Name: sage 2011-07-07 23:08
Hello /prog/. I'm a software engineer from Los Angeles. I make $74,000/yr and I'm 24 years old. Both my age and salary are roughly industry standard for programmers at my experience level.
I visit /prog/ often as I almost always find something interesting or at least funny, however as I was reading through today, at work, a thought struck me: Students, either high schoolers or college level, with no experience in this field, might actually believe real-world programming is like this. This is why I'd like to leave a short message to everyone not yet employed full-time in this industry:
Programming is nothing like what is represented on this board. Absolutely and totally nothing like it. This will be obvious to my colleagues here, who are also gainfully employed (meaning, getting flown around the country occasionally to go to mostly useless conferences on your company's dime), and are just trolling with the endless Lisp / Haskell / Whateverthefuck-useless-academic-language debates.. But to the kids here, you should know that what you're doing is useless and will not carry over to a job where your boss needs something done on a system that actually does useful things.
You can troll each other about Lisp and number theory with your brand new copy of SICP in hand, that's fine, but be sure you spend time learning perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, and some C variant. Learn basic SQL syntax and usage. Learn basic system administration and Bash. When you actually have rent to pay and your boss telling you the company needs a live chat module by next Monday, you'll need to be able to actually accomplish things, in a programming language others can maintain, on a system already in place. Spoilers: That language will not be Lisp.
Sure, there will be fringe mentions of Lisp or Haskell monads here and there, and that weird autismal guy who's 38 and single and published a math paper who does this crap in his free time is eager to ramble about it.. But even then you probably don't want to get cornered in the break room by him because he's fucking autismal and you have real work to do.
Just thought I'd get that off my chest.
I visit /prog/ often as I almost always find something interesting or at least funny, however as I was reading through today, at work, a thought struck me: Students, either high schoolers or college level, with no experience in this field, might actually believe real-world programming is like this. This is why I'd like to leave a short message to everyone not yet employed full-time in this industry:
Programming is nothing like what is represented on this board. Absolutely and totally nothing like it. This will be obvious to my colleagues here, who are also gainfully employed (meaning, getting flown around the country occasionally to go to mostly useless conferences on your company's dime), and are just trolling with the endless Lisp / Haskell / Whateverthefuck-useless-academic-language debates.. But to the kids here, you should know that what you're doing is useless and will not carry over to a job where your boss needs something done on a system that actually does useful things.
You can troll each other about Lisp and number theory with your brand new copy of SICP in hand, that's fine, but be sure you spend time learning perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, and some C variant. Learn basic SQL syntax and usage. Learn basic system administration and Bash. When you actually have rent to pay and your boss telling you the company needs a live chat module by next Monday, you'll need to be able to actually accomplish things, in a programming language others can maintain, on a system already in place. Spoilers: That language will not be Lisp.
Sure, there will be fringe mentions of Lisp or Haskell monads here and there, and that weird autismal guy who's 38 and single and published a math paper who does this crap in his free time is eager to ramble about it.. But even then you probably don't want to get cornered in the break room by him because he's fucking autismal and you have real work to do.
Just thought I'd get that off my chest.