Well, for those who actually enjoy computing, they'd all be capable before going into Computer Science. I couldn't believe how many fellow students in 3rd and 4th year just didn't understand programming. When anyone asked for help I tried to give them hints without giving the answers to our assignments, but some clearly didn't care about learning for themselves. They should have been doing liberal arts degrees, or working at McDonalds.. well, they probably are doing that now, but with a nice student loan debt on their shoulders.
Why do people think so much inside the box and reach so low?
Probably because they're being far more realistic than you are.
For one thing, our own immune systems can already "upgrade" themselves - that's how vaccines work.
We can't even fully secure our computers, so how do you expect us to be able to secure our own immune system against real viruses? And even if we do develop an upgraded immune system that is immune to all known viruses and harmful bacteria, what happens when some of our white-listed bacteria (some bacteria in our bodies are symbiotic to an extent, so we'd want to keep them) develop some new mutation that proves harmful to us? We're back to having to patch up our immune system the same way you have to patch a computer.
Right now I like letting my own highly evolved immune system deal with as many problems as it can, and only relying on medicine when my body is unable to protect itself.
It might help on applying for your first job, but after that I presume that your experience will matter a lot more. I wouldn't actually know since I'm still technically on my first job.
It's the fries doing that, not the mayo. I never eat fries any more, unless they're sweet potato based (which is delicious btw). When I did eat fries, mayo was great. Hellmans mayo is the best. I tried poutine when I visited Canada and thought it was great, mostly because the place I had it also left the skin on the fries, which was new to me. Here in the UK you can get cheese/chips/gravy from most chip shops, though it admittedly isn't as good as poutine., because they use awful "cheese"
The first two would be detectable under "hand gestures" as mentioned at the end of the summary:p Putting the phone on mute sounds like a winner to me though.
We're a small business. I rotate 10 offsite HDDs. I only rotate offsite once a week. Each day I take backups of files between servers, so as long as several servers don't get taken out at once then things are fine. If anything happened that took out all the servers at once, I think we'd have bigger issues to deal with than losing up to 5 days of design work.
Our file server has volume shadow copy for restoring previous versions of files, and our databases are backed up each day onto the file server. So if people need files restored from the last few days/weeks then it's a simple matter to recover them without messing around with the offsite backups.
I also have another HDD that gets a full backup of the file server each day, so that if it died then we could simply plug the HDD into any machine and set up some shares as a temporary solution.
Especially since this particular guy won't go to dinner by himself, but won't talk to you at dinner either. Why does he need someone to go with him then?
Wow. Really does sound like he has issues. I wouldn't like to meet his parents.
This is about the only response that hasn't been completely loaded with crazy ideas of "people should be the way I want them to be". It makes sense. Nice work:)
I said no such thing, I was just asking you some questions. From my response, and others' responses, you should be able to tell that a few people do consider "pleasant" small talk quite inane.
I agree with you that the guy sounds boring, but he doesn't "need" to do anything. Maybe he had horrific things happen to him as a child and can't help being like that. Maybe not. Either way, I can see getting annoyed at someone for not shutting up, but getting annoyed at a co-worker for being too quiet is kind of crazy. This person is not your friend, he is simply a co-worker. You would expect friends to talk to you, but I don't see why you expect all of your co-workers to act like friends.
Notice also that I didn't say that you can't be friends with co-workers. But if this guy can get his job done without speaking to anyone, and is happy to do that, it's his choice.
Yes, but that doesn't mean the explosion will go nuclear. It makes it more like a "dirty bomb", but the fact that it's underground would hopefully stop too many contaminants from getting out.
That's all true, but I've become much more productive since I wangled my way into a quieter office, and we brought a second IT guy on board to handle most of the basic IT support needs of the company:)
I do have to deal with constantly changing requirements, and currently around 4 or 5 different projects, as well as occasional IT management and second line support duties. I enjoy the programming aspect of my job the most when I have a clear set of goals to work towards, and nobody interrupts me:p
You may notice that I posted the same quote twice in my original post. The second quote was meant to be
It's just a matter of being social and not having the only interest in your life be programming.
My point was that if someone is really only interested in programming, they don't care about being sociable.
Want to get a good job, be valued in the workplace, have a friend of two?
If someone wants these things, then clearly programming is not their only interest. OP was trolling, and I was simply responding to his ludicrously extreme examples.
Sure, but the original hypothetical statement was about someone who was "only interested in programming". That's "shallow" by anyone's standards - and it's a hard thing to imagine given that programmers tend to be helping people in other fields solve problems. But the guy was being an asshole/troll, saying all geeks and quiet people are misanthropes who should get a life. So I thought I'd deal with him at a similarly trollish level by using his extreme example. Anyone who really was that single minded honestly doesn't care if they are a social outcast.
You are assuming that this person even has that kind of job. If they only care about programming, it's a lot more likely that they will work in research. Possibly for a business, but maybe also at a University, and they won't have to deal with requirements, or customers. They may speak to other company researchers, professors and students, but chances are that they will be speaking to them about subjects that they find interesting, and so it won't be a burden for these people to deal with each other. I fail to see the problem.
If someone is going to work as a professional developer in a team, then yes social skills would make things much easier of course.
My point exactly, we rarely get days (and surely never get weeks) to immerse ourselves in a solution space when programming. We can't, as it is a sure way to produce the wrong solution for the wrong problem.
I really don't understand your thinking here. Thinking through problems is just simply necessary sometimes. The longer you think, the better you understand the problem. Sometimes you might choose the wrong path and have to backtrack, but you may have to do that no matter how many people you've talked to. When I was 16 I just woke up one morning having figured out the solution to the problem I had been working on for the past couple of days. If you are immersed in a problem in that way it's a great way to come up with solutions.
Also recently I had to redesign the timesheet system here at work to take into account some new factors for a new project that the company has taken on. I happened to be sick at the same time so I just worked from home, and I flew through the design and coding compared to what I would have been able to do at work (where I often get people coming in and asking me for help).
You keep talking about developers working in a team. If you're working in a team, it's obvious that social skills are useful. There are many people out there just doing programming for fun or research or whatever though. Being a programmer does not have to involve being a sociable person.
Really, and where do they get their requirements for said drivers then? In addition of users bug reports, said programmers get requirements from marketing, market/product development and R&D. I think there is too much focus here on "users". Think stakeholders.
Again I wasn't thinking of professional coders, I was thinking of people who for example wrote a Linux driver so that they could use a particular piece of hardware themselves, and then submitted the driver to the main source tree.
I'm not sure what you mean by "aren't that good". It's pretty egotistical to say that guys like Ken Thompson "aren't that good".
I suppose the fact is that there are different ways to be good at programming - some people are better at solving architectural issues, some are better at finding clever algorithms to solve problems, some people simply organise their code better, etc. So programmers can complement each other by interacting for sure, but that's more in design/thinking stages than when it actually comes to writing code. For coding, I've not read of anyone that actually likes to work in an environment full of distractions. It sounds like maybe you don't mind it. In that case you're either very good at fitting programming problems + social interaction into your head at the same time, or you are working on some really simple problems.
Anyway, what about guys like me who are the only developer in the company, and just have to get on with it themselves? I don't feel that I need a team to help me figure things out. I seem to be getting on fine as-is.
I'm not talking about someone trying to become "successful". He said someone who's only interested in programming. So that would be the programmer equivalent of Grigori Perlman, who is only interested in maths.
Personally I have had girlfriends, and I do have a small group of friends that I enjoy spending time with regularly. I've become better over time at dealing with larger social groups too, but often I just have no enthusiasm for that kind of thing. I'm quite happy to live in my not very connected social world, because it leaves me time for other things.
Did you ever consider that this guy just doesn't like you, or hates the sound of your voice? Are you one of those people that can't stand silence and so have to fill it in with inane ramblings?:p
I get what you're saying, it's all quite sensible - but I think anyone who is really socially aware should try to put themselves in other's shoes rather than expect everyone to be like they are.
It's funny that you should say introverted people can be a drain on others, because that's exactly how introverts feel about all social interaction. Last year I met the quietest woman I've ever met - she finds it incredibly draining to have to be around other people all the time, and prefers at least a day a week to herself to "recharge". I think all of us can understand that feeling to some extent, but there are people out there who have to deal with an exaggerated version of that feeling, and there's very little they can do to change that short of taking medication.
The act of programming itself is certainly not inherently social. Most programmers seem to code much better when they are left to themselves for hours/days/weeks to just fully immerse themselves in the problem that they're trying to solve. Other areas of software development can benefit from having good social skills, for example if you get involved with the customer then you can save a lot of wasted time having to re-write things when they come back and say "that's not what we asked for!".
You also have to bear in mind that not all programming is applications programming There are researchers who may be writing programs to solve specific problems where there is no end user per se. Other people may use the code or ideas that have emerged from solving this problem, but they will probably just read that that in a paper rather than strictly requiring any social interaction. Also when it comes to writing things like device drivers, the only thing you'd really expect to get back from users are bug reports.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for those who actually enjoy computing, they'd all be capable before going into Computer Science. I couldn't believe how many fellow students in 3rd and 4th year just didn't understand programming. When anyone asked for help I tried to give them hints without giving the answers to our assignments, but some clearly didn't care about learning for themselves. They should have been doing liberal arts degrees, or working at McDonalds.. well, they probably are doing that now, but with a nice student loan debt on their shoulders.
Why do people think so much inside the box and reach so low?
Probably because they're being far more realistic than you are.
For one thing, our own immune systems can already "upgrade" themselves - that's how vaccines work.
We can't even fully secure our computers, so how do you expect us to be able to secure our own immune system against real viruses? And even if we do develop an upgraded immune system that is immune to all known viruses and harmful bacteria, what happens when some of our white-listed bacteria (some bacteria in our bodies are symbiotic to an extent, so we'd want to keep them) develop some new mutation that proves harmful to us? We're back to having to patch up our immune system the same way you have to patch a computer.
Right now I like letting my own highly evolved immune system deal with as many problems as it can, and only relying on medicine when my body is unable to protect itself.
It might help on applying for your first job, but after that I presume that your experience will matter a lot more. I wouldn't actually know since I'm still technically on my first job.
In the 90s, I used to use "water" for everything..
Bonus points if you can do networking using multiplayer characters in mine carts.
It's the fries doing that, not the mayo. I never eat fries any more, unless they're sweet potato based (which is delicious btw). When I did eat fries, mayo was great. Hellmans mayo is the best. I tried poutine when I visited Canada and thought it was great, mostly because the place I had it also left the skin on the fries, which was new to me. Here in the UK you can get cheese/chips/gravy from most chip shops, though it admittedly isn't as good as poutine., because they use awful "cheese"
The price tag is that the rest of the world thinks you're an asshole, so you get people adding their body fluids to your food when you dine abroad.
The first two would be detectable under "hand gestures" as mentioned at the end of the summary :p Putting the phone on mute sounds like a winner to me though.
> > > which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them.
> > which encourages bacteria to **evolve** new ways of overcoming them.
> which encourages god to design new ways for bacteria of overcoming them.
which encourages god to increase his research and development funding to develop evolution to allow new ways for bacteria of overcoming them.
We're a small business. I rotate 10 offsite HDDs. I only rotate offsite once a week. Each day I take backups of files between servers, so as long as several servers don't get taken out at once then things are fine. If anything happened that took out all the servers at once, I think we'd have bigger issues to deal with than losing up to 5 days of design work.
Our file server has volume shadow copy for restoring previous versions of files, and our databases are backed up each day onto the file server. So if people need files restored from the last few days/weeks then it's a simple matter to recover them without messing around with the offsite backups.
I also have another HDD that gets a full backup of the file server each day, so that if it died then we could simply plug the HDD into any machine and set up some shares as a temporary solution.
Especially since this particular guy won't go to dinner by himself, but won't talk to you at dinner either. Why does he need someone to go with him then?
Wow. Really does sound like he has issues. I wouldn't like to meet his parents.
This is about the only response that hasn't been completely loaded with crazy ideas of "people should be the way I want them to be". It makes sense. Nice work :)
I said no such thing, I was just asking you some questions. From my response, and others' responses, you should be able to tell that a few people do consider "pleasant" small talk quite inane.
I agree with you that the guy sounds boring, but he doesn't "need" to do anything. Maybe he had horrific things happen to him as a child and can't help being like that. Maybe not. Either way, I can see getting annoyed at someone for not shutting up, but getting annoyed at a co-worker for being too quiet is kind of crazy. This person is not your friend, he is simply a co-worker. You would expect friends to talk to you, but I don't see why you expect all of your co-workers to act like friends.
Notice also that I didn't say that you can't be friends with co-workers. But if this guy can get his job done without speaking to anyone, and is happy to do that, it's his choice.
Yes, but that doesn't mean the explosion will go nuclear. It makes it more like a "dirty bomb", but the fact that it's underground would hopefully stop too many contaminants from getting out.
Just for reference, these bombs aren't nuclear.
That's all true, but I've become much more productive since I wangled my way into a quieter office, and we brought a second IT guy on board to handle most of the basic IT support needs of the company :)
I do have to deal with constantly changing requirements, and currently around 4 or 5 different projects, as well as occasional IT management and second line support duties. I enjoy the programming aspect of my job the most when I have a clear set of goals to work towards, and nobody interrupts me :p
You may notice that I posted the same quote twice in my original post. The second quote was meant to be
It's just a matter of being social and not having the only interest in your life be programming.
My point was that if someone is really only interested in programming, they don't care about being sociable.
Want to get a good job, be valued in the workplace, have a friend of two?
If someone wants these things, then clearly programming is not their only interest. OP was trolling, and I was simply responding to his ludicrously extreme examples.
Sure, but the original hypothetical statement was about someone who was "only interested in programming". That's "shallow" by anyone's standards - and it's a hard thing to imagine given that programmers tend to be helping people in other fields solve problems. But the guy was being an asshole/troll, saying all geeks and quiet people are misanthropes who should get a life. So I thought I'd deal with him at a similarly trollish level by using his extreme example. Anyone who really was that single minded honestly doesn't care if they are a social outcast.
You are assuming that this person even has that kind of job. If they only care about programming, it's a lot more likely that they will work in research. Possibly for a business, but maybe also at a University, and they won't have to deal with requirements, or customers. They may speak to other company researchers, professors and students, but chances are that they will be speaking to them about subjects that they find interesting, and so it won't be a burden for these people to deal with each other. I fail to see the problem.
If someone is going to work as a professional developer in a team, then yes social skills would make things much easier of course.
My point exactly, we rarely get days (and surely never get weeks) to immerse ourselves in a solution space when programming. We can't, as it is a sure way to produce the wrong solution for the wrong problem.
I really don't understand your thinking here. Thinking through problems is just simply necessary sometimes. The longer you think, the better you understand the problem. Sometimes you might choose the wrong path and have to backtrack, but you may have to do that no matter how many people you've talked to. When I was 16 I just woke up one morning having figured out the solution to the problem I had been working on for the past couple of days. If you are immersed in a problem in that way it's a great way to come up with solutions.
Also recently I had to redesign the timesheet system here at work to take into account some new factors for a new project that the company has taken on. I happened to be sick at the same time so I just worked from home, and I flew through the design and coding compared to what I would have been able to do at work (where I often get people coming in and asking me for help).
You keep talking about developers working in a team. If you're working in a team, it's obvious that social skills are useful. There are many people out there just doing programming for fun or research or whatever though. Being a programmer does not have to involve being a sociable person.
Really, and where do they get their requirements for said drivers then? In addition of users bug reports, said programmers get requirements from marketing, market/product development and R&D. I think there is too much focus here on "users". Think stakeholders.
Again I wasn't thinking of professional coders, I was thinking of people who for example wrote a Linux driver so that they could use a particular piece of hardware themselves, and then submitted the driver to the main source tree.
I'm not sure what you mean by "aren't that good". It's pretty egotistical to say that guys like Ken Thompson "aren't that good".
I suppose the fact is that there are different ways to be good at programming - some people are better at solving architectural issues, some are better at finding clever algorithms to solve problems, some people simply organise their code better, etc. So programmers can complement each other by interacting for sure, but that's more in design/thinking stages than when it actually comes to writing code. For coding, I've not read of anyone that actually likes to work in an environment full of distractions. It sounds like maybe you don't mind it. In that case you're either very good at fitting programming problems + social interaction into your head at the same time, or you are working on some really simple problems.
Anyway, what about guys like me who are the only developer in the company, and just have to get on with it themselves? I don't feel that I need a team to help me figure things out. I seem to be getting on fine as-is.
I'm not talking about someone trying to become "successful". He said someone who's only interested in programming. So that would be the programmer equivalent of Grigori Perlman, who is only interested in maths.
Personally I have had girlfriends, and I do have a small group of friends that I enjoy spending time with regularly. I've become better over time at dealing with larger social groups too, but often I just have no enthusiasm for that kind of thing. I'm quite happy to live in my not very connected social world, because it leaves me time for other things.
Did you ever consider that this guy just doesn't like you, or hates the sound of your voice? Are you one of those people that can't stand silence and so have to fill it in with inane ramblings? :p
I get what you're saying, it's all quite sensible - but I think anyone who is really socially aware should try to put themselves in other's shoes rather than expect everyone to be like they are.
It's funny that you should say introverted people can be a drain on others, because that's exactly how introverts feel about all social interaction. Last year I met the quietest woman I've ever met - she finds it incredibly draining to have to be around other people all the time, and prefers at least a day a week to herself to "recharge". I think all of us can understand that feeling to some extent, but there are people out there who have to deal with an exaggerated version of that feeling, and there's very little they can do to change that short of taking medication.
The act of programming itself is certainly not inherently social. Most programmers seem to code much better when they are left to themselves for hours/days/weeks to just fully immerse themselves in the problem that they're trying to solve. Other areas of software development can benefit from having good social skills, for example if you get involved with the customer then you can save a lot of wasted time having to re-write things when they come back and say "that's not what we asked for!".
You also have to bear in mind that not all programming is applications programming There are researchers who may be writing programs to solve specific problems where there is no end user per se. Other people may use the code or ideas that have emerged from solving this problem, but they will probably just read that that in a paper rather than strictly requiring any social interaction. Also when it comes to writing things like device drivers, the only thing you'd really expect to get back from users are bug reports.