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

  • Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!



    Go here and give us your nominations!
    Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Cad

Cad

scientia potentia est
<Bronze Donator>
26,266
53,551
Tenks said:
That is because we've channeled our powers of autism for good. You can read through the general forum and see people who are channeling their powers of autism for evil.
Click to expand...

I actually didn't spend much time looking for stray commas or spaces or whatever.

Whenever I would help people fix things I was always seriously alarmed that they'd be just sitting there looking at code trying to "figure it out" rather than adding debug statements and really showing whats going on. I'd sit down and plow 20 debug statements in to narrow the problem, then identify the problem code, identify all inputs to the problem code, and it'd be a completely obvious fix. People would stare at me like I'm a voodoo doctor.
 
T

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
14,163
607
That assumes a certain amount of comfort with an IDE and probably already learning from the mistakes previously of having to hunt down some shit because you were too ignorant to understand where/how to use breakpoints effectively. Anymore with a high level of proficiency with unit testing, remote debugging and Intellij experience I can rather quickly and accurately diagnose and fix a problem -- but I also remember that was not always the case. When you start out writing .java files in Notepad you aren't granted such luxury. Possibly things have changed and people learn on full blown IDEs but I feel like having to learn Eclipse AND having to learn how to program at once would be a monumental overtaking. Hell I had to take not one but two classes in high school just to learn Office and Office is easier to use than modern IDEs.
 
Lendarios

Lendarios

Trump's Staff
<Gold Donor>
19,360
-17,424
Tenks said:
Because most people would rather die than spend an hour looking for the one keystroke difference in the input parameter that is causing your program to crash? Or worse yet code that looks perfectly fine and good is not behaving in the expected manner and chasing that for 2 hours? Or having to constantly on a nearly annual basis relearn and reinvent your tool set to make sure you're staying modern? Having to translate from a non-technical person's English into working software that you know for a 100% certainty will have to be modified because it is never right the first time?
Click to expand...

I spent an hour fixing a bug, just to realize, there was a white space at the end of an user entered string that was making things fail.

desk-flip.png
 
Deathwing

Deathwing

<Bronze Donator>
17,074
8,076
Tenks said:
That assumes a certain amount of comfort with an IDE and probably already learning from the mistakes previously of having to hunt down some shit because you were too ignorant to understand where/how to use breakpoints effectively. Anymore with a high level of proficiency with unit testing, remote debugging and Intellij experience I can rather quickly and accurately diagnose and fix a problem -- but I also remember that was not always the case. When you start out writing .java files in Notepad you aren't granted such luxury. Possibly things have changed and people learn on full blown IDEs but I feel like having to learn Eclipse AND having to learn how to program at once would be a monumental overtaking. Hell I had to take not one but two classes in high school just to learn Office and Office is easier to use than modern IDEs.
Click to expand...

IDEs definitely help. I would enjoy writing Python MUCH less without the use of a heavy IDE like PyCharm. I had to do some work with C++99 recently and everyone here uses fucking xemacs, so support for a heavy IDE like visual studio was non existent. It was alarming the difference of stuff I could do(easily) in Python just because of the IDE but not do C++ because I basically had to use a fucking text editor.
 
Noodleface

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
38,500
16,462
Some dudes here refuse to use the ide and insist on a shit load of Unix macros and shit for finding stuff.
 
T

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
14,163
607
Noodleface said:
Some dudes here refuse to use the ide and insist on a shit load of Unix macros and shit for finding stuff.
Click to expand...

Architect at my old job worked on a massive Spring laden Java program and refused to use anything other than emacs. With the amount of Spring integration in Eclipse/Intellij that makes developing Spring apps I couldn't believe she refused to swap.
 
Cad

Cad

scientia potentia est
<Bronze Donator>
26,266
53,551
Tenks said:
Architect at my old job worked on a massive Spring laden Java program and refused to use anything other than emacs. With the amount of Spring integration in Eclipse/Intellij that makes developing Spring apps I couldn't believe she refused to swap.
Click to expand...

I learned to program in vi on a VAX. IDE's are a luxury.

But you have to be holy shitballs stupid not to use IDE's when they are available.
 
alavaz

alavaz

Trakanon Raider
2,004
714
I'd actually prefer to be a full time developer but because my career has mostly been in the "admin" arena, I'd probably have to take a paycut to be a junior dev for a little while and I can't afford that. On the other hand, I get to do plenty of scripting and some small compiled stuff when it makes sense. Realistically the main difference between a 50k admin and a 100k one is that the 100k one is probably competent at programming.

I've worked with lots of old guys (mostly in government) who don't want to learn how to use a debugger so they write in tons of print statements. Problem is that they forget to comment/remove them and have apps that make their way to production with debug shit splattering all over the screen.
 
Deathwing

Deathwing

<Bronze Donator>
17,074
8,076
I understand being comfortable with what you know, especially when it's the thousands of emacs shortcuts. Who knows when programming on an 80-char console will be popular again!?!
 
A

a_skeleton_03

<Banned>
29,948
29,763
So T Tenks the guy I talked to is going to looking into doing it in ROR and thinks it's very feasible. He has agreed to stay open source and on github so that I can later get more people interested in it and build more onto it.

He is doing some research to see what framework he can build on and keep it around $500 for his time.

He works on other big open source projects in his free time and is interested in the idea.
 
T

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
14,163
607
RoR would probably be a good solution for your problemset. I just didn't even think about it since I have no experience with the language and framework.
 
A

a_skeleton_03

<Banned>
29,948
29,763
Tenks said:
RoR would probably be a good solution for your problemset. I just didn't even think about it since I have no experience with the language and framework.
Click to expand...
Yeah I haven't played with it at all. Most of my self hosted stuff I play with is NodeJS or Python. I know a very very tiny bit of it to fix things here and there.

I am really hoping for this guy to just get it all fleshed out and the basics working so that then I can start pushing it around places and get people interested in contributing to it.
 
T

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
14,163
607
RoR is about the least sexy thing out there. May hinder finding people willing to contribute.
 
Cad

Cad

scientia potentia est
<Bronze Donator>
26,266
53,551
Rails is awesome include 47 gems so your site can be 5 lines that nobody can tell what its doing

:Thumbsup:
 
  • 2Like
Reactions: 1 users
wilkxus

wilkxus

<Bronze Donator>
519
210
Deathwing said:
I don't understand the general disdain for writing code. There's a lot of bullshit baggage involved, but just about any job has a bunch of required cruft that you have to do in addition to the good stuff. But actual writing code? Automating the computer in an intelligent and creative manner? IDK, I'll take that all day long, please.
Click to expand...
Lol.... then count yourself as very lucky in the jobs you have had so far.

Just sharing my opinion for others who are thinking of becoming developers.

Vast majority of programming jobs have absolutely NOTHING to do with automating the computer in an intelligent OR creative manner. If you ever do any consulting.... especially business and or finance (where a lot of the money is) .... good luck finding the handfulls of jobs that require intelligence or creativity. The rest just require minions. But you can make boatloads of money fleecing suckers doing dumb shit automation stuff all day.

To stay a developer for along time and fit your definition would IMO require working on products that are interesting, challenging and require skill, intelligence and creativity AND working on a NICE team..... Your average programming gig is not that at all. Some areas like High Performance Computing or big tech companies such as IBM, AMD, Google or Intel you might have an easier time:), but the bar of entry and experience to get there is pretty high.
 
Noodleface

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
38,500
16,462
BIOS was like the most interesting job I could imagine. Unfortunately not many places for that.

Radar is cool too.
 
Ao-

Ao-

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
<WoW Guild Officer>
7,880
507
wilkxus said:
Lol.... then count yourself as very lucky in the jobs you have had so far.

Just sharing my opinion for others who are thinking of becoming developers.

Vast majority of programming jobs have absolutely NOTHING to do with automating the computer in an intelligent OR creative manner. If you ever do any consulting.... especially business and or finance (where a lot of the money is) .... good luck finding the handfulls of jobs that require intelligence or creativity. The rest just require minions. But you can make boatloads of money fleecing suckers doing dumb shit automation stuff all day.

To stay a developer for along time and fit your definition would IMO require working on products that are interesting, challenging and require skill, intelligence and creativity AND working on a NICE team..... Your average programming gig is not that at all. Some areas like High Performance Computing or big tech companies such as IBM, AMD, Google or Intel you might have an easier time:), but the bar of entry and experience to get there is pretty high.
Click to expand...
Part of IBM might be that way, but the lion's share of their employees still do outsourced-IT work, and that's even worse.
 
hodj

hodj

Vox Populi Jihadi
<Silver Donator>
31,672
18,378
So I'm doing this Code Louisville program that is pretty cool. Its a 12 week boot camp where you self instruct learn front and then in a second 12 weeks, back end web server design and management. Totally free, its a government jobs program for the region to try and provide more code monkeys for the local business universe.

Advice is welcome. Biggest hurdle is just completing a project. I got just under 90 days (March 31 at noon to push to Github), a few pretty decent ideas that are manageable, and enough understanding to get started + resources, including free access to Treehouse.

Right now the focus is HTML/CSS/Javascript which, tbh, pretty intuitive and not really that hard to grasp. Putting it all together seems to be the hardest part.

I feel pretty competent to accomplish this, but yeah. I mean advice on work flow or just general advice is welcome.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
You must log in or register to reply here.