It's not for everybody. As well as writing, poetry, music, architecture, construction, medicine, law.
You have to put in time and patience, be persistent, curious, driven to be a software engineer. Well that's probably true for any profession if you wanna be good at it. You also have to have a good memory, logical/analytical thinking, attention to details, etc. You also have to work a lot on your own to improve. Day after day after day. So traits, yeah. Mindset.
The 'C++ in 21 days' fallacy. People have this idea that if they go through a book like this, it means they're developers. 21 days is not even enough to go through STL thoroughly. Sure, you'll learn the syntax, but that can be compared to knowing how details of a complicated mechanism look like. It doesn't help with building or understanding the mechanism. People usually don't think they can become doctors after reading a couple of medical books.
The high demand/low supply situation we're in. Even a mediocre developer will be hired for an enormous amount of money. So yeah, why won't I complete a 'crash course in javascript' and go earn some $$$? Sure, it works, today. However, the ability to earn money with writing code doesn't make me a good software engineer. Doesn't make a software engineer at all. Don't know how to name it.
I've seen this a lot. I've seen software engineers that don't understand how a filesystem works, not on a primitve level, or network, or memory, or CPU, you name it. In spite of their programs interact with all of these, constantly. They just don't care. People don't see any problems when deduplicating a list with O(n2) algorithms. It doesn't qualify as engineering in my book.
Then, this beautiful mindset of justifying half-baked products. Even here, there's a comment that says - it's OK because everybody does it. Sure, why not? Let's build a bridge in a hurry, not test it and open it. And there will be followers! Isn't it great that people don't die of software deficiencies (well usually, sometimes they do)?
As a result of all this combined, here's what we have: text editors 1GB in size that can't load 10MB files and fail to switch tabs smoothly; terminal emulators with 500 ms lag as soon as you open 20 tabs; websites with 10s loadtime; and bugs, bugs, inconsistencies, half-bakery everywhere.
I'd like people to not contribute to it. To not make it even worse.
Yes, I agree. This is partly why I want to write a series of books/essays. There's a lot of people that got into programming for a specific job and may want to learn more, but just don't know what the field has in store. I want to give a chance to everybody, regardless of background, to see everything that is programming.
I’m not sure how a book will help them to look around. There’s a ton of information on fundamental stuff that matters, it’s just only a small fraction is interested in it.
I think I know what you mean, but would you care to clarify? I assume you mean in terms of personality, desires, and innate skill alignment.
There are multiple aspects to this.
It's not for everybody. As well as writing, poetry, music, architecture, construction, medicine, law.
You have to put in time and patience, be persistent, curious, driven to be a software engineer. Well that's probably true for any profession if you wanna be good at it. You also have to have a good memory, logical/analytical thinking, attention to details, etc. You also have to work a lot on your own to improve. Day after day after day. So traits, yeah. Mindset.
The 'C++ in 21 days' fallacy. People have this idea that if they go through a book like this, it means they're developers. 21 days is not even enough to go through STL thoroughly. Sure, you'll learn the syntax, but that can be compared to knowing how details of a complicated mechanism look like. It doesn't help with building or understanding the mechanism. People usually don't think they can become doctors after reading a couple of medical books.
The high demand/low supply situation we're in. Even a mediocre developer will be hired for an enormous amount of money. So yeah, why won't I complete a 'crash course in javascript' and go earn some $$$? Sure, it works, today. However, the ability to earn money with writing code doesn't make me a good software engineer. Doesn't make a software engineer at all. Don't know how to name it.
I've seen this a lot. I've seen software engineers that don't understand how a filesystem works, not on a primitve level, or network, or memory, or CPU, you name it. In spite of their programs interact with all of these, constantly. They just don't care. People don't see any problems when deduplicating a list with O(n2) algorithms. It doesn't qualify as engineering in my book.
Then, this beautiful mindset of justifying half-baked products. Even here, there's a comment that says - it's OK because everybody does it. Sure, why not? Let's build a bridge in a hurry, not test it and open it. And there will be followers! Isn't it great that people don't die of software deficiencies (well usually, sometimes they do)?
As a result of all this combined, here's what we have: text editors 1GB in size that can't load 10MB files and fail to switch tabs smoothly; terminal emulators with 500 ms lag as soon as you open 20 tabs; websites with 10s loadtime; and bugs, bugs, inconsistencies, half-bakery everywhere.
I'd like people to not contribute to it. To not make it even worse.
Yes, I agree. This is partly why I want to write a series of books/essays. There's a lot of people that got into programming for a specific job and may want to learn more, but just don't know what the field has in store. I want to give a chance to everybody, regardless of background, to see everything that is programming.
I’m not sure how a book will help them to look around. There’s a ton of information on fundamental stuff that matters, it’s just only a small fraction is interested in it.
I agree there is a ton of information around, but I also think a lot of it is a bit disorganized, or very technology specific.