I qualified in electronics and electrical enginering way back in 1971 and then discovered microprocessors about 5 years later, so I missed the opportunity to get a "proper" education in software. However, being self-educated didn't stop me getting and holding down a succession of software jobs over the years and decades. I always had a mild feeling of being an impostor but in general I was no better and no worse than anyone else. We all made mistakes and we all got some things right, which as far as I can see is all one can really expect.
The following may be a bit of a diversion, but I was left with the belief that the software industry loves to make things more complicated than they need to be, which restricts the pool of talent available. I base this belief on the fact that even after more than half a century of development, software projects continue to have a poor reputation for achieving their aims, staying within budget or even working at all, in spite of massive efforts to ensure that this can never happen. Ordinary human brains are poorly equipped to truly understand computer code, and rather than devising ever more exotic coding structures for the benefit of computers, perhaps we should spend comparable time and effort getting computers to understand the way we think and talk. SQL, HyperScript, Excel macros and other domain-specific products point the way and low-code is promising, but we still have a way to go.
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I qualified in electronics and electrical enginering way back in 1971 and then discovered microprocessors about 5 years later, so I missed the opportunity to get a "proper" education in software. However, being self-educated didn't stop me getting and holding down a succession of software jobs over the years and decades. I always had a mild feeling of being an impostor but in general I was no better and no worse than anyone else. We all made mistakes and we all got some things right, which as far as I can see is all one can really expect.
The following may be a bit of a diversion, but I was left with the belief that the software industry loves to make things more complicated than they need to be, which restricts the pool of talent available. I base this belief on the fact that even after more than half a century of development, software projects continue to have a poor reputation for achieving their aims, staying within budget or even working at all, in spite of massive efforts to ensure that this can never happen. Ordinary human brains are poorly equipped to truly understand computer code, and rather than devising ever more exotic coding structures for the benefit of computers, perhaps we should spend comparable time and effort getting computers to understand the way we think and talk. SQL, HyperScript, Excel macros and other domain-specific products point the way and low-code is promising, but we still have a way to go.