@Jmv38 - Good point! However, I do think programming ‘leads’ should take some responsibility on ensuring some ‘house rules’ are adhered to regarding coding style on projects - especially large ones.
Problem solving aside, I guess the main implication of your companies internal paper is whether having freedom of choice has an impact on the end result in respect to correctly functioning code. Unit testing should alleviate this, as would in more mission critical applications (e.g. military, medical, aviation) using the dreaded ‘formal methods’ approach to mathematically proving that code works which is ‘real’ software engineering in my book.
Back to the original point though, I think @time_trial is spot on with his view that the idea of a what a ‘developer’ is will diverge into a number of different camps in the future.
From all the previous posts I think the concept of a ‘programming job’ is really broad and ranges from writing Excel macros and shell scripts to writing guided missile code and Z80 assembler to control washing machines. All different industry sectors, but the basic coding concepts are pretty much the same.
I was a nuclear simulator engineer for a few years. The code was mostly FORTRAN, with some C++, and lots of little misc codes. The pay was very competitive.
The key to choosing your career is finding something you can be passionate about 8 hours a day and really enjoy. Then become the expert at it. As was mentioned previously it takes normal people about 10,000 hours of practice to begin to enter the professional realm.
It really doesn’t matter (to a certain extent) what the pay is as long it is enough to live off of and you enjoy it.
Seek all the education you can, for me that was a master’s degree. Again as was mentioned previously, the major of your degree doesn’t matter to a certain extent, what matters is you have one and the experience to prove you can do what they are looking for. This world will pay you largely what they think you are worth.
Build on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Some people were never meant to be programmers, and some people were never meant to be artists. Don’t waste your time practicing something you’ll never be good at.
Develop awesome communication skills and the ability to be likable by/get along with anyone, especially people you personally loathe.
For those who don’t make it to professional programmer, and end up in business, I strongly recommend getting to know Excel well, and - since you can already program in Codea - VBA as well. VBA is quite similar to Codea.
Excel skills make you extremely valuable, especially as hardly any business users take any trouble to learn them. The best part is that almost every company relies on Excel, so you are not trapped in one industry.
I had a lot of fun with Excel over many years - not as much as with Codea, of course, but a lot of fun, all the same. So business doesn’t have to be boring…
@Jmv38. That is good, I learn the most through failure it seems like. I call it the personal debugger. Dale Carnagie’s tactics in his book, “How to win friends and influence people” (the orignal 1970-1980s ones, the ones he actually wrote, not the new digital age ones some one else wrote using his name) make me sick to my stomach, but work amazingly well.
@ignatz Sound advice. VBA in excel has let me do data mining so fast, my bosses have thought I was lying when I said I was done with an assignment they thought would take days. I felt like Scotty in Star Trek.
@Andrew_Stacey lol! You dont program the universe! No way! You try to understand how it is programmed. I belived math pre-exist the human brains that discover it. Which is subject to debate among scientists, i know…
@Prynok we come up with more and more equations to torture students with.
When I say “mathematician”, I mean “professional mathematician” in that I’m a researcher and lecturer in mathematics. Half my time is spent teaching students, the other half is spent doing research, meaning either inventing or discovering new mathematics (depending on which side of Jmv38’s philosophical dichotomy you prefer).
@stevon8ter that’s one of the many mind blowing fractals that exist now, I’m no maths lecturer but I’m positive finding new fractals would fall in to Andrew_Stacey’s job role.
