot

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

I feel your pain. I used to program in Assembly and, god help me, COBOL.
Assembly went away, but the knowledge of COBOL will take a 9mm to erase.

Hipster brogrammers have become THE MAN

[Anonymous Coward]

And THE MAN, wearing boots, is always looking to step on your neck. These new ubermensch rule the roost from shiny new San Francisco offices with their free lunches, aeron chairs and mandatory copies of Atlas Shrugged standing proudly on their otherwise empty bookshelves.

You, not working for Apple or Google, simply don't matter. Get used to it.

Re:Fucking English Majors

[DoofusOfDeath]

And that's all there is to say about that.

Well, duh. Which of us can't think of an English major we'd like to fuck? But that's not what we're discussing...

Jorgenson is full of shit

[PvtVoid]

From Jorgenson's unbelievably-full-of-himself rebuttal:

The idea that programming is something anyone can learn if they just sit down with a book and type examples is not just offensive to programmers—it’s a dangerously misleading idea

That's funny. Most of the best programmers I know learned (at first) exactly that way.

My first experience with programming was reading a book on BASIC. This was before the widespread availability of personal computers like the Apple II or TRS-80, so I had to work out all the exercises with pencil and paper. This led to a successful career as a programmer, despite the fact that I think I only took one programming course ever (Fortran in college).

I have a friend (still working as a professional software engineer) who first learned by reading a used book on PDP-11 assembly language.

Maybe everybody doesn't need to know how to program. But even if that is true, Jorgenson is still an asshole.

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[K. S. Kyosuke]

if they just sit down with a book and type examples

Actually, he's right. You can't just sit down with a book and type examples - you also have to extract patterns from the examples and form a mental model that allows you to generalize over those examples.

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[tnk1]

His point could have been made better.

I'm not cut out to be a doctor. I'm probably smart enough to do the job, but I don't have the mindset for it, nor really the interest. So, I'd probably make a shitty doctor.

While it is easier to become a professional programmer, becoming someone that can legitimately base a career on it, or write something that a company can rely on is not just a matter of picking up a book. Yes, you could sit down with BASIC and your Commodore 64 and make a little balloon made of sprites fly across your screen, and I could probably sit down with an anatomy book or a first aid book and learn some stuff, even very useful stuff, from that too. However, if I was a hospital accountant, I might decide that I'd do more good for the hospital by actually spending my time being a good accountant, instead of trying to splint bones.

If they want me to learn something completely outside my interests and skillset to do a job that has nothing to do with being able to do my job well, I suppose I would consider such a directive to be idiotic. If anything, sometimes you want people who *don't understand* what you do for a living to do the jobs that are supporting you because they will not gloss over things that you take for granted.

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny. Most of the best programmers I know learned (at first) exactly that way. ...

Maybe everybody doesn't need to know how to program. But even if that is true, Jorgenson is still an asshole.

I learned to program on my own as well (though by reading theory rather than typing out examples), however it'd be a tremendous waste of time for most of my friends to try to do that. There are two main problems with it: that's not how they learn best, and legitimately decent programming involves mental abilities that my friends don't excel in. I know for certain in some cases, because a few friends have tried and failed either on their own or via CS classes. Similarly, it'd be a tremendous waste of time for me to try to master anything requiring memorization of vast amounts of data (I can memorize concepts pretty well) -- e.g., I could never be a medical doctor. Some people can sit down with a big book of diseases and soak it all up, but I'm not capable of it.

That quote of Jorgenson makes him sound like a perfectly reasonable person. Just because something worked for you, doesn't mean that it'll work for everyone.

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

The point wasn't that programmers don't learn just by sitting down with a book and trying out examples, his point was that not EVERYONE can do that. Many people do not have the mindset and problem-solving approach necessary to become programmers. Giving them a little taste of programming will result in them still not being programmers because the relevant skills for skillful programmers are not knowledge of programming languages but a particular style of problem solving and analytic thought.

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[ceoyoyo]

Programmers. After a couple decades being social outcasts, they're new elitists. And the pigs were walking around on two feet.

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[manu0601]

His point could have been made better.

I'm not cut out to be a doctor. I'm probably smart enough to do the job, but I don't have the mindset for it, nor really the interest. So, I'd probably make a shitty doctor.

But you know enough about health to know when you have to see a doctor. And perhaps you know enough to detect a doctor that have not been up to date for a decade; If you do it can save you time and trouble.

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[Hast]

I think you put the emphasis on the wrong part of the quote.

The point isn't that you can't learn programming by reading a book and experimenting.

The point is that this is not something everyone can learn (at least that way).

Those who are interested in computers will learn that way. But most people will not learn anything.

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[nine-times]

If anything, sometimes you want people who *don't understand* what you do for a living to do the jobs that are supporting you because they will not gloss over things that you take for granted.

It's also nice because sometimes, people who don't understand what your job instead understand other things. Sometimes they understand how to do their own jobs, and that sure is handy.

Sometimes the problem is just that everyone likes to believe that they themselves are very important. If you're a sloppy thinker, this might lead you to believe that your skills are the most useful skills, and that the things you know are things that everyone should know. For most of us, we aren't actually that important.

Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

The feeling is mutual (whether he's able to code or not)...

Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Shados]

Everyone should know at least the basics of what is part of our daily lives.

Everyone should know how to read and write, even if they're not professional authors (and, like me, are pretty bad at it in general)

Everyone should know basic math, even if they never use it, at least to be able to calculate tip at the restaurant and be able to read their tax report.

Everyone should know enough biology to be able to make a basic informed decision when discussing a problem with their doctor or dentist.

Everyone should know at least basic economics and finance, so that they can at least understand the graphs on their 401k.

And.....everyone should know at least the very very very elementary basics of programming, as it is now part of our everyday lives. No need to know python and APIs or how to compile a linux kernel. Know just enough to understand what a conditional and a loop statement is, why software can crash, and why a single programmer cannot write an entire ERP suite in 2 weeks by themselves.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[mwvdlee]

The basics of computer programming is mathematics (formal logic and algorithms in particular).
This should be taught at schools already.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[tnk1]

Know just enough to understand what a conditional and a loop statement is, why software can crash, and why a single programmer cannot write an entire ERP suite in 2 weeks by themselves.

What you say may be helpful, but I've never had any hand in building a building before, and I can tell you that I understand very well why it may not be a good idea to rush the job.

As for the opposite, I don't think I'd want a slightly trained person to tell me that I should be able to do it *faster* than I am. Bullshit detection is one thing, but that's why you hire *technical management*, who are presumably people who used to do something at least tangentially related to programming.

I get what this guy is saying, and I agree with him if he is suggesting, and making available the ability, for interested people to learn about coding. However, the idea that you have to do something completely unrelated to your career in order to do you job is garbage.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

The basics of computer programming is mathematics (formal logic and algorithms in particular).
This should be taught at schools already.

Should be.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[ceoyoyo]

No it's not. Formal logic and algorithms are are things that the majority of programmers have probably heard of, but don't really know and don't use very often. That's like saying the basics of general contracting and construction is physics and chemistry.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Cederic]

The basics of programming are logical thinking. That's an approach to problem solving that primarily adds value through introducing objectivity and supplemental purely emotional decision making.

Even artists benefit from multiple modes of thinking.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Math is the basics of computer programming, as computer programs are mathematical algorithms. That is simply a fact. The majority of good programmers have studied formal logic and algorithms; the ones who haven't are usually code monkeys who screw their head around and give a confused stare when you try to talk with them about code design. (There are probably exceptions, but none I've known personally.)

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone should know electronics. It is part of your everyday lives.
Everyone should know about cars, it is a part of your everyday lives.
Everyone should understand weather patterns and know how to predict the weather, it is part of your everyday lives.
Everyone should know economics, it is part of your everyday lives.
Everyone should have an understanding of architecture and buildings, it is part of your everyday lives.
Everyone should know A+, net+ or the equivalent, it is part of your everyday lives..

Same with electrical, plumbing, heating and AC, and so on.

The only ones who feel everyone should know programming is programmers. Here's a hint for programmers and software engineers.. You are not the only ones dealing with idiots that don't understand what they do. For some reason you are the only ones that do not realize that.

I am an infrastructure engineer. I think all programmers should understand how a network works, how DNS works, technology behind backups, how routing is done and how virtualization works. Almost any programmer will say they do understand those things. Ask any network team that supports programmers if they think their programmers know any of that and they will say no or kind of.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Math is the basics of computer programming, as computer programs are mathematical algorithms.

That's one way to represent them.

Math is not "the basics of computer programming", whatever that's supposed to mean to you. It sounds like nonsense. The basis for learning computer programming has always been and will probably always be, memorization of patterns. THEN you learn to apply them, in a specific syntax (for which there may be many ways to express the same operation), as logical models. It seems almost effortless to an experienced developer, but it's learned.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

The basics of computer programming is mathematics (formal logic and algorithms in particular).
This should be taught at schools already.

Formal logic is a basis of certain types of AI, not general programming.

Look at a typical imperative language. You have:

* Numerics, which are usually approximations of real arithmetic.

* Variables and values, which build on notions in algebra like substitution.

* Set and mapping types, which build on set theory and functions.

* String manipulation, regular expressions, input / output, mutable state and iteration, which build on automata theory.

* Types and classes, which build on type theory.

* Recursion, which builds on lambda calculus.

It's only when you start putting that all together to make advanced programs that you get into structured or object oriented programming, and that's where computer science goes beyond traditional math.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[mwvdlee]

What if no pattern exists for the problem you're trying to solve?

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[sydneyfong]

Math is the basics of computer programming, as computer programs are mathematical algorithms.

This is simply wrong, especially the latter part. The former part is mostly a moot question on philosophical definitions, but to claim that (all) computer programs are mathematical algorithms is to ignore the fact that (for example) the web browser you're using to view my comment, is definitely not a mathematical algorithm in any commonly understood sense.

Sure, a bunch of underlying subroutines to parse the html content and constructing the data structures might be somewhat mathematical, but reading data from network, changing pixels on the screen, handling user input events, are definitely not "mathematical algorithms".

To be clear, I do think most computer programs are "algorithms" in the broad sense, but I don't see anything inherently "mathematical" about (for example) implementing the specs of HTML5, or handling a user clicking the submit button.

I guess it's my folly to actually expect more on slashdot, but there's more to CS and software than what they teach you in CS101.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading and writing, yes, being able to communicate enriches your life.
Basic math, yes, being able to figure out a tip, or know if 5 people are coming to dinner and each want two hamburgers that you need twelve hamburgers (your going to eat too right).
Basic biology, yes, its good to know that your teeth don't grow back if you lose them (as an adult), and that if your body temperature is 106 degrees F, you may be dying

Basic programming, no way. Its not a basic skill. The only reason you could even argue it is because it could be considered a basic skill to use a computer, since in many societies, so much information is readily available on a computer. But you shouldn't need to know anything about programming use one.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Keith_Beef]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=know+thy+data

If you really cannot find a pattern in your problem's data, then reframe the problem until you can find a pattern. And write your program in such a way that data falling outside the pattern is handled elegantly.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[mwvdlee]

If nobody ever invents patterns, how come you're able to find paterns for every problem imaginable?
Thank god some of us are creative enough to invent solutions when we need to.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hint - no one "invents" patterns, they are discovered. You may apply a pattern to a problem that no one has (to your knowledge) applied before, that doesn't mean you "invented" it.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

To be clear, I do think most computer programs are "algorithms" in the broad sense, but I don't see anything inherently "mathematical" about (for example) implementing the specs of HTML5, or handling a user clicking the submit button.

You probably think "mathematical" means "adding up lots and lots of numbers".

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[sydneyfong]

Yes I do. Sort of. If everything is inherently mathematical, the very word of "mathematics" will become meaningless.

Just as you don't think about particle physics and thermaldynamics when you're cooking food, I don't think about mathematics when implementing a "onclick" function in a button.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Start praying to your god(s).

Kirk = Dick

[Anonymous Coward]

What an arrogant ass. "I run a cool company...", yeah, I have heard that before, from a ball-busting micro-manager who worked people into the ground, and could never bring himself to use the phrase, "good job". He had taken a couple of classes at a community college on programming, and thought he was an expert. Disaster. No time allotted to plan projects, no time allotted to test, but we were a cool company. Incompetent, but cool. I bet he still wonders why the turnover rate is so high.

Re:Kirk = Dick

[Anonymous Coward]

He's still in business, so he must be doing something right. $deity knows what.

Look at what they're hiring.

[Animats]

This guy is head of PubMatic, which is one of those companies on the fringes of on-line advertising. Here are their job listings. The programming jobs are in Puma, India. The US jobs are for things like "Mobile Account Executive" (i.e. ad sales rep.) Requires "proven track record of meeting or exceeding sales targets." No mention of any tech skills.

The PubMatic site is so full of business buzzwords that it's difficult to tell what they actually do. "From brand awareness initiatives looking to reach broad demographic segments through to lower funnel campaigns focused on reaching those expressing purchase intent, PubMatic has a targeting solution to fit advertisers' needs." What they seem to do is match up low-end advertisers with unsold ad space on web sites.

If this company dropped off the face of the earth (or AdBlock became popular enough to delete all their ads) nothing of value would be lost.

Re:Look at what they're hiring.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. PubMatic is on my wall of shame (cookies to block), accumulated one at a time, usually after some JavaScript figured out how to disable ffox's "block third party cookies" settings:

25hoursaday.com.........block
2o7.net.................block (etc)
33across.com
adblade.com
adcito.com
addthis.com
adfusion.com
adgrx.com
adinterax.com
adjug.com
adlegend.com
admailtiser.com
adnxs.com
adrcntr.com
adscale.de
adshost2.com
adsonar.com
adsvr.og
advertising.com
afy11.net
audienceiq.com
constantcontact.com
crwdcntrl.net
doubleclick.net
extremereach.com
fastclick.net
gigaom.com
googleadservices.com
insightexpressai.com
intentiq.com
interclick.com
myroitracking.com
optimizely.com
pointroll.com
precog.com
pubmatic.com
pulse360.com
quantserve.com
questionmarket.com
scorecardresearch.com
sharethis.com
specificclick.net
statcounter.com
tapad.com
tribalfusion.com
undertone.com
visiblemeasures.com
webtrendslive.com
yieldmanager.com
yieldmanager.net
zapit.com

Re:Look at what they're hiring.

[luke923]

So, what you're saying is that PubMatic used to do business under the name of CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet before Microsoft bought them out.

Re:Look at what they're hiring.

[Samizdata]

Yep. PubMatic is on my wall of shame (cookies to block), accumulated one at a time, usually after some JavaScript figured out how to disable ffox's "block third party cookies" settings:

And it triggered a Web Of Trust warning to boot. Lovely people, apparently.

A programming language versus a framework

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd consider myself an experienced web developer (PHP, CSS, HTML. JS, DOM API). I wanted to learn more languages, but I found it very inaccessible to learn different "languages" since it seems these are merged nowadays in frameworks with deep learning curves. It tried Visual studio 2010, Titanium frameworks and some others. Either giving me dependencies-error during installation or a complexity level that feels disastrous to cope with as a newbie.

I just feel that it seems most programmers/developers and their tools want to protect their creed of "language" with a steep learning curve to protect their profession & expertise, and make it as inaccessible for newbies as possible. VB6 compared to the latter Visual VB is an example of simplicity morphed into "enterprise level" development.

Why don't people start to differentiate in the actual "language" and the bloated "framework".

   

Re:A programming language versus a framework

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on language. Java and C# have probably just the most "framework overhead", because they try to satisfy everyone and hence the feature bloat.

Most other languages are better in this regard, if you don't try to learn from those "learn LANG in N days", and start from the basics. If on the contrary you try to learn a language plus its frameworks, of course the overhead is greater.

In fact, even C# and Java aren't that bad if you ditch the IDE and the crap. The simplest hello world can be written in a couple lines. It may not be the most efficient thing to write C#/Java on a plain text editor, but it would save you hours of struggling with setting up the IDE and the basic frameworks.

Re:A programming language versus a framework

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel the same when going in the other direction. Im a server side programmer and moving into web sphere with all frameworks just wrapps wet towels around my head. Why all these frameworks,why not programming libraries?

Re:A programming language versus a framework

[chrismcb]

It tried Visual studio 2010

Uhm... I don't know what you think you tried, but Visual Studio isn't a framework or a language, it is just an environment. Mostly an editor that you can attache different compilers to. It helps manage your projects and even has hooks to source management. But you can use it for just about anything.

Why don't people start to differentiate in the actual "language" and the bloated "framework".

People never actually stop differentiating them. They are different. A framework is just a set of APIs, while a language is a bit more than that. While a good programmer should be able to easily transition to a new language, a good programmer should be able to transition to a new framework, in a language they already know, even easier.
Is their a steep learning curve creating for job security? Not in the least bit... Its just that, simply programming is hard.

As programmers, yes, as co-workers, no.

[SuperKendall]

the absolute worst people to work with are the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge.

That's very true, but the BEST non-coding co-workers are those with similar levels of knowledge who then have a better understanding of what is possible, why some things may be hard and a tolerance for mysterious delay.

Re:As programmers, yes, as co-workers, no.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Agreed. And it's not just useful for interaction with coders or other IT folks; most of the better knowledge workers know a bit of coding to make it easier to process and manage information for their own job. Some macros, VBA in Excel, life hacking, ITTT, or even setting up a little Access database (yes) can make ones life a lot easier than if one has to ask someone else for help on these tools. Because in a lot of cases (especially MS Access), if you have to ask for it, you won't get it.

Re:Fucking English Majors

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's almost as though they make up for unemployability with sheer hotness. First girlfriend in college. English major. Hot. Liked to bang like no one's business. No idea what she planned to do with English. Unlikely to matter given that she could just pick some man take care of her.

Probably a rich housewife/socialite now.

THIS is the reason to block all ads from the inter

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS is the reason to block all ads from the internet.

The worst programmers in the world work for ad networks writing crap javascript code to run inside every computer browser in the world. Nothing could go wrong with that, right?

Let me guess

[NotSoHeavyD3]

He's probably the type that thinks for example that for example C# is totally different than any other object oriented language. Most likely he would be honestly surprised to find out somebody that understood general OO concepts and was in an expert in another one like C++ could pick up a second OO in a matter of days or less. (Sorry, I get that a lot. I think it took me 1-2 days to get up to speed from C# from C++. Not sure how long it'd take me to pick up java but I'd expect a week at most.)

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so you're still at the "I know everything" stage of programmer development.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't work on anything critical. Ever.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

From C# to C++ in two days?! Wow! You must be a genius who dreams in code, and talks to other people in his head...

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

I think his statement is poorly worded, and he meant to say he went from knowing C++ well to learning C# well enough to use it in two days. I wouldn't think that's unlikely, especially if he had some functional programming experience as well. C# is not that complicated.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

At least he's not a prick.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, on a basic level most imperative languages are are almost identical conceptually C# and C++ are (obviously) very similar in syntax so switching between them is easy. There's some different libraries and class names and compilation gets a bit more annoying but the basics are the same. It's only once you need the advanced stuff or performance that you'll have to start thinking about memory management and concurrency, that the differences become pronounced.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

You english bad.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

The process you describe takes time. It's quite like learning another spoken language. You still think in your "mother tongue", the one you learned first or used most. You translate into other languages slowly in comparison.

I'm primarily a C# programmer, and I can program in VB with no problem. But I'll still attempt to declare "int foo;" instead of "Dim foo As Integer". I usually won't even finish the line before correcting it, but it's plainly obvious that VB isn't my "mother tongue" (so to speak). The same goes for other languages I encounter occasionally (Java, PHP, JS, even the rare C program, usually from some FOSS stuff I need customized).

There's a big difference between "up-to-speed" as in "able to contribute to a development effort" and "up-to-speed" as in "could do this in my sleep". The former takes days, as you mentioned. The latter takes months, or even years (for slow learners).

Re:Let me guess

[luke923]

He card read good! (Wow! Two Simpsons' references in the same day? Strange)

Re:Let me guess

[Actually, I do RTFA]

It depends on how much you consider "knowledge". I can read pretty much any OO language well enough to understand any recent graduate's code for hiring purposes. I also understand enough to be dangerous in all of them; that is enough to open the IDE, change behavior to suit a requirement, and make sure it works. What I don't know in most of them is when I'm re-inventing the wheel, when I'm doing something a backwards-ass way, etc.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

(Sorry, I get that a lot. I think it took me 1-2 days to get up to speed from C# from C++, but being new to it I was unaware of my incompetence. Not sure how long it'd take me to pick up java but I'd expect a week at most.)

FTFY.

Re:Let me guess

[dkf]

I think it took me 1-2 days to get up to speed from C# from C++. Not sure how long it'd take me to pick up java but I'd expect a week at most.

To read it? Yeah, with your background if it takes you more than a few days, you're slacking. Being able to write it, and write it well... that takes longer. In particular, learning the associated tooling and common libraries can take a lot of work.

FWIW, there are other OO languages that are considerably more different than that trio (those three have a pretty clear historical relationship to each other, and so share a lot of assumptions). For example, being able to subclass the class of classes makes you reconsider how lots of OO patterns that you think you know work.

Re:Let me guess

[jez9999]

What about learning C++ after knowing C# though? C# generally makes things a lot easier than C++, but the reverse is true when switching the other way.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll take a day or so to pick up the grammar/syntax and basic compiler usage of any of those languages coming from another.

The libraries on the other hand, the intricacies of the language and complexities of the buildtools will take much longer. However, It's not as though you cannot learn on the fly with a good reference and google.

I'm not a professional truck driver

[Anonymous Coward]

so why would I need to know how to drive?j

The guy's examples don't make sense, but his premise is sound.

Who cares what this douche thinks ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a big world, and he doesn't define success OR
failure.

Not a program per employee

[tepples]

Each garbage collector need not write a separate program. An employee of the company employing dozens of garbage collectors can write the program, and the team for each truck can load a map into that program.

Re:Not a program per employee

[93 Escort Wagon]

Each garbage collector need not write a separate program. An employee of the company employing dozens of garbage collectors can write the program, and the team for each truck can load a map into that program.

You, sir, have obviously never worked on an open source project.

Re:Not a program per employee

[Anonymous Coward]

And so how does that translate into each collector needing to know how to program??

Re:Not a program per employee

[cellocgw]

An employee of the company employing dozens of garbage collectors can write the program, and the team for each truck can load a map into that program

Replace "truck" with "operating system" and see what happens if you have dozens of "garbage collectors" running simultaneously.

Re:Not a program per employee

[tepples]

Replace "truck" with "operating system" and see what happens if you have dozens of "garbage collectors" running simultaneously.

Because the navigation computers on all the trucks will be running copies of the same operating environment, which was developed by employees of (or contractors for) the garbage truck company, they can all coordinate.

Re:Not a program per employee

[cellocgw]

You got whooshed, or I wasn't sufficiently careful with my humor. I intended to refer to the software tool referred to as a "garbage collector," not the physical world trucks.

Re:Not a program per employee

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't. I suspect that's the point.

He's Right

[echusarcana]

The guy is completely correct.

The situation: You've got a thousand applicants. You've got one or two job openings.

If you don't have the slightest idea what makes the internet and the information age run, you probably don't deserve the job. But the converse is also true: programmers should learn something of art, literature, and history. Too many software people don't even know anything about science. A person that can't think broadly in a well-rounded way is useless.

Re:He's Right

[Anonymous Coward]

People should also all be mechanics, because we use cars every day! And we should all know plumbing, because who doesn't shit, shower, and shave? Oh, and we should also be electricians, because we all use that, right? And you better know how the lock on your door works! Oh, and it's a good idea to know about medicines, and which version of penicillin is going to cure your illness! And we could certainly function a lot better in buildings if we understood architecture. And color composition, well, we use lots of things with colors. There are so many things we use every day. It is impossible to learn all of them. Someone doesn't have to understand programming, and it shouldn't be expected except where it is required. Just like you wouldn't expect to have to bake a souffle in a technical job. If people picked up every single skill related to every single thing they do in the day, they would be horrible at a lot of things. The entire purpose of civilization is for specialization. The entire point of having in house programmers is so that someone can say "hey, I think this task can be automated" or "this feature in this software would be cool!" and there's a dedicated guy there to work on it while everyone else does whatever their job is.

Re:He's Right

[sandytaru]

You don't need to be a mechanic, but you do need to know that when your car hits 60.000 miles you probably ought to get the timing belt changed. Or if the temperature gauge starts climbing, suck it up and pull over because it's probably not going to magically go back down again on its own. Or that you should get your tires checked (or do it yourself) once a month, especially in winter months, because they gradually lose PSI over time.

I'd be grateful if any time a marketing person found a bug in the code, they knew to snag a screenshot rather than give me a call and say, "My monitor broke again. Help!"

Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[melonman]

I think that everyone should learn to code. Not because it will make them a programmer. Not because it will enable them to estimate how long something will take, not least because experienced programmers are legendarily bad at doing that anyway. Everyone should learn to program because programming makes the modern world go round, and it's good for everyone to have at least an inkling of what that involves.

We teach a lot of kids chemistry, without any expectation that they will invent a new compound that will change the world. We teach a lot of kids physics, without any expectation that they'll make a significant contribution to subatomic particle research. We teach most kids to do creative writing and poetry, without expecting the vast majority of them to produce fiction or poetry of publishable quality. I don't see why we wouldn't teach programming alongside all those other topics that most students never master and never "need".

One argument for teaching a lot of academic subjects widely is that the skills you learn along the way have wider application than the topic itself. And it seems to me that this argument holds at least as well for programming as for, say, pure math. As programmers keep saying, programming is about analysis, structure, models... is there really no application whatsoever for those skills outside of hardcore programming? Does no-one ever wish that their managers had a better grasp of "system"? Yes, of course, you can acquire these skills in other places. But the thing about programming, pretty much from the outset, is that your pious beliefs about system will stop your code from performing correctly unless those beliefs are reasonably accurate. I sometimes tell people that I do executable philisophy - it's all about logic, but, unlike the philosopher, my logic has to work.

No, a bit of Python won't enable people to produce estimates for projects. But it may enable managers to understand why writing code once to do something that needs doing often is often a good plan (and, also, why it sometimes isn't). It may enable managers to understand why "Can we just change this one assumption" at the end of a project may involve restarting the entire project.

Yes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But the little knowledge is out there already on the TV station of your choice. I don't even like Python that much, but I'd still much rather deal with erroneous assumptions based on a bit of Python experience than deal with erroneous assumptions based on watching Mission Impossible and NCIS.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[iggymanz]

pffft. of far higher priority to most humans:

I think every one should learn public speaking, to help effectively communicate ideas.

I think everyone should learn to cook well for more than one person, there is nothing like "breaking bread" with others to build relationships from the most fundamental of human needs.

I think everyone should learn to play a musical instrument or make visual art or poetry, for that stimulates the parts of the brain that mere technical subjects do not.

I think everyone should study philosophy, for that is how humans have tried to make a conceptual framework to treat others and to live (religion being a subset of philosophy)

any of these things is far more important than making instructions for a binary computational device to process.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

Public speaking is worse than useless if you have nothing of value to say. But though I do agree with your other examples, I don't see how you can leave out programming. In the modern world, it's having some conceptual idea of programming which is the one thing that keeps technology from seeming like magic.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely right on. I must have written computer code for money for at least 30 years and i cannot think of a more useless, boring, stupid waste of my time at the moment. If there was ever a task which should be relegated to machines, computer coding is that task. And the last thing the world needs is more badly written computer code.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

I always assumed the reason why we teach kids chemistry is because, until we try, we don't know which of them are going to turn out to be hugely productive industrial chemists or work out how to produce the next cure for cancer. When they try, a few people get fascinated and go on to learn way, way more than the teacher is even trying to convey.

Likewise with programming. You might be a natural at it, but if you never try, how would you know?

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[theskipper]

Well said.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

Best comment on the thread. How on earth this is modded troll IHNI.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[dbIII]

I think that everyone should learn to code.

The funny thing is we had this discussion in the late 1970s, a lot of people agreed it was a good idea, the sort of logic needed started to be taught in schools and then cutbacks came along to fuck this up and a pile of other things as well. Now there are high schools that don't even teach their best and brightest simple calculus for fucks sake.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[dbIII]

Yes but you have to learn it before you have anything of value to say if you want to be taken seriously when you say it.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[chrismcb]

Everyone should learn to program because programming makes the modern world go round, and it's good for everyone to have at least an inkling of what that involves.

I think we should give everyone an opportunity to learn how to code. But I don't think it should be required. Programming is HARD. And many, many people just don't get it. Requiring them to take a course or two in it, isn't going to teach them anything. For the other people who might learn something, but will never use it, what inkling will it give them?
Personally I think the confusion that it would cause trying to teach the people who just can't understand it, isn't worth it.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

We teach kids chemistry, physics and biology so they understand the world in which they are, and of which they are part, lest they believe it's all magic, divine or inexplicable. And if they have a clue about, say, electricity, it might even help them to not electrocute themselves. So that is far more important than programming.

The more of them later go on to become scientists or engineers, the better, of course.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[iggymanz]

Actually no, a proper foundation in science and engineering as part of a well-rounded education will keep technology from seeming like magic. For example, merely knowing how to program will not give a person insight into how wireless communication works, or how undersea fibre repeaters operate, or how GPS can provide a position.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[iggymanz]

A public speaking class will indeed teach you to value your audience's time, and take the effort to make a speech worthy of it.

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

pffft. of far higher priority to most humans:

I think every one should learn public speaking, to help effectively communicate ideas.

I think everyone should learn to cook well for more than one person, there is nothing like "breaking bread" with others to build relationships from the most fundamental of human needs.

I think everyone should learn to play a musical instrument or make visual art or poetry, for that stimulates the parts of the brain that mere technical subjects do not.

I think everyone should study philosophy, for that is how humans have tried to make a conceptual framework to treat others and to live (religion being a subset of philosophy)

any of these things is far more important than making instructions for a binary computational device to process.

Why can't we do both?

Re:Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming is about defining a series of steps for solving a given problem.

Forget everything else you just said because that one statement is all of the justification anyone needs make introductory programming a requirement on the same level as other standard subjects.

If a majority understood the problem solving process it would solve a lot of problems.

Careful. Monefield ahead

[erroneus]

With everything ever written both protected by copyright and patents, what is this guy proposing? I think it's clear that only companies with big legal budgets can be allowed to have coders on staff. Everyone else is a risk.

Sounds good to me

[93 Escort Wagon]

Ad Exec: Learn to code or you're dead to me

It might be worth it to forget what languages I know, if it meant the online ad companies would start considering me to be dead.

Re:Sounds good to me

[fredgiblet]

They'd just serve you ads for psychics and the like.

please no

[Tom]

If you've ever worked in IT, you know that the clueless secretary isn't your worst enemy. At least she knows the knows nothing.
Your worst enemy is the "power-user". The guy who knows just enough to fuck everything up. This is the same thing. Breeding people who know a little bit about 2 programming languages is breeding a catastrophic collection of idiots who don't know that they know nothing.

Teaching someone the basic principles of programming, that's cool. Let them know a little about how algorithms work and stuff, a little bit of basic understanding of what, exactly, programming is. But please don't teach someone a little bit about a programming language or two.

Re:Careful. Monefield ahead

[oodaloop]

Indeed. One does not simply walk into a field of mones. Be careful!

COBOL

[MrEricSir]

Remember COBOL? Remember what it was intended for?

Those who forget history are doomed to... um... something, right?

"Most employers?" "More than enough?" WTF!

[stevegee58]

What's this guys smokin'? Crack?
Sorry charlie, if you want to work at any companies *I* ever worked for (current included), you had to have a proper technical degree. Period.

English Major, Online Ad Agency Owner

[sycodon]

'nuff said.

Bite me.

Re:English Major, Online Ad Agency Owner

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention that this fuckwit, if anybody followed mcDouche's advice, would simply be someone who "knows enough to be dangerous" and would be about as fucking useful to a real programmer as the PHB is to Dilbert. Just another dumbass spewing words he picked up like "agile programming" and getting in the damned way of the ones actually doing the damned job.

Hey, real programmers, don't you just fucking HATE that type? Don't you just loathe their very breathing because you know those breaths are gonna give them the ability to spew more shit they don't know WTF they are talking about at you? Frankly i don't think I've ever met anybody that liked having a "knows enough to be dangerous" in their midst, its probably one of the most annoying things one could have in their work environment, right up there with "girl who bathes in stinky perfume" and "fat bastard that leaves a sweat trail all summer' on the bug the hell out of you scale.

Re:English Major, Online Ad Agency Owner

[digitalchinky]

He has a point though. While a college grad might come with a nice laminated certificate that covers a whole range of buzzwords to a depth of a few millimeters, you can't typically unleash them on a client without investing another 6 months in more focused training. Even with nothing else in their working lives to worry about beyond a shallow curve and a single programming language, quite a few just don't have any interest or motivation "because it's too hard" - worse, some of these graduates actually believe they are already "real programmers".

Re:English Major, Online Ad Agency Owner

[HaZardman27]

some of these graduates actually believe they are already "real programmers"

I didn't RTFA, but I don't think the story is about programmers. I believe this guy is saying that any college grad regardless of major should know how to program.

Re:English Major, Online Ad Agency Owner

[minstrelmike]

I didn't RTFA, but I don't think the story is about programmers. I believe this guy is saying that any college grad regardless of major should know how to program.

Forcing grads to understand programming makes about as much sense as expecting commenters to read the articles they comment on.
What is this world coming to?

Re:English Major, Online Ad Agency Owner

[Gallomimia]

would simply be someone who "knows enough to be dangerous" and would be about as fucking useful to a real programmer as the PHB is to Dilbert. Just another dumbass spewing words he picked up like "agile programming" and getting in the damned way of the ones actually doing

While I personally believe that the world would be better off if everyone understood just a little bit about programming, or better still, could write their own simple programs and scripts, this post has hit the nail on the head. Asking for a bunch of people to take the plunge and learn the basics of a few languages is going to cause overconfident people to start arguments over things they don't know enough about to discuss maturely. As if we don't have enough of that going on everywhere, especially during election time.

He has a point though. While a college grad might come with a nice laminated certificate that covers a whole range of buzzwords to a depth of a few millimeters, you can't typically unleash them on a client without investing another 6 months in more focused training. Even with nothing else in their working lives to worry about beyond a shallow curve and a single programming language, quite a few just don't have any interest or motivation "because it's too hard" - worse, some of these graduates actually believe they are already "real programmers".

This particular reply speaks more broadly to the uselessness of college as opposed to actual training, on the job, or perhaps self-directed, or some certificate program. Tacking on a single course of computer programming to every already-useless college degree is going to flood the world with more useless college degrees held by people who think they're programmers.
I'm all for getting more people in the world who understand computer programming. But this is the wrong way. Let's do it online, with people who care about giving people useful skills, as opposed to in institutions which care about salaries and research budgets far more than any sort of teaching. Younger is better. College age is too late. I think 6-10 years of age is best to start dabbling with basic programming. Do it right along side keyboarding and spreadsheeting and word processing and video editing. Simple, basic skills to pique curiosity and send the kids on their way to fulfilling their interests naturally.

Non-programmers

[amightywind]

Non-programmers are losers. Actually non-GNU/Linux C/C++ programmers are losers.

Hello!

[__aaltlg1547]

He's president of an ad optimization company. They deal in programming. Of course he thinks he needs people who understand programming. If he were selling cars he would think differently.

He's offering the deal of the decade!

[doubledown00]

FTA: "This isn't because I don't have positions that need filling. On the contrary, I'm constantly searching for talented new employees, and if someone with the right skills walked into my office, he or she would likely leave it with a very compelling offer. The problem is that the right skills are very hard to find. And I'm sorry to say it, dear graduates, but you probably don't have them."

-----

The downside of having said programming skills if you could be conned into working for a total douche-nozzle like this.

Also, this dude is very high on himself and what he's doing. "Next potential dream boss"? "Cool and interesting" company with "interesting and rewarding" work? Bro, you sell internet ads. Your "interesting and rewarding" work is trying to find new and innovative ways to piss me off while I'm looking at Ebay and surifing for porn. Let's not get carried away here.

Two programming languages

[maxwell demon]

So does it count if you know brainfuck and whitespace?

Re:Two programming languages

[luke923]

How about LOLCode?

Re:COBOL.....or j2ee

[iggymanz]

and java is the COBOL of the 90s that still lingers like a really rancid fart in a church long after the congregation left.

Re:"Most employers?" "More than enough?" WTF!

[Cederic]

Interesting. If you want to work for the successful companies I've worked for, you need to be intelligent.

People with non-technical degrees still qualify. I can teach someone intelligent to program a hell of a lot more easily than I can teach some muppet with a technical degree.

Re:Moronic/ right but for the wrong reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

A well educated person should know a little about a lot of things (economics, business, writing, math, science, physics, etc...) but this moron say that the reason his employees should know a little programming is so that they can give estimates to clients. Moronic idiot! ^ 2

Re:Fucking English Majors

[EmagGeek]

A grammar lesson for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzhEt1-qGhk

Yeah...

[Jaysyn]

...I couldn't care less about anything a fucking ad exec says.

Re:COBOL.....or j2ee

[Clueless Moron]

C'mon, that's unfair. COBOL was in all seriousness meant to let "Managers do Programming", and so it had syntax like "ADD 1 TO X".

Java really was like an easy C/C++. The the object system wasn't bolted on like with C++ and memory management was GC done for free. I program in C for a living but I don't see the hate for Java. It seems like some trendy bullshit to me.

j2ee on the other hand, holy crap what a stinking turd..

Re:COBOL.....or j2ee

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. It even has the same wordiness, the laborious attention to meticulous mind-numbing detail.Substitute jar files for copy libs and you even have the same nightmare descent into spaghetti which masquerades as coding structure. Java has replaced COBOL as the language du jour of the current generation of software engineers. What is wrong with this picture? Why are we still doing this and when are we going to stop? Computer coding is a mindless task which should be relegated to the machines which consume it.

"Ad exec"?

[PopeRatzo]

This is pretty funny. An advertising executive telling college students what they have to know to not be "dead to him".

A guy who makes his living by getting people to buy stuff.

He doesn't realize how little it takes to make his entire existence meaningless. Plus, don't you hate guys who go speak to college students and tries to do this kind of tough talk? Too many people got boners when they saw Gordon Gecko give his speech in Wall Street. They thought, "I wanna be that guy who makes young people quake in their boots". I bet his family hates him.

Fair's fair...

[ZeroPly]

I have no problem with him requiring his sales people to know how to program.

But when you come by looking to sell ads for our hospital, you need to demonstrate knowledge of least a couple of basic surgical procedures. Someone who doesn't understand surgery shouldn't be making ads for us. You don't need to be able to fix an aortic dissection on your own, but you should at least know what instruments to use, and the overall procedure.

Re:Fair's fair...

[tehcyder]

But when you come by looking to sell ads for our hospital, you need to demonstrate knowledge of least a couple of basic surgical procedures. Someone who doesn't understand surgery shouldn't be making ads for us.

Why on earth not? What sort of ad for a hospital is going to have any technical content whatsoever?

Most of you are already programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

You make lists in english and execute the instructins youself, or give them to another.

The government is stuck in an endless loop as well ;)

Still doesn't matter w/o the magical 5 years exp

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say meh anyways.

My major is graphic arts. In terms of programming, I know enough about coding to make an old-school "punch the monkey" interactive ad that sort of works. (Made at least one "fun" game with limited reference, and scratched the surface of a few ECMAscript style languages at times.) I also suspect that I'd know enough such that you still wouldn't want me to touch anything involving much on the backend of anything interactive or around fidgety database stuff. All to easy to break dependencies if you try tweaking stuff while not sure how it ties together. I know my limitations, and when it comes to programming my vocabulary and fluency is limited. However my code although not great is probably good enough for a competent programmer to figure out what I'm trying to do in a half-assed manner and go about fixing it in under half the time I took to write it in the first place.

Despite having some skill and crossover knowledge, I'm still fairly unemployable in the job market which relates to my field of study. Primarily because there's no magic way to get five years experience in the relevant field after graduating from college. That's the big thing few are able to get that every hiring employer out there is looking for. Sure some would say to do pro-bono work, but my time is still worth more than that. (And still true even when considering the amount of recognition one gets for those kind of jobs. Which often isn't much, as most outfits are happy with boilerplate CMS templates that any fool can copypaste into. And trust me, lots of websites out there half assed with unused lorem ipsum pages and other hints that makes it all too obvious about how much they care.)

Re:Fucking English Majors

[Anonymous Coward]

They are always the one's doing the minors in High School.

Actually...

[sootman]

"Teach yourself just enough of the grammar and the logic of computer languages..."

I'd be happy if they knew grammar and logic, period. Screw computer languages.

Re:Fucking English Majors

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine the glowing reviews she gives a gross nerd, who still talks like a 16 year old boy.

why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

While going to school for technical knowledge I spent many years learning biology and English appreciation, If I needed to be able to debate the meaning of Shakespeare for a CS degree, then why cant some waste of time English major at least write "hello world" in a loop?

Move out to the woods

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading these kinds of stories always puts the fear of God in me that I may suddenly find myself "job free", and scrambling to find work. It reminds me to keep working on my off grid cabin where I can ride out such turmoil.

Re:Move out to the woods

[luke923]

Yeah, that's the problem with guys like the PubMatic guy -- they whine and complain to the government and news outlets that there aren't enough developers in the world. Then, all of a sudden, the media starts putting out stories about a tech shortage, and how salaries for people in tech are on the rise. Meanwhile, the government starts enticing students who lack the aptitude and critical thinking to be able to perform well in software to get degrees in computer science they have no reason having in the first place. So, what happens? More and more kids, with dollar signs in their eyes, enroll in their local universities in order to get a computer science degree. Getting a computer science degree is fine and dandy, but what the market ends up doing is create an oversupply of technical labor; so, you end up having a guy who isn't interested in development in the first place get a piece of paper that's worthless to him since that degree isn't as hot as it was when he first started college. Of course, this gets magnified hundreds of thousands of times over to the point of bubble proportions, but that doesn't matter since PHB at PubMatic has a need right now, and damn the world to Hades if the government and society can't wipe his ass for him.

Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

People that intentionally seek useless degrees are naturally satisfaction seeking and ignore risks. I.e. people with crap degrees will be more likely to bone people in general and therefore it is much easier to land a desirable mate from that category.

Re:Careful. Monefield ahead

[luke923]

Yeah, back in the day, I used to kick ass in monesweeper. I would get high score and everything!

Re:"Most employers?" "More than enough?" WTF!

[luke923]

Yeah, I've worked with a number of programmers at ad agencies who would tell me straight to my face, "I don't need to know math in order to write code!." Come to think of it, there might be something to Kirk McDonald's statement: PubMatic only wants "muppet(s) with a technical degree," and not someone capable of logical and analytical thought. If your employees can't think for themselves, they certainly aren't gonna question the horrible way you manage your company.

Re: Still doesn't matter w/o the magical 5 years e

[Anonymous Coward]

You want a job whereas you need to work in the first place.

Where were you during your 5 years master? No experience gained?

Thats it. The all for the diploma approach.

I failed my masters, since I worked. I have experience, you have a degree. I get your much wanted job.

how many of you took physics?

[Goldsmith]

How many people here took physics?

The US produces approximately 7000 professional physicists a year, yet almost every student in the country takes physics classes.

These "everyone" physics classes are insufficient training to do any sort professional physics. What they do accomplish is help expose people to physics so that 1) they can see that physicists think a bit differently and 2) they can think about physics as a career. The classes are designed to do this instead of actually teaching useful modern physics (this is why you're repeating 400 year old experiments in a college class).

So yeah, physicists have to deal with crackpots and managers who haven't actually learned any physics from the last 150 years, but in the end, it's a net positive experience for all of us. Doing the same thing with programming would be a good idea.

Re:how many of you took physics?

[YoungManKlaus]

well, you also repeat 400-year old experiments because the theory behind them is comparatively simple and the experiment does not require an LHC ;)

Re:how many of you took physics?

[StripedCow]

It also teaches you how laws of physics were found instead of just showing you the results. This is important if you ever want to get into the same line of thinking to find new laws of physics.

Re:how many of you took physics?

[funky_vibes]

So... we should be teaching instruction sets for pre-1970 computers?

Seriously though, it's a huge mistake that schools are now using scripting languages like Java and .net.
People need to learn real programming to ever be able to get into the mindset of a good programmer.

Re:how many of you took physics?

[Goldsmith]

Yeah, not every school can afford an LHC, that is simply the unfortunate reality we all have to live with.

Just about all of them have (or had) cloud chambers though, which you can use to do some early 20th century era particle physics. That would be enough to get students pretty far into particle physics if we actually wanted to teach it.

Knowing syntax is nothing

[YoungManKlaus]

because you have to have the right mindset ... being able to write valid programs in any language doesnt help you if you cannot structure and break down your problem into meaningful blocks (be it classes, functions, ...). So people who know "how to code" are essentially the worst because they think because they know the language syntax (and often even that only barely) they know everything there is to know about "programming" (as in: from problem to elegant solution).

"Claim"?

[AdamWill]

"English major Kirk McDonald, president of online ad optimization service PubMatic, informed college grads that he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two programming languages"

We're talking about the *advertising* industry, right?

In that case I can claim familiarity with two programming languages, no problem. I also claim familiarity with advanced astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and Elvis Presley, who I met in his vacation home on the Moon.

Two languages?

[Anonymous Coward]

Visual Basic and Perl? What could possibly go wrong? No, hold that. What could possibly go right?

The "custom program" just needs to be told

[dbIII]

I don't have to - stuff like ImageMagik or bits of gimp (both cross platform) already do all those things so it's just a matter of writing a shell script (ImageMagik) or python script (gimp) to call them in the order desired. Or if it's vector graphics I could use any version of AutoCAD from about 1988 on and do it in lisp.

Career change

[StripedCow]

McDonald's tells grads that cannot code to go flip burgers.
News at 11.

I somewhat agree.

[SCHecklerX]

Computers are tools. What makes them useful is the things we tell them to do. We tell them to do things through code. Therefore, to properly use a computer, you should know a little bit about how to code, and a bit about how the thing works, shouldn't you? I'm talking about general-use computing here, not things you would do with a kiosk or point of sale system.

If a big part of your job is to use a computer, to analyze and share data, then yes, you should know how to code. I certainly expect people who work on my house, my car, etc, to know how to use their tools.

If you create content or processes on computers, you should know how to properly tell them how to do things. Not knowing this leads to spreadsheet 'databases', single images in powerpoint (or powerpoint at all), word attachments in email that state what could have just been written in the email itself, and all of the other associated idiocy that I'm sure you all deal with every day. I don't expect my mechanics to know these things. In this analogy, they are the computer drivers, not the ones building and fixing the car.

Remember, SQL was originally written to make querying and correlating data easy for managers and NON-PROGRAMMERS. That's why it is so english-y. Now, it is considered 'programming' to understand how to create a SQL query, and management has to rely on other people to use the tool for them so they can have a non-flexible set of buttons they can push rather than just tell the system what they need at any given point themselves. Let that sink in.

An odd requirement

[Kimomaru]

If McDonald is insisting on some familiarity with coding in order to maybe weed out a particular kind of applicant, then I can kind of understand where he's coming from. And by the way, a person can manage to have some familarity with coding and APIs by using CodeCademy (which is free. If just takes some time and effort). But if he believes that the individual should be able to contribute coding based on just this, yeah it's not really going to work I think.

I think what he's asking for isn't that unreasonable. Everyone should have some exposure to coding, even if it's not for them.

Kirk is a golden douchenozzle

[gelfling]

And drop the Bo Burnham glasses. Then jump off the roof.

Re:COBOL.....or j2ee

[iggymanz]

But the objects are bolted on in Java, it is a procedural partially 00 language.

As for your "Add 1 to X", I'd retort myCamelCaseMethodSoTypicalOfAJavaDweeb()

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing

[Ioldanach]

I'm a programmer, and there's little worse than having someone in Marketing or Sales come to me to ask for a specific task to be done in a specific way, because half way through the project I'll generally figure out what it was they were trying to accomplish and have to start from scratch to deliver a product that actually meets their needs. Because they know some of how things work on the back end, they try to solve a problem themselves and then send it to IT for implementation. What I prefer is that they present us with their problem or need and we can go over, with them, several possible deliverable solutions and their relative merits, time to deliver, and cost to deliver. Reading this, I can now see that it could actually be worse. They could be versed in programming languages we don't use and come to us with solutions that use their own personal hammer, not the full tool set we possess.

Simple economics

[ElitistWhiner]

wageSLAVERY

managers who dabble get in the way

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a DBA. Managers who dabble in technical skills get in the way. They know just enough to know some of the buzzwords, but generally think they know more than they do. They tend to get in the way of people who really know what they are doing. You try to explain stuff and it is in one ear and out the other because they don't know which keywords are important. They don't know enough to know what they missed. Then either blow it off because they don't get it, or put their interpretation on it and get it completely wrong.

This is doubly frustration to a DBA because our operational responsibilities require us to carry pagers. We get paged overnight and the manager is sleeping. Something was 'fast' in development and there 'just is' level of knowledge can't grasp that something is then 'slow' in prod. You get these 'just is' responses back. However, I am the one carrying the pager and gets woken up at 3 AM on a saturday because a job they wrote is 'slow' since they didn't do what I told them to. I am supposed to 'monitor' this, then send email updates (managers don't like being woken up). Monitoring amounts to losing sleep staring at a screen.

This happens to the developers too when they deal with 'pseudo-technical' managers who act like know it alls.

I worked with a statistician once and I had to create tables and manipulate data in a way that his SAS tool could handle it. I didn't understand what the hell he was doing with his stats models. They looked like greek to me. I had a couple of statistics classes in school, but I was smart enough to realize that this guy is an expert. He has a degree in stats and its what he does all day for years. I didn't go 'dude, there is this feature in SAS use this to get a cool picture on the screen'. I got out of his way.

That's what my old boss said

[unix_core]

That's what my old boss said!

I'll never take a programming job again...

When my company analyzed....

[Anonymous Coward]

When my previous employer (a Fortune 20 company at the time) analyzed our marketing, sales and support processes (I was on the team), we found that 80%-90% of even these "lib arts" types of job activities were "information or information processing". Whether that means you need to be a programmer to "do sales" is debatable (in some case our sales people *did* need to have programming knowledge just to know how to sell the product). But certainly you needed a higher level of "information processing" tool, skill and abstraction knowledge than merely learning Excel.

No, he's not.

[Anonymous Coward]

The situation: You've got a thousand applicants. You've got one or two job openings.

There's your first problem -- you don't know how to specify the job you are hiring for.

If you don't have the slightest idea what makes the internet and the information age run, you probably don't deserve the job.

There's your second problem -- your operation is not organized enough to take advantage of highly skilled specialist.

Sure, everyone should have some broad knowledge of many fields. However, can you imagine demanding that all programmers understand how to write marketing copy, or sell ads over the phone?

dunning-kruger strikes again

[PJ6]

'Big picture' is the insight that one may gain over years. To some, it never comes.

Put This Guy in a Padded Room...Please

[rhalstead]

One of the worst parts of my job was interfacing with a system written by an MBA who "knew how to Code". He knew nothing of structured programming, or flow charts or no concept of unique records, or the normal forms in database construction. So when he cane across some tests that could have Y/N, Pass/Fail, and numeric values with different ranges he solved the problem by combining the test id and the product id. Sounds simple enough until you have to interface a system that expects unique tests like maybe SAP, or a lab information management system. Of course there were thousands of these tests. Thanks, but after many hundreds of hours of seeing (and fixing) the results of that approach, lets keep coding to people who understand structured programming at least. Although they are unlikely to write a compiler, current state and next state arrays can be handy too.