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Stumbled upon this blog entry:
One paragraph from the OP instantly stuck out to me.
I don't want to [be] a typical "code monkey". I want to go deep into low level, even to clear math when we talk about computer science, but at same time, I want to have a job in shorter period of time than let's say 3 years. I was switching so many times between Python, C++, Java and I'm nowhere. I know it's bad practise, it's worst, but I don't know, I'm just confused.
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Web development has an extremely low barrier to entry in comparison to, say, systems programming. Setting up a Wordpress blog takes significantly less knowledge and effort than building an operating system.
As a consequence, being a web developer does not carry the same prestige as being a software engineer (whatever that is). God have mercy on your soul if HN or /r/programming learns you implemented some common functionality in NodeJS for fun. (Expect the words "web scale" to show up in the comment thread somewhere).
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As I became more involved in online communities, the narrative became increasingly clear that my confidence and sense of accomplishment were unwarranted. PHP was a terrible language, and PHP developers were terrible programmers. JavaScript was a terrible language, and JS developers couldn't perform asymptotic analysis to save their life. Web developers don't have degrees and it shows in their code. Drupal/Wordpress developers are an absolute joke. Web developers never took a compilers course, so they don't understand just how easy their "jobs" are. Web developers are overpaid for how little they know. Web developers have everything handed to them. Web developers have never had to manage memory or make hard decisions. Web developers have no knowledge of data structures or algorithms. Web developers are not real programmers.
Armed with impulsive spending habits and a sense of urgency, I went to Amazon and purchased just about every programming book not related to web development I could find. Cryptographic protocol implementations in C, Embedded Systems development, Linux Kernel Development, etc. I wanted to learn things that real programmers knew. I wanted to learn the hard things. I bought an Arduino, started hanging out in ##c on freenode, began reading through implementations of the C standard library.
I never fully read any of those books. Most of them I never even started. I didn't do anything substantial with the arduino. I never made it passed analyzing "assert.h" in the C standard library (which I was planning on progressing through alphabetically.)
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When you hate what you do, you stop caring about it. When you stop caring about something, you aren't going to bother learning more about it.
For a period of nearly 3 years, I was stuck in a terribly unproductive mental state. I hated web development, but I didn't know how to do anything else. Web development was all I knew. Bills needed to be paid, so CRUD apps needed to be made.And thus arose my main cognitive dilemma: I hated web development because it was easy, but it was never actually easy to me. Instead of concluding "maybe web development is actually hard and those people don't know what they're talking about", I concluded that I must be a terrible programmer.
Question to SN fellows: have you had moments like this (doesn't matter if in relation with Web development or not)? Have you crossed over them? If true, how?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:29PM
I was thinking this exactly. I've seen the same attitude all over the internet, and in fact I saw the same attitude from my classmates in school and from local professionals.
The thing is... the people with these smug attitudes in reality have almost none of the skills they proclaim to be necessary.
Most of the consultants I see out there write software that looks like it came out of a shop that Microsoft declined to buyout or even bother to spend money discrediting back in the 80's, and it's utterly inefficient, non-expandable, overpriced, and nearly 100% dependent on the continued consulting services of the "pros" that put it together in the first place.
The moral of the story: Do things smart, not the way people on Reddit tell you to do them. There's a good chance the people on Reddit are insane and merely jealous of those who have a modicum of success. Some of them might actually have good jobs and decent amounts of money due to the f***ed up state of our economy, but it doesn't mean their advice is good.
Don't forget to learn the subjects you struggle with but don't think that there are very many people who've mastered all of them nearly as well as they like to go around on the internet TELLING people they have.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @01:57AM
I personally do not mind /r/programming. It is much more 'accepting' of beginners or people just having a brain fart. Unlike here and SD where the attitude is very 'my way or shut the fucking hell up'.
I like this attitude much better. https://xkcd.com/1053/ [xkcd.com] It is seriously fun to teach people who dont know. "oh you have not heard of XYZ check this out your going to love this".
I stick to pretty much the first or second page or top. At that point most of the good stuff has floated to the top and the junk has fallen off. It is rather genericy but it is good sometimes it is good to revisit your basics. You may have been dragging along a bad assumption.
To give you a good example from the old site http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/01/27/1849207/apples-ipad-out-in-the-open [slashdot.org]
I think I can safely say we were WILDLY wrong about that (to be fair some people got it right). The SD and by extension this site have become very insular in its attitude about tech. We look down our nose at other tech sites and other announcements.