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Ask Slashdot: What Do You Wish You'd Known Starting Out As a Programmer?
snydeq writes: Most of us gave little thought to the "career" aspect of programming when starting out, but here we are, battle-hardened by hard-learned lessons, slouching our way through decades at the console, wishing perhaps that we had recognized the long road ahead when we started. What advice might we give to our younger self, or to younger selves coming to programming just now? Andrew C. Oliver offers several insights he gave little thought to when first coding: "Back then, I simply loved to code and could have cared less about my 'career' or about playing well with others. I could have saved myself a ton of trouble if I'd just followed a few simple practices." What are yours?
What Do You Wish You'd Known Starting Out As a Programmer?
How to program, I guess.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I think the main thing I'd change is I wish I had started becoming active in the open source community around the tools I commonly use. I spent the first 10 years of my career mostly working on my own, or with a few people on the job and was not connected at all with the greater community. I think if I had done so earlier I'd be a better programmer today
Peace, or Not?
On my CS track, you start with C++, learn data structures and algorithms, and then learn assembly on a 68k.
I can't think of a better way to discourage someone from learning how to code.
I wish I had known to pick a different trade instead of programming. Programming isn't a profession like law or medicine. It's a skilled trade like plumbing, masonry, or electrical work. But unlike plumbers and electricians, programmers aren't smart enough to unionize, and so they get fucked in the ass by management. If you have to live in the United States, don't become a programmer. There are better ways to earn a living.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I would have studied more about the history of computers and computer science. It would have kept me from re-making so many mistakes and re-inventing so many wheels.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
Project management, specifically the importance of not being a bottleneck.
Finding God in a Dog
Knowing how to troubleshoot systems -- whether it's code, or things like cars and other physical machines or electrical wiring -- is key. Every programmer will spend time fixing his own code, and has a good chance of spending even more time fixing someone else's. Building the skill to understand complex systems quickly, and to apply fixes that are short of "re-write the whole thing", is essential.
I've been a developer for over 20 years. Maybe 20-25% of my total time is spent writing new functionality. About 35% is fixing bugs (mine and others'), with the remainder spent on process documentation, design, etc.
Write like someone smarter than you will have to fix it ("Who wrote this crap? At least I can tell why he or she did that."), and like someone dumber than you will be adding features ("Bless him or her for making this easy."). You'll be both eventually.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
That people who use spaces for indentation are just WRONG. :)
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I wish I had known how uninteresting and boring coding could be when working for a corporation. It was the ability to be creative and imaginative that made me fall in love with coding in the early eighties. Although I still work in IT, I generally don't code for companies anymore. And somehow coding has miraculously become very interesting once again!
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
When I first started programming the 6502, back in 1981, I was still in school, and I was manually entering hex opcodes for every machine language program I wanted to create... I was doing this for about 6 months before somebody pointed out that I could use an assembler. I honestly didn't understand what they were talking about until I used one to type in a program that I saw in Nibble magazine. I never looked back. An assembler would have saved me *loads* of time if I had known about it at the beginning.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Or just the proper applications of unit and regression tests.
I would have teached him grit. Oh god, how many unfinished little projects I had. Learn to concentrate on one thing and finish it properly. Just keep grinding on it.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
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put every god damn penny you can into a 401k.
Oh, you mean programming wise?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This Programmer Competency Matrix has been instrumental in helping me "know what I don't know".
I just had my one year anniversary as a full time Android developer, and it's insane how much I've learned after leaving school. Luckily there's two older guys (well, one now, the other moved on recently) on my team who are _awesome_ mentors.
1. Pay attention to everything you can in the work place. You may be a client side developer, backend, whatever, but pay attention in every meeting or conversation that you can eavesdrop on. You may not understand everything going on with the teams you don't work in, but just being exposed to their terminology and _looking up what they're talking about_ will get you far. This doesn't go for just development, either - listen to the business and sales guys talk and try to understand your clients and what they need so you can build a great product by anticipating what will work for them before they have to ask.
2. Write a blog. Seriously. I'm the first to admit that I don't really know anything when it comes to development, but I've been actively writing new posts to my blog and it forces me to grok whatever I'm writing about. Whatever you're doing, post the code on GitHub so others can read it (mine's here). Developers who read peoples code online tend to be awesome about making suggestions and asking questions that make you realize you screwed up without being jackasses about it.
3. If there are tech meetups in your area, go to them. If you're in a decent sized city (I'm in the Denver/Boulder area, which isn't huge, but it's a lot bigger than where I'm originally from) you can find multiple meetup groups related to tech that you're interested in. It's a great way to learn new things and meet a lot of awesome people in your area.
4. If there's hackathons in your area, no matter how small, go to them. You meet awesome people and learn how to work in teams that are different than the one you're in every other day. Plus there's usually free food and beer, so what's not to like about that?
5. Pick up skills that compliment your work area by doing projects that aren't work related. It helps you understand what other teams are doing and how it affects you, plus it just makes you more awesome while keeping down the monotony. As a client side developer, I've been taking a Udacity course on using AppEngine to make backend APIs, and it's been fun.
6. For the love of God, check for null pointers and other kinds of exceptions. You may not catch all of them due to inexperience in spotting them, but that's what senior devs doing code reviews are for. You don't want code going into the wild that crashes, even when data is bad. Getting a call on a Saturday saying something bad is happening is not what you want - the weekends are yours to do whatever you want, not put out fires that could have been avoided.
7. Open source third party libraries are your friend. People way smarter than me have put together some amazing things that we use every day, like Otto and Picasso from Square. Try libraries out in a sample project, and if they will work for what you're doing, give it a shot. If you can make them better in the process, submit a pull request. Like I mentioned earlier, the open source community is awesome and if your pull request isn't up to par, they'll let you know what you can do to fix it.
8. You're going to fail at some things, and it's alright. Fail early, learn what did and didn't work, and try again. Learning from mistakes is how you get better. Along this same line of thought, if you run into a roadblock that you can't figure out yourself via documentation/stepping back and evaluating the problem, StackOverflow is awesome.
1. A copy of the "Mythical Man Month" by Fredrick Brooks and being told to read it.
2. A set of closing prices for every stock on the NY exchange for the next 20 years with the advice to become an investment banker..
If #2 isn't possible, then sitting down with somebody who could explain that you get what you negotiate, not what you deserve, so don't settle for what you get.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Here's my advice, been programming for 15 years. Write comments, one per block of code that does a step, then fill in code. You will then have well commented code, and forced yourself to think through the solution before you begin coding. This saves tons of time by avoiding thought errors before you code. When hunting a bug, don't just look at what's not working. Instead look at what was most recently changed, even if it seems it couldn't possibly be related. The times I didn't do it this way have cost me many days hunting down a really tricky bug. Sometimes it really is unrelated to recent changes, but not often. If you are stuck, take a break and do something mindless, like get some water, go to bathroom etc. your subconscious keeps working without the interference of your conscious mind. Preplan your work a few days ahead if possible. You can avoid many roadblocks by thinking through things ahead of time. Persistence pays off. I've worked through many "seemingly impossible" tasks, only to find the solution after failing a few times first. Visualize what the users interaction will be before coding. I like to draw it on paper and pretend to use it. Putting yourself in your users shoes allows you to see what might be difficult to understand. I rarely keep my first design, but since it's just a drawing I'm not invested in it. If you lay it out in software, it's much more tempting to keep a poor design. Ask a colleague if you are stuck. Often, articulating the problem out loud is sufficient to solve it!
I wasn't a comp-sci major, so I don't know how common they are in that field ... but in engineering, you typically have a freshman class that's referred to as the 'weed-out' class.
It's not supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be damned hard, so they can see who's got the fortitude to stick with it.
Not all of life is going to be a cakewalk -- there are going to be times when you really have to knuckle down and study, and it's often better to get it over with early on than spend 3 years towards the degree and then find out that you can't cut it.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You can ignore them, in which case you've volunteered for the role of "victim".
You can make them your full-time job, in which case you're no longer a developer.
You should find a good defensive middle ground. At least, some situational awareness. Put your head up and look around. And listen.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Become a plumber. - better hours, comparable pay, healthier lifestyle, & your job will never be off-shored or out-sourced,
I learned C++ first and just kind of learned various languages and technologies as the need arose, and now I know several languages and my projects have been widely varied. But I noticed that most of my peers who specialized were much more in demand, and therefore pretty much had their pick of jobs, made more money, and had better working conditions. The kind of specialization I'm referring to is learning something that less than ~5% of programmers know, but is still in some demand, and likely to be in demand in ten or twenty years. Or if you pick something that many programmers already know, learn the shit out of that one thing so that there aren't many others that have your level of knowledge in that one thing. In an interview, impressive knowledge of something specific is always better than just adequate knowledge of many things.
Also, learn how to be interviewed. It is a very valuable skill.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
I wish I had learned to balance real life with coding life sooner. I used to do the same zillion hour marathons everyone else did at one point or another in their coding careers. I loved the challenge and being the one producing the results. But then, eventually, I realized there's really a LOT more out there than that tiny little challenge/reward cycle. Biking, hiking, sports with friends, whatever. You can easily burn through 10-15 years of your YOUNG life living the code only to realize later when you're not so young any more that there were TONS of things you would have enjoyed doing more. You can make up some of that, but not nearly all.
I started programming as a kid at the age of 10. This question just doesn't apply to me at all. No such thing as "career" etc. were relevant to me at that point.
I work for consulting firms, selling both flesh-by-the-month and fixed-budget custom dev/integration. Here's what I'd like begining devs to know:
1- be presentable. Be clean, pleasant, non-threatening (agreed, that means be lame. Lame is good). You don't *have* to wear a suit and tie (though if you want to move up, you probably should), but at least clean jeans (chinos is much better) and a top with a collar (polo is OK). "Town" shoes are much better than hiking or sport shoes. Needing to express your personality by shocking others is pretty much a dead-end. It's not "look how much you need me that I can bug you by being an ass", it's "look how much I'm sabotaging myself by making my self be a problem".
2- don't be afraid to say "no" and "I don't know". And don't say anything else instead (like "yes" or "this idea/tech sucks"). If your client/boss is asking for unrealistic, impossible stuff, just say so, or at least say you need to check, don't accept. Saying you can't do something, or something is undoable, will hurt you and others a lot less than accepting and then not delivering. Also, "I can't do it" and "it's undoable" are not the same. Maybe you need help from someone else. Maybe you need training.
3- Be proactive. Learn new skills and try to help people around you. You boss mainly. If you spot a problem or a potential sale, say so. Don't make a huge issue out of it, don't get frustrated if it doesn't get top priority, but do point out issues, and if you can, solutions.
4- be patient. Many youngsters have this mental image of where they want to get, and how good they are. You'll probably get there, but not in 6 months. You *will* have to work on nonsensical doomed projects, with idiots as coworkers and bosses. That doesn't prevent you from building skills (technical, personal , organizational), networking and building up your brand...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I went to work for System Development Corporation (SDC) in 1969. SDC was actually the company that established computer programming as being distinct from building computers; before then, the only people programming were the engineers who built the computers. SDC was a good company with good pay and good benefits. Then, SDC sold itself to the Burroughs Corporation, which succeeded in a hostile takeover of Sperry Univac and became Unisys.
At Unisys, we found ourselves in an environment that treated highly experienced technicians and professionals as if we were assembly line workers. Unisys even imposed work rules on us salaried employees that are actually legal only for hourly wage-earners. I should have recognized the abuse sooner than I did and "jumped ship". I could have timed a change for when shortage of software experts made job jumping very profitable. Instead I stuck it out until mass layoffs were very near.
When Burroughs and Sperry Univac merged, the resulting Unisys had more than 120,000 employees. Today, Unisys has less than 25,000.
I must disagree with the replies that indicate programming is poorly paid. I earned sufficient pay that I was able to retire very comfortably before I was 62.
I would suggest that programmers learn how to test rigorously the software they create. This requires that they also write software specifications that are testable, after which they should learn to write formal test procedures. They can then advance into becoming requirements analysts and software test engineers (except in states where "engineer" is a career that requires a license). There are too few analysts and testers, who are often paid much more than programmers. Large computer-based projects are failing because of a lack of clear, objective, and testable specifications. Attempts to put those projects into actual use are disastrous because of a lack of testing.
For some details about my career, see http://www.rossde.com/retired.....
Why... regular expressions of course! I could have saved myself endless hours of dumbfounded confusion!
Learn principles and techniques. A little theory. Use programming languages to help you learn it but do not obsess over the language. All programming languages suck, just to a greater or lesser extent and some in more interesting ways than others. But basic principles never change.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
better hours
Forget the fact that some summer days you'll wake up at 3:30 AM and head to the job site because by the afternoon it's too hot to throw a shovel (dig holes/trenches). Plumbing is the kind of work with mandatory overtime, 24-hour on-call shifts, AND inversely periods of time where work dries up completely (i.e., no pay).
comparable pay
In 3 years as programmer my income has surpassed the highest paid, 30-year veteran, Journeyman plumber at my previous place of employment. And good luck finding an employer that offers 401K contribution matching.
healthier lifestyle
Tell that to my great grandfather, my grandfather, several uncles, brother, and my father - all plumbers with severe back issues starting early in their careers and worsening to a chronic state in old age.
While I'm sure that poor pay and shitty hours are a reality for some programmers, they usually have a choice whether they realize it or not. Most blue collar professions don't provide you the option to quit and find better conditions in the same field elsewhere.
If you're overworked, underpaid, and unhealthy that is on you to do something about it.
I'm going to answer this in a different way: what I knew when I started that I think most programmers, and most people, don't. That may sound arrogant, but I keep seeing it every day of my working life.
I wasn't a computer science major or anywhere close: I was a film major and English minor. It was the English that has helped me more than anything learn very quickly certain secrets to programming effectively. And yet it wasn't even the English classes themselves, because a lot of what is fashionable to teach in English is misleading or harmful.
What really happened was a certain approach to writing. It is taught clearly in just a few books, like The Elements of Style and On Writing Well. Reading these books literally changed my life. If I were to try to summarize it, it would be that the goal of writing is to reach the reader as plainly as possible, instead of writing in a flowery, fancy, or important-sounding way. To do that actually is the greatest amount of work. It actually is the opposite of everyone's inclination. Even for professional, longtime writers, it doesn't happen on the first draft or even the seventh draft. It involves adhering to certain non-glamorous principles like using as few words as possible and preferring the short word over the long one. It means putting yourself in the background. In short, in trying to be elegant.
I wish when I was starting out, I knew how idiotic it would sound to tell everyone what I wished I knew when I was starting out. Cause, man, does it sound stupid.
Come children, let me pretend to be wise by telling your really obvious things I was not aware of when I was your age.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.