• pinchcramp@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 months ago

    That programming as a career means you’re going to spend writing nice, clean code 80% of the time.

    It’s rather debugging code or tooling problems 50% of the time, talking to other people (whether necessary or not) about 35% of the time and the rest may be spent on actually spending time doing the thing you actually enjoy.

    I may be exaggerating, but only a little.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      In my experience, you’re rather inaggerating. I’m not even 10y into my career and if I get to actually code for 2h a day, that’s already a success. Most of my time nowadays is documentation, meetings, jira, research and calls with the clients.

      • pinchcramp@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 months ago

        I think it heavily depends on the size and (management) culture of your employer. My most recent gig had me sit in way too many meetings that were way too long (1hr daily anyone?), dealing with a lot of tooling issues and touching legacy code as little as possible while still adding new features to our main product on a daily basis. Obviously “we don’t need a clean solution. We’re going to replace that codebase anyways, next year™”.

        The job before that had me actually code for about 80% of the time, but writing tests is annoying and slows you down and we don’t have time for that. Odd how there was always time for fixing the regressions later.

        • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          I think it’s also a question of how you position yourself. Without noticing it, I’ve developed a kind of “will to power” in the sense that I want to shape the product we’re working on. So instead of just sitting in my corner and working on ticket after ticket, I’m actively seeking conversations with stakeholders to find out, whether it even makes sense to implement it as described in the ticket, or propose new ideas, etc.

          Also, my mother taught me (by virtue of being completely untechnical) how to explain complex problems and systems in a way that non-technical people understand. So if “a developer” was needed, management often enough volunteered me.

          I could pull myself mostly out of this stuff, but I’d get even more frustrated not being able to at least try to make things a bit better. So I’m putting on the headset once more.

        • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          also microservices in my experience worsen this sort of bitrot where the amount of usual duplication it involves means that even if you manage not to have poorly documented spaghetti magic that gets updated once in an eon in one service or two it still might be elsewhere and this

          1. discourages refactoring due to the duplication
          2. harms consistency
          3. encourages lousiness because your stuff might mostly work on a surface level with the rest of your system because you only expose APIs and don’t need to worry that much about how your methods will be called. Which might seem convenient to use and implement in an ideal scenario, but could easily become troublesome to debug if anything goes wrong.
  • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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    10 months ago

    That you can just go to a bootcamp, and be good at or naturally suited for it.

    That you can go to college and get a degree, and be good at or naturally suited for it.

      • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        But programming is definitely more open to the idea of people just showing up and claiming to know stuff. You wouldn’t trust Steve to build a bridge just because he watched a bunch of engineering videos on YouTube.

    • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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      10 months ago

      Eh, I’m naturally good at it. I got shoved into the programming UIL group in school with absolutely no background in programming and tied for 3rd place.

      But, I really don’t enjoy doing it.

  • halloween_spookster@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Myth: software engineers replicate value similar to a factory worker making the same item over and over

    Truth: software engineers are closer to artists than factory workers IMO. We find and create new value, not replicate existing value

  • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    That a “working” prototype with no tests is just as good as a carefully-designed and well-tested feature. I see this happen so often that a coder puts a prototype in front of a product manager or exec and they are like, “this is exactly what we need, now! Ship that!” And then misery ensues for all of the engineers that need to maintain this piece of garbage. As managers pressure the engineers to build new features on top, they inevitably break fundamental parts of it, and without a confident leader to demand that tech debt is paid off, that product will consume the souls of many desperate coders.

    In contrast, if you do it right the first time, there will be significant parts of code that never need to change, and the parts that do need to change will be much easier, because it will be obvious if it breaks the tests.

    • nilclass@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 months ago

      That sounds super familiar :D

      Anyway, a prototype is not a bad thing, if the managers know the difference. It’s easier said than done to “do it right the first time” if you don’t know how / what to build. Prototypes can be built to validate hypotheses and generally figure out what works, then build the real thing afterwards.

      • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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        10 months ago

        Yea I should have clarified. Prototypes are a great idea. The problem occurs when you say, “this is good enough we can improve on it as we go.” Yea good luck balancing priorities when everything breaks from tapping your keyboard too hard. You MUST NOT MERGE the prototype.

    • waz@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I like puting my prototype code in namespaces like “garbage” “trash” “throwaway” etc to emphasize how unfit for production. I’ve no concrete evidence of it’s success, but I like to think it dissuades other team members from using it where they shouldn’t.

    • Ethan@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      As my first job out of college (when I didn’t know what I didn’t know) I was hired to build a bespoke inventory system for a manufacturing company. My prototype became a production system the second I showed it to one of the engineers. The next three months of my life were a living hell as I frantically fixed bugs on a live system. Lesson learned.

    • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      oh yeah and the overt emphasis by suits on frontend development because it feels more tangible. like yeah sure we can add a follow button in a couple lines of code… granted you want to allow duplicate requests by non-signed in users or users that block each other with no manual approvals support, no protection against CSRF and the followee not getting notified

  • Addv4@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    That if you know how to code, you understand how computers work and understand really complicated math concepts.

    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      That’s the difference between a programmer and a computer scientist, but even I (a computer scientist) I’m not an expert in hardware, networking, or OS level operations because that’s not my daily focus.

      • Landless2029@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I compare my career to the medical field. Sure there are some crossovers but lots of specialties.

        Would you consult a dentist about your bowel movements?

      • cole@lemdro.id
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        10 months ago

        and what you just described is the difference between a computer scientist and a computer engineer!

    • jadero@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      I call that the “nerd equivalency problem”. I think it’s the source of much (most? all?) of the problems with software that comes out of organizations that are not programming shops by nature.

      “We’re not moving fast enough (or, “I have this great idea!”), hire another nerd!”

      The problem also exists within individual programmers (“sure, I can do that UX/UI thingy, just let me finish building this ray-tracing thingy”), but that’s just an ordinary cognitive weakness that affects us all (thinking that being expert in one field makes one expert in all). It’s the job of proper leadership to resist that, not act as though it’s true.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    “Programming is just writing code”

    Programming is, first and foremost, understanding what the fuck you want/need the computer to do. That means that some programmers (mostly analysts) may understand workflows and processes better than the people whose job depends on their knowledge of said things.

    • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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      10 months ago

      People don’t realize that as you get better at programming, the amount of code you write goes down. At least in my experience, my work day has shifted to 80% thinking about what I’m going to write and then about 20% actually writing it.

          • okamiueru@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            It was the job switch that landed me in that situation. A change from a small company where about 70% was actual productivity, to a large corporation, in a team where there was severe issues with planning and working on the correct problems. So far it’s been 6 months of… well, wondering if I’m missing something, or a bigger picture somewhere, to trying to turn the ship in the right direction. If it’s still like this in another 6 months, I’ll consider a change of scenery.

            • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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              10 months ago

              That’s fair, that definitely can happen with a switch. My first year at my current company was like that and occasionally still is lol. Luckily our next few quarters I’ll be on a team that has much nicer processes so I won’t be twiddling my thumbs waiting for solid requirements.

              • okamiueru@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                waiting for solid requirements

                This is exactly the situation. Except that my team consisting of consultants just “started”, instead of trying to scope out the constraints and larger picture. I joined a month or so after.

                Six months, and the result so far of their exploration is a fairly uninteresting happy-path use of some technologies, barely related to the task that had unclear requirements. Turns out the work done is unsuited for it. Boggles the mind how much resources are wasted on such things.

                Feels extremely unrewarding to have worked, relatively hard, for half a year, and the fruits of my labour is… getting to the point where the actual problems are solved. Which one could have done from day one, if one had started in a team without wrong preconceptions, or, no team, for that matter.

                • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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                  10 months ago

                  Yeah I would not like that situation at all. I was very adamant about not starting our latest project until we had firm requirements. Of course that didn’t happen but I was very careful about designing in a way to be flexible enough to change to requirements. Had a major change halfway through but only lost a week or two which could’ve been much worse.

  • Cyclohexane@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    Requiring a candidate to know a specific programming language is stupid. Nearly all of the commonly used languages in industry are similar.

    It’s maybe more valuable to require knowledge in a specific framework, where knowledge is less transferrable between popular frameworks. Nonetheless, I personally rather hire an engineer that solves problems and learns flexibly rather than one that happens to know the right tech.

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I’d say this is pretty dependent on the language. For example, with C++, you need to micromanage (or at least benefit from micromanaging) a lot of things that you can get away without knowing about at all with other languages. That stuff takes time to pick up if you’re self-teaching as you can write stuff that looks like it works without knowing its half as fast as it could be because you aren’t making use of move semantics, and if a colleague is teaching you, then that’s time they’re not spending directly doing their own work. On the other hand, someone with Typescript experience could write pretty decent Javascript from the get-go.

      • CodeMonkey@programming.dev
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        10 months ago

        C++ is unique in that it is wildly dominant in its niche. I am sure that any developer who has worked with another object oriented, manually memory managed, systems programming language (are there any other popular ones out there?) should have no trouble picking up C++.

        • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          There are other rarely-used C+±like languages that fit your criteria, and they basically all aim to eliminate the kind of thing I was talking about. If someone was used to one of those and tried picking up C++ for the first time, they’d probably end up with working, but unnecessarily slow C++, having assumed the compiler would do a bunch of things for them that it actually wouldn’t.

          The popular low-level systems programming languages that aren’t C++ are C and Rust. Neither is object-oriented. C programmers forced to use C++ tend to basically write C with a smattering of features that make it not compile with a C compiler, and produce a horror show that brings out the worst of both languages and looks nothing like C++ a C++ programmer would write, then write a blog post about how terrible C++ is because when they tried using it like C, it wasn’t as good at being C as C was. Rust programmers generally have past experience with C++, so tend to know how to use it properly, even if they hate the experience.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      10 months ago

      I used to agree, but now I’m not so sure. There are huge time savings in having someone already familiar with a specific technology. They’ve ran across an issue before and can quickly find the solution.

      For example, I started learning Elixir a little over a year ago. I struggled with how to get it to change data in place, and the answer is that you don’t. You work with data in an immutable way; you make a copy with the change made and throw away the original. Once you get used to it, this works very nicely, and Elixir has quickly become one of my favorite languages. However, few other languages force you to work immutably, and nobody does it voluntarily. It takes a bit to get your head around it, and you’ll take a lot longer on any given task until you do.

    • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      It’s not a black and white issue. “Jack of all trades, master of none” vs “expert of one”. Both have their place and I think it’s better to have a mix than just one or the other.

      I’ve seen python newcomers writing code as if they were writing in another language. They don’t know about dataclasses, operator overrides, __init__ vs __new__, metaclasses, __init__.py vs __main__.py, @property, match, the walrus operator, or assignments, or the common pitfalls of python like mutable defaults, type hints, and a bunch of other things.
      Knowing a language in-depth helps write DRY code, avoiding common pitfalls, handling things better like debugging, profiling, and other tooling, and avoiding pitfalls of the language, which newcomers have to first learn, regardless of how their experience with other languages.

      A lot of stuff is transferable, for sure, but every language uses different idioms, covers different paradigms, and so on. It’s good to have at least one expert on the term to teach others, and to have people flexible enough to switch of willing to learn. Having only experts can mean a static team unwilling to experiment or use better programming languages or technologies. Having only beginners or mediors of a language can produce functional, but sub-optimal code. YMMV

      CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    • neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      I generally agree with this, there’s specific circumstances but for the most part its true.

      I went from a C# position to PHP, to Python, to perl all with little or no experience with what I was jumping in to. There’s different nuances and the syntax might take a bit to get used to but as long as someone understands the how and why of what their code is doing that can be pretty easily transfer to most other languages. It’s all about the fundamentals.

    • CodeMonkey@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      It is better to find a developer that has experience with the language features you use rather than one that is experienced in the exact language you use. For example, I work on distributed systems in Java/GoLang/Python. We want candidates that understand how to write concurrent logic and stay away from people who are just Java web developers.

      The big issue is doing a coding interview with candidates. We have a standard straightforward problem that candidates need to solve by filling in a stubbed out method. We have it in Java and have ported it to GoLang. If we have to interview a candidate who does not know either of those languages, we would need to find a language that the candidate knows and we know well enough to port the problem to. We would also have some difficulty digging in to design specifics like choice of concurrency primitives.

  • jplee@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Programming != Computer Science. Programming is just a tool used in computer science. Computer Science is so much more and follows scientific theory and methodology.

    • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      CS is also what most problems on leetcode and the like are about. Programming is just application of CS concepts, usually wrapped in several layers of abstraction, to domain specific problems. But I’ve never seen a job posting for a computer scientist specifically, yet we all know how it often looks like.

    • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      especially if the other person uses some stupid bloat like MIUI. I assume under the hood it must be a real hot mess if in the process of adding new features they broke support for standard stuff if last time I needed to do something on two people’s xiaomis these shitboxes didn’t show a password below the wifi qr code and it has this thing with accent colors derived from wallpaper but absolutely no control over it unlike in standard android despite the fact that it landed two major releases ago.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    This one’s a hot take, but: That Python is easy.

    I’ve had to work with it in three projects in the past five years and I consider it one of the hardest programming languages, for anything but very short scripts.

    You don’t get proper compiler assistance, unless you have 100% test coverage. You don’t get a helpful text editor. You don’t usually get helpful type hints in libraries you use, so you have to genuinely just study the documentation and/or code. You get tons of quirky behavior in the stdlib, build tools, async stack, imports. You get breaking changes in minor versions of the language.

    I find writing code in Python extremely mentally taxing, because you just get so little assistance, that you have to think of everything yourself.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      Dynamically typed languages all suffer that fate. There’s a reason Typescript literally has that feature in its name.

      What does help though is type hinting. You “just” have to enforce it and its fallout in your entire codebase.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Yeah, we invested a lot of time into type hinting and checking, but mypy would never exit without warnings and errors, because many libraries we were using had no type hints.
        It was also just exhausting/cumbersome, having to write type hints everywhere, as there’s no type inference.

        But yeah, we always joked that someone should create TypeScript for Python – Typhon.

        • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Part of the investment has to be only using libraries that have type hints.

          But yeah - I definitely prefer strongly typed languages. Or at least languages like Swift where you have to jump through a few hoops to have a dynamic type (in Swift there is an “Any” type but you have to write a bunch of code checking what the variable contains before you can actually worth with it). Basically you have to convert it to a static typed variable before it can be touched. Thankfully there’s pretty good syntax for that. Including an arbitrary way to convert almost anything to a string (essential for debugging).

    • Rimu@piefed.social
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      10 months ago

      Try the PyCharm IDE. It’s really smart and helpful. The free ‘community edition’ is fine.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        I’m sorry to say this, but PyCharm is precisely what we were using. I do consider it the best Python editor, but it’s several classes below IntelliJ for Java/Scala/Kotlin or even the extremely new RustRover for, well, Rust. And I’d say roughly at the level of KATE (a non-smart text editor) with just the rust-analyzer language server hooked up.

        It is extremely impressive what PyCharm manages to analyze in Python, but other languages offer similarly good tooling out of the box, or make such analysis much easier by having static types.

    • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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      10 months ago

      I don’t know if i qualify as a full programmer, I’m an actuarie but 90% of my work is in python, 5% SQL and 5% excel. I love python because is flexible as fuck, I can connect to the SQL server, send the queries to a pd.DataFrame, process the information, scrap some webpage for adicional information needed, and finally export to an excel file that the accounting team can use. I don’t write fully functional programs, but small specific scripts for different tasks. R is another popular programming language between actuaries and statisticians, but I haven’t find anything that R can do, that I can’t in python.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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        I don’t write fully functional programs, but small specific scripts for different tasks.

        This is exactly why your experience is different and you like Python better than many others. You are using Python as it was meant to be used and where it excels; for small scripts.

        When people say they don’t like Python they mean that Python does a really, really bad job when it comes to larger systems. Static analysis becomes exponentially more important in larger systems and Python has basically 0 of that.

        But as long as you stick to relatively small stuff (less than a few thousand lines), Python is pretty nice and fast to develop in.

        • Flipper@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          So you are saying using python to write the server for a federated multimedia messenger is a bad idea.

          Let me tell you, I’m shocked😲

        • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          also just plain readability. Indentation-based scoping is horrible for larger codebases. Maybe if it was a purely-functional language like Haskell where this sort of scoping works better and all effects are tightly contained. But most larger codebases tend to use python in OO way and that can get messy pretty quickly. Damn, if python had a piping operator like elixir that’d be of a lot of help, actually. Plus there is so much legacy code in a language that had e.g. ternaries long before adding something seemingly so fundamental as switch-case.

    • aluminium@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Agree, also just in general I find many things Python very odd and syntactically isolated to some extent. Constructors, lamba, dictionaries in particular are extremly whack.

    • alsimoneau@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      I’m a scientist that has been coding almost exclusively in Python for the past decade and I strongly disagree.

      Python is great at being the glue that holds everything together, and everything crunchy part of the program is being handled by a library anyways.

      I code with two terminals, one for iPython and one for vim. And you don’t need anything else. The beauty of Python is that it’s not a language that is so full of boilerplate that you need an IDE to type it for you to be remotely productive.

      Overall, Python is a language made to be used by people that need to make something that just works and don’t need to spend years learning programming paradigms and industry practices. Fortran and C are so unwieldy in comparison and everything more modern lacks the expansive and diverse libraries of Python.

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    10 months ago

    Technical Leads are not rational beings and lots of software is developed from an emotional stand point.

    Engineering is trade offs, every technical decision you make has a pro/con.

    What you should do is write out the core requirements/constraints.Then you weigh the choices to select the option that best meets it.

    What actually happens is someone really likes X framework, Y programming language or Z methodology and so decides the solution and then looks for reasons to justify it.

    Currently the obvious tell is if they pitch Rust. I am not saying Rust is bad, but you’ll notice they will extoll the memory safety or performance and forget about the actual requirements of the project.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      Currently the obvious tell is if they pitch Rust

      I would amend that to “if they pitch any language”.

      The best language is almost universally “whatever we already use” or for new projects “whatever the team is most familiar with”. It should occasionally be reconsidered, and definitely try out new languages, but actually switching to the new language after trying it out? That should be very very rare.

      • stevecrox@kbin.run
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        The team/organisations knowledge is a huge factor but its easy to fall into a trap where no matter what the problem is the solution is X language.

        If I have an organisation that knows C# and we need to build a Web Application. I would suggest we need to learn Node.js and Typescript and not invest in a solution that turns C# into web pages.

        • fuzzzerd@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          Wait, are you seriously overlooking ASP.NET and suggesting c# tes learn typescript and node to build web apps?

          I get that it’s a hypothetical, but typescript and node shouldn’t be the first stop on the we need to build a web page train for folks already in the c# wagon.

  • rodbiren@midwest.social
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    10 months ago

    No programming language, development philosophy, or technology can save you from projects and business lacking clarity. Your ability to communicate and be understood is as/perhaps more important than the quality of your ideas. Consistency is better than perfection.

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I’ve got a lot of these.

    Programming is not doing leetcode problems all day long. Those problems can be a good brain exercise or a good prep for a [misguided] technical interview but in a real programming job you have next to no chance of running into problems like those. Even if you do, you’re an idiot if you spend hours toiling away at a problem that somebody else already solved much more efficiently than you will. Your boss doesn’t give a crap if you pulled all of the code straight from your brain.

    Programmers are not hackers. The reverse might be true but hacking is about finding problems (and exploiting them) while programming is about fixing problems.

    A programmer can do anything that involves code. Maybe not quite this succinct but I think most will assume you can write a mobile app or a website just because you say you can code. Websites, games, apps, and so on are written in code but they all involve different technologies, toolsets, and standards. I’m sure I could fumble my way through any kind of software but don’t expect it done quickly if it’s not my area of expertise.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      Especially regarding the first one: this seems like a very US-centric thing - or maybe a non-german thing. I’ve been in a bunch of interviews on both sides of the table here in Germany and I’ve literally never encountered a single leetcode question. At all.

    • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      I’m pretty sure that when programmers and other techies call themselves “hackers”, they don’t mean in the security-breaching sense. It means that you can “hack together” something.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Programmers are not hackers. The reverse might be true but hacking is about finding problems (and exploiting them) while programming is about fixing problems.

      You have to find a problem before you can fix it. All good programmers are hackers.

      • Sickday@kbin.run
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        10 months ago

        You don’t need to be a hacker to find those problems. You need to be a good detective. All good programmers are detectives.

      • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Programmers have the source code right in front of them, hackers usually don’t. It’s quite amazing what they can do taking shots in the dark.

        • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          depends. Desktop code, sure, reverse engineering from assembly takes some time but some good dissasemblers might be able to produce some C skeleton to start from. Though you might get lucky just exploiting the supply chain of bloated open source with a hellton of vulnerabilities deps/infra like glibc, apache or sudo.

          But web code? Sure, minifiers exist but not every website uses them and even if their do, thanks to all the new stuff since ES5 you can for example spend way less time doing something like finding a Math.random() based, ergo cryptographically utterly broken PRNG.

          Or for example you can easily rule out whether the website uses header-to-cookie based CSRF protection by just checking the console on any authenticated write-like request. The rest could be automated with things like zaproxy or selenium/curl-impersonate/puppeteer scripts.

          • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            “Hacking” also has plenty of specialties like programming. When I think of hacking my first thought is remote, non-http services. Webservers are fair game for hacking but they’re also meant for public consumption so I’d guess monitoring is a bit more severe (not that companies don’t skimp on intrusion detection).

    • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      tbh the biggest upside of competitive programming sites was when I finally learned some Scala so that I can feel smug about my elegant one-line solutions dabs in a very specific way that makes my arms resemble a lambda /s