1y ago

programmer job in a nutshell

52 comments

She's now qualified to do 90% of my job. Unfortunately the other 10% is explaining why it works.
- There's an anecdote that goes like this:
  An important machine in a factory stops working. No matter what they do they can't get it to work again.
  So they bring in a specialist to solve the problem, for an agreed fee of $1000
  The guy checks the machine over and then goes and presses a specific button and the machine is back working again.
  So the factory manager goes: "All you did was press a button! Why should I pay you $1000 for pressing a button?!"
  To which the specialist answers: "Well, you see, you're paying me just $1 to press the button. The other $999 are for knowing which button to press".
  
  I heard the same story when I was a kid, but it was about a boilermaker. The rest was for knowing where to tap his hammer to fix their problem.
  It's an obviously apocryphal story with two great messages. First, don't undervalue your expertise just because the fix was easy (I still have a problem with that). Second, if you don't know what you're doing don't question the expert just because it looked easy.
  
  It's a real story!
  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/
  At the beginning of the 20th century Henry Ford's electrical engineers had issues they could not solve with a gigantic generator. Henry Ford called Steimmetz, a genius mathematician working for GE to help them.
  When he arrive at the factory he spent 2 days and night listening to the generator and scribbling on his notebook.
  After that he asked for a ladder, climbed on it, put a chalk mark on a specific spot and explain to the engineers that they needed to remove the plate and replace sixteen windings behind the plate. After that the generator worked perfectly and Ford received a $10 000 bill.
  Ford asked for an itemized bill and Steinmetz sent this
  Making chalk mark on generator $1.
  Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
  Ford paid the bill.
- Yeah, but companies everywhere have just laid off the 10% who could do that.
- You can Google that too 🤷🏻‍♂️
  "I don't know shit! I just have, like, a really good memory."
- That last 10%, my friend, is GPT's job not mine
working her way through C++
part of Digital arts curriculum
Might be too high for this, but what??
- Maybe part of a gaming curriculum?
  Like, "learn some code so that when the devs are crying you can make small talk?"
  
  Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.
- There are lots of ways computers are used for making art. Not just video-games. For example, projection mapping, algorithmic music composition, live coding, etc.
  You can look into openFrameworks for examples of C++ in arts.
  
  I get that, but I would have expected Python.
  
  Or libcinder. Or even simply Arduino.
- Just checking an art degree guide: https://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/architecture-course-4-b/
  One of the classes that can be chosen is: 6.4400 Computer Graphics, which has a programming 101a/b class as a prereq (granted, it uses python instead of C++, but pretty sure they used C++ as their language-of-choice for the programming 101 language until recently).
  Given the variety of digital art (video games, VTube avatars/VR avatars, more traditional-style digital art, etc), having the tools to make those kinds of things can be useful for making responsive/interactive digital art.
  
  I'm currently working in game making and a ton of tools for things like 3D model creation (such as Houdini or Substance) use some form of procedural generation where at least understanding programming concepts is important and actual programming is required to do the more advanced stuff.
- A elegant and beautiful piece of code is art.
  
  Even in c++
- I'm very confused as well. Some universities do have ridiculous requirements though. I was planning on being a veterinarian and had to take politics classes. I switched to IT and was required to take general chemistry.
  
  40 years ago at UCLA, I had to do my FORTRAN programs on punch cards submitted through the batch system. The CS/Math department (no CS department then), only offered 1 section in FORTRAN with 40 others in PASCAL. And it was taught by an Engineering professor. Why would a Chemistry major take a computer science class? Remember all those shiny machines CSI uses to do forensic analysis? They came from chem labs.
- I agree, that only makes sense if it's 1999
I've straight up ripped code from StackOverflow that worked... But I had no idea why or how it worked 😂 I taught myself Go and I'm decent at it, one of my coworkers was a former professional programmer who knew C and could fumble his way through Go. I later told him I had no idea what some of the code did because I did the old copy and paste and he just said "I knew you did" 😂
- When someone copies from stack overflow, a reviewer's first question should be "did you copy the question or the answer?"
Oh shit. That's the secret weapon that will get me ahead of my colleagues! I can't believe I'd never thought of it.

52 comments