I totally get the point, but one must consider the environment in which these statements are being made -- a convention for programmers. In such an environment, the baseline of knowledge and...
I totally get the point, but one must consider the environment in which these statements are being made -- a convention for programmers.
In such an environment, the baseline of knowledge and abilities is skewed towards STEM. This means that, at that venue, a "bad" programmer is probably capable of accomplishing things regular people can't dream of.
While there is the error of overestimating one's own competence, there is also the mistake of overestimating the competence of others.
I guarantee you that there are many people around the world for whom learning to program to a professional or reasonably competent degree would be a complete waste of time.
I am more and more convinced I am just one of those people. And it's not just an issue with programming, it's an issue for things that are long, vast, and complex. I can't be a programmer for the same reason I will never write a novel.
And that's okay. I don't need to do everything.
I can write short stories, and I have concocted quite a few absurds in Emacs and shell. I don't understand what I'm doing, I just copy, paste, and edit things without ever understanding what is going on besides a passing and elementary comprehension.
I lost count of how many books, online courses, and tutorials I tried to learn programming. I usually hit a roadblock when complexity starts to build and I suddenly feel like I'm trapped in a spiderweb, slowly losing my breath. It's like the moment when you realize the difference between learning basic German and reading Freud in the original.
Accepting my incompetence made me happier. Before, I wanted to make my own text adventure in Python just with ifs, elses, whatever. Arrogance, pure and simple. Now that I know I'm incompetent, I'm happy do my text adventure in Inklescript, which is ultra-high-level programming for people that can't really program.
I wanna learn to draw so I can make visual novels in RenPy. Do I know Python? No. But, like Inkle, RenPy is made for incompetent non-programmers like me.
Now that GPT exists, I soon realized that almost everything I need in terms of scripting, either on Windows or Linux, can be entirely provided by AI. Suddenly, one of the reasons I might want to program ceased to exist.
I am not a programmer. I will, quite possibly, never be a programmer. I am so below average it's not even funny. I'm okay with that. I do not feel humiliated or anything like that. I am, quite literally, not talented in programming. That is just the reality. I'm a humanities and arts guy with some interests that intersect with programming.
And that's fine. I'm in peace with the fact that there's things I'll never be good at.
The other day, speaking to media professionals, I asked "who owns the copyright for that music?" Because, that's like video editing 101, right? "It was in the music library." "Yes, but who's the...
The other day, speaking to media professionals, I asked "who owns the copyright for that music?" Because, that's like video editing 101, right?
"It was in the music library."
"Yes, but who's the holder? Does it require attribution?"
It's easy to think that it's easy to do something until you run into something that you find really stupid, ya know? Making a video is super easy, anyone can do it. Commercially releasing a video without opening yourself to a risk of getting sued, or at least a copyright strike, is harder.
Tech companies do need those with 'soft' skills but just working in a tech company doesn't get you those six figure salaries right out of college but being in a tech company usually comes with a certain structure or lack thereof.
I really like that you found a way forward with your ideas and hobbies when traditional programming became a roadblock for you. It would've been a lot easier to just give up, but you found...
I really like that you found a way forward with your ideas and hobbies when traditional programming became a roadblock for you. It would've been a lot easier to just give up, but you found something that works for you and ran with it.
I think you may be selling yourself short. You used words like "incompetent" and "not talented", but it kind of just sounds like you just haven't had the education to do some of the things you...
I think you may be selling yourself short. You used words like "incompetent" and "not talented", but it kind of just sounds like you just haven't had the education to do some of the things you tried to do. I actually had a similar experience. I programmed a very short MUD-like game once as a joke. When I tried to take a further, I realized that expanding my if-else decision tree would take forever. I hadn't done enough learning to get farther, so I just quit. Now I've had a lot more education on programming and I know better, although I haven't tried to create any more text-based games. Well, there's a large gulf between learning the basic functions of a programming language and being able to produce complex software, and a lot of instructional materials are really awful at bridging this gap. However, if you keep going, eventually you realize that you've done more than you thought you could.
That said, there are plenty of things that I've realized that I don't care enough about to learn. I could not draw at all through to adulthood, but I always felt like it would be cool to be able to draw. I went through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and my before/after self-portraits were basically similar to the examples in the book. However, after convincing myself that I could learn to draw, I immediately quit. I just didn't love drawing enough to work on art for hours on end. You don't have to be incompetent to choose to focus your efforts on other things you are more interested in.
I don't see what's so wrong about sorting people into careers based on aptitude (and/or dedication, where this wouldn't make a difference). Not everyone can or should be funneling into tech jobs....
I don't see what's so wrong about sorting people into careers based on aptitude (and/or dedication, where this wouldn't make a difference). Not everyone can or should be funneling into tech jobs. This video is also from 2015, which makes the surplus-mindset with respect to tech jobs feel a bit outdated.
I think the speaker makes a very good point here. I really dislike the myth of inherent genius, and think that most skills can be learned, and it's better to emphasise this. It's really...
I think the speaker makes a very good point here.
I really dislike the myth of inherent genius, and think that most skills can be learned, and it's better to emphasise this. It's really interesting how Japanese companies will hire people, train them up, and then deploy them to a role after years.
I personally feel that some skills are kind of neglected by the tech industry
social skills (I think the key problem in modern tech organisations that makes them unpleasant to work in is the extremely poor internal communication – I've seen this even in startups with <10 employees which is honestly impressive)
very related to the previous talk: the ability to communicate ideas in written form
On a side kind of personal wish list:
understanding of systems (e.g. digital circuit design, assembly programming, syscalls, operating systems, memory allocators, compiler tooling)
how to use a debugger such as [rr][https://rr-project.org]
mathematics (e.g. basic combinatorics such as rules of addition/product, bijections for counting, generating functions, etc) and algorithms (basic algorithms as well as randomized algorithms), some linear algebra, graph theory (and also algebraic graph theory)
Of course many tech companies don't do anything very interesting at a technical level, so this only really applies to those which do (e.g. companies doing systems programming, or systems-adjacent application programming, handling high levels of network traffic/distributed systems).
I totally get the point, but one must consider the environment in which these statements are being made -- a convention for programmers.
In such an environment, the baseline of knowledge and abilities is skewed towards STEM. This means that, at that venue, a "bad" programmer is probably capable of accomplishing things regular people can't dream of.
While there is the error of overestimating one's own competence, there is also the mistake of overestimating the competence of others.
I guarantee you that there are many people around the world for whom learning to program to a professional or reasonably competent degree would be a complete waste of time.
I am more and more convinced I am just one of those people. And it's not just an issue with programming, it's an issue for things that are long, vast, and complex. I can't be a programmer for the same reason I will never write a novel.
And that's okay. I don't need to do everything.
I can write short stories, and I have concocted quite a few absurds in Emacs and shell. I don't understand what I'm doing, I just copy, paste, and edit things without ever understanding what is going on besides a passing and elementary comprehension.
I lost count of how many books, online courses, and tutorials I tried to learn programming. I usually hit a roadblock when complexity starts to build and I suddenly feel like I'm trapped in a spiderweb, slowly losing my breath. It's like the moment when you realize the difference between learning basic German and reading Freud in the original.
Accepting my incompetence made me happier. Before, I wanted to make my own text adventure in Python just with ifs, elses, whatever. Arrogance, pure and simple. Now that I know I'm incompetent, I'm happy do my text adventure in Inklescript, which is ultra-high-level programming for people that can't really program.
I wanna learn to draw so I can make visual novels in RenPy. Do I know Python? No. But, like Inkle, RenPy is made for incompetent non-programmers like me.
Now that GPT exists, I soon realized that almost everything I need in terms of scripting, either on Windows or Linux, can be entirely provided by AI. Suddenly, one of the reasons I might want to program ceased to exist.
I am not a programmer. I will, quite possibly, never be a programmer. I am so below average it's not even funny. I'm okay with that. I do not feel humiliated or anything like that. I am, quite literally, not talented in programming. That is just the reality. I'm a humanities and arts guy with some interests that intersect with programming.
And that's fine. I'm in peace with the fact that there's things I'll never be good at.
The other day, speaking to media professionals, I asked "who owns the copyright for that music?" Because, that's like video editing 101, right?
"It was in the music library."
"Yes, but who's the holder? Does it require attribution?"
It's easy to think that it's easy to do something until you run into something that you find really stupid, ya know? Making a video is super easy, anyone can do it. Commercially releasing a video without opening yourself to a risk of getting sued, or at least a copyright strike, is harder.
Tech companies do need those with 'soft' skills but just working in a tech company doesn't get you those six figure salaries right out of college but being in a tech company usually comes with a certain structure or lack thereof.
I really like that you found a way forward with your ideas and hobbies when traditional programming became a roadblock for you. It would've been a lot easier to just give up, but you found something that works for you and ran with it.
I think you may be selling yourself short. You used words like "incompetent" and "not talented", but it kind of just sounds like you just haven't had the education to do some of the things you tried to do. I actually had a similar experience. I programmed a very short MUD-like game once as a joke. When I tried to take a further, I realized that expanding my if-else decision tree would take forever. I hadn't done enough learning to get farther, so I just quit. Now I've had a lot more education on programming and I know better, although I haven't tried to create any more text-based games. Well, there's a large gulf between learning the basic functions of a programming language and being able to produce complex software, and a lot of instructional materials are really awful at bridging this gap. However, if you keep going, eventually you realize that you've done more than you thought you could.
That said, there are plenty of things that I've realized that I don't care enough about to learn. I could not draw at all through to adulthood, but I always felt like it would be cool to be able to draw. I went through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and my before/after self-portraits were basically similar to the examples in the book. However, after convincing myself that I could learn to draw, I immediately quit. I just didn't love drawing enough to work on art for hours on end. You don't have to be incompetent to choose to focus your efforts on other things you are more interested in.
I don't see what's so wrong about sorting people into careers based on aptitude (and/or dedication, where this wouldn't make a difference). Not everyone can or should be funneling into tech jobs. This video is also from 2015, which makes the surplus-mindset with respect to tech jobs feel a bit outdated.
I think the speaker makes a very good point here.
I really dislike the myth of inherent genius, and think that most skills can be learned, and it's better to emphasise this. It's really interesting how Japanese companies will hire people, train them up, and then deploy them to a role after years.
I personally feel that some skills are kind of neglected by the tech industry
On a side kind of personal wish list:
Of course many tech companies don't do anything very interesting at a technical level, so this only really applies to those which do (e.g. companies doing systems programming, or systems-adjacent application programming, handling high levels of network traffic/distributed systems).