IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

I would imagine a high end hair salon would require quite a different underlying implementation. Like a great clips would be more concerned with storing a bunch of rows but a high end place would be more concerned with storing more information per-row. As such a high end place would almost certainly want a SQL backend but possibly something like great clips would be able to harvest more relevant data if you just backend to a NoSQL and do the data mining later such as staffing requirements for Friday in the afternoon vs staffing requirements for a Tuesday night. Where the boutique would be more concerned with storing enough information about each individual person so they can cater to their needs each time such as "Molly uses cucumber shampoo and likes her hair cut in a certain fashion." Though I highly doubt that is what the professor is going for so I'm not 100% sure I understand what he's after.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

Nothing to do with Comp Sci specifically but I am hating every second of my degree right now.

Juggling 3 classes and work and a startup right now.

My IFSM 300 Information Systems in Organizations class is very little to do with actual IT work. I am "advising" a fictitious hair salon at how to bring IT into their salon but the professor is more interested that we know about haircuts. In my first assignment he told me I should research the prices for contracting out salon work to weddings to help increase her revenue. I don't give a shit about how much a haircut costs. I care about how what software she is using to schedule and how she is managing her website and payment processors and the like. It doesn't matter if the hair cut is $40 or $125 it still needs the same infrastructure.

I hate college.

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Yup I remember my IS 320 class, what a joke.

The only thing that was more of a joke is how some of the students all sucked up to the adjunct and the completely worthless reading material with fake self important pusedo business terms; meanwhile shitting on the Unix professor for trying to teach regular expressions and Vi.

You guys are getting way to real and way to deep into that fictitious analysis paper, most of the case studies are "Shopa bla bla bla has NO technology and they are finding that its getting more and more time intensive every month to do whatever by hand with the old paper books, your hired as an analysis to come in and recommend a solution" and don't forget "company boobooboo wants to increase their DIGITAL MARKETING..*brain turns off*" - write a report on a CRM and make up bullshit expenditure -> gains numbers like the real world, literally everywhere in the past 5 years that has hired a "new tech savvy" marketing director, they need to fire them all.. but the report is simple because its ALL bullshit!

xadion_sl said:

You guys are getting way to real and way to deep into that fictitious analysis paper, most of the case studies are "Shopa bla bla bla has NO technology and they are finding that its getting more and more time intensive every month to do whatever by hand with the old paper books, your hired as an analysis to come in and recommend a solution" and don't forget "company boobooboo wants to increase their DIGITAL MARKETING..*brain turns off*" - write a report on a CRM and make up bullshit expenditure -> gains numbers like the real world, literally everywhere in the past 5 years that has hired a "new tech savvy" marketing director, they need to fire them all.. but the report is simple because its ALL bullshit!

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zzzz.

OK, then 99.9% of papers would just be buy Salesforce. Done.

The rest would somehow justify SAP.

Well at least that's a real life example vinen

Renault_sl said:

I have a question for everyone going back to the beginning of this whole thread. I'm many years out of college with a major in history, I've worked a variety of jobs over the years and I'm currently bored out of my mind. I would like to transition into a new career and something in the tech field is very appealing to me.

I'm not interested in going back to school for another degree and ignoring for now the question of CS degree vs self taught programming for job prospects what is the best path to start learning; jump straight into a language (Java, Python, C variant?) or start off with something like the MIT open courses?

As it stands having skimmed through this whole thread obviously 90% of the discussion flew completely over my head so I'm wondering when first starting out what a reasonable expectation time wise would be to feel like you aren't just drowning in new terminology and concepts. Also is it generally expected that you go into programming knowing already that you love it or have any of you gotten to that place as you learned it more in depth.

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I know I'm late to the party on this but I generally agree with what was already posted. I'd list order of learning from a practical standpoint to be this:

Basic computer and OS components (I assume you already know this)

Procedural programming/scripting (Python and PERL are great IMO)

Learn more advanced scripting. Download some basic open source libraries and read and understand what the code does. Write your own function libraries to handle a specific problem and then compare approaches.

After getting a handle here, taking some intro classes online and really doing pretty well with procedural programming, it's time to revisit hardware. Take a class on OS and hardware. Understand I/O stacks, how a bus works, drive speeds and memory management schemes.

Now turn to daddy C. Start off by learning to do all the shit that was super easy in python and PERL in C. Get all the syntax down, get comfortable with basic memory management, learn about libraries, get used to using a compiled language instead of an interpreted one. Get used to using an IDE instead of notepad++. Become used to debugging complex code and utilizing both IDE debugging tools and manual console output you added.

Now learn about references and the basics of more advanced concepts and object oriented programming. At this point you will need to understand the differences between structures and classes, functions and methods. Get a handle on instantiation, inheritance, parent/child relationships in OOP, polymorphism, overloading operators, etc.

Once you are comfy with the basics and all these concepts, you are pretty grounded and ready to stop making shit text only applications like calculators and fake point of sale systems with inventory in teststuff.txt and things like that. I would then take all that knowledge and try to dig into the languages and types of applications you want to learn. By this point you may not know the syntax but when you watch a vid/lecture/example and they are talking about ensuring the array is initialized but to make sure you save memory by only passing a pointer to your next method, it all makes sense and you can follow along. You will start off with "hello world" once again but you will blitz through to the interesting stuff.

I do think everyone who wants to program should eventually learn C/C++ and should learn to program with limited computing resources.

Or skip everything Palum said, and get the Head First C# or Head First Java book, depending on which OOP model you prefer. Fuck unmanaged code.

Khane_sl said:

Or skip everything Palum said, and get the Head First C# or Head First Java book, depending on which OOP model you prefer. Fuck unmanaged code.

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And then be functionally useless because while you know the syntax and a few general basics you don't know shit.

Vinen_sl said:

And then be functionally useless because while you know the syntax and a few general basics you don't know shit.

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You're right. It was implied in my post that he then immediately go look for senior level positions after reading a book.

Palum was talking about trying to learn scripting, and C, and hardware. Why? Pick one thing and run with it. Scripting languages are a good suggestion, but if you aren't planning on going back to school full time why would you even bother with hardware or a language like C? learn a managed code base, it's way quicker to pick up and get going and find a good career with.

Khane_sl said:

You're right. It was implied in my post that he then immediately go look for senior level positions after reading a book.

Palum was talking about trying to learn scripting, and C, and hardware. Why? Pick one thing and run with it. Scripting languages are a good suggestion, but if you aren't planning on going back to school full time why would you even bother with hardware or a language like C? learn a managed code base, it's way quicker to pick up and get going and find a good career with.

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Goodluck entering the industry without an internship. Junior positions are far and few between. The only way I see companies taking the risk anymore is with interns.

So this is where we start shoveling anecdotal evidence down each other's throats right?

I think we already did that 20.pages ago

And 20 pages before that