Poll of the Day > Do you know how to program?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I know we got a lot of those types around here. And yeah I know it probably could've gone in that other topic but that one was kinda weird.

I semi stumbled into it as a career path. I don't know how much I like it anymore but it's not gonna be an easy time to find anything else that pays as well so I guess I'm stuck with it

I couldn't even make a hello world program in BASIC.

CaptainStrong posted...

I couldn't even make a hello world program in BASIC.

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To be fair, if you asked me to do that right now without looking up any resources I couldn't do it either

I took a few classes on the subject in the past.

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I worked towards a programming degree in college, but eventually decided to switch over to creative writing. I probably can't program much right off the top of my head, however, I took enough classes that I'm fairly certain a quick crash course could bring me back up to where I was before I switched degrees.

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Yes.

I'm probably going to go back to school and get a 'programming' degree so I can sit behind a desk instead of traveling everywhere to do a different kind of programming.

I've dabbled for about three decades... didn't do much (non-zero though)

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I went to a bootcamp, and my last job was in the industry

No

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Yes, I'm a software developer and have a computer science degree

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I know a little HTML, SQL, and JavaScript.

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I've only dabbled with GameMaker Language if that counts.

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I used to be able to code in a couple different languages (had classes in ADA and C++ in college), and I actually worked as a webmaster at one point so I was pretty well-versed in HTML, but it's been a loooong time since I've coded anything other than HTML text formatting, so I've probably forgotten pretty much everything.
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I used to. Started with QBasic on an old Windows 3.1 laptop, then Visual Basic 6.0 and VC++. I was especially good with the winapi and various COM interfaces. I was also fascinated with 2D Isometric tilemap engines. These days I only mess with shell scripting.

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I'd like to hope so, or else I'd question what I've been doing with my life for the past decade.

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I single-handedly developed Grand Theft Auto V so I guess you could say I know my way around a program or two lol

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Im a physicist and make local programs we use in cancer care so yeah

I'm a computational biologist so yeah

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Gonna bump this

Those of you in the industry, what do you think my prospects would be like for moving from a tester role to more of a straight dev? I can write code, but I feel like writing tests is probably looked at quite a bit differently than production code. I'm sure lots of people do it but I'm wondering if I would have any luck just straight jumping ship into a dev role at a new place or if I need to transition into one at my current place and gain experience.

I just don't see a whole lot of testing roles out there anymore, maybe it's cause of the pandemic, but even before that I've been of the mind that it's much narrower of a long term career path.

I dunno if it's "programming", but I know some SPSS, Stata, R, and a bit of VBA on Excel. Not enough that I could get a job solely working with them, but enough that it's probably a plus on a resume

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GrabASnickers posted...

I just don't see a whole lot of testing roles out there anymore, maybe it's cause of the pandemic, but even before that I've been of the mind that it's much narrower of a long term career path.

Might depend on the company, but my past company (older, started in the 90s) got rid of QA almost entirely and my new company (late stage startup) has a few but that's mostly testing our hardware. In both cases, devs are expected to own their projects which includes running our own test plans and writing extensive unit/integration tests ourselves.

I would not be surprised if there were far more open roles for devs out there.

GrabASnickers posted...

I can write code, but I feel like writing tests is probably looked at quite a bit differently than production code.

There's more than writing code. Designing systems that scale, are flexible, maintainable. Things get complex. Knowing best patterns, security concerns, monitoring, etc. I'm sure there are materials out there you could take about architecture and system design, and more, if you want to really learn. There are probably full courses you can pay for that are probably not more than bootcamps (that I think generally just teach you how to code+some web dev tools)?

If you ever do decide to do interviews, I would also get the book Cracking the Coding Interview. It includes some system design there too and how to do those sorts of interviews, among others. But you should probably take some courses or read some books too, that's just a brief overview.

That said, simple web dev positions do exist at smaller startups. But idk their prospects (startups often fail so you might be jumping a lot) and they generally pay less. But people do learn while on the job and continuing their learning with courses/books then. My advice would just be, don't stop learning here, learn more about system design etc.

GrabASnickers posted...

or if I need to transition into one at my current place and gain experience.

No harm in doing that I think? Would make your resume a bit better and you can see if you like it, and make further steps simultaneously.

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I'm a software engineer with a degree in computer engineering. I do mostly embedded development but I've done some application development as well.

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GrabASnickers posted...

Gonna bump this

Those of you in the industry, what do you think my prospects would be like for moving from a tester role to more of a straight dev? I can write code, but I feel like writing tests is probably looked at quite a bit differently than production code. I'm sure lots of people do it but I'm wondering if I would have any luck just straight jumping ship into a dev role at a new place or if I need to transition into one at my current place and gain experience.

I just don't see a whole lot of testing roles out there anymore, maybe it's cause of the pandemic, but even before that I've been of the mind that it's much narrower of a long term career path.

From my experience, you still end up doing a bunch of regression testing and redlining test procedures even when you're developing software

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Kotenks posted...

I took a class in high school on it.

I wish they would've had a programming class at my high school

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GrabASnickers posted...

Gonna bump this

Those of you in the industry, what do you think my prospects would be like for moving from a tester role to more of a straight dev? I can write code, but I feel like writing tests is probably looked at quite a bit differently than production code. I'm sure lots of people do it but I'm wondering if I would have any luck just straight jumping ship into a dev role at a new place or if I need to transition into one at my current place and gain experience.

I just don't see a whole lot of testing roles out there anymore, maybe it's cause of the pandemic, but even before that I've been of the mind that it's much narrower of a long term career path.

Actually programming is the "trivial" part of my job. Interpreting requirements, and making sure everyone else is coding to said requirements (like a busybody - yea it's really annoying sometimes) is like 90% of my job. Although some people I work with take a long time to get the actual coding part done.

I have no idea how to answer your question chewy I have to keep my accounts in order I thought you were schmen, but I know people who have done that before and they didn't exactly like the transition (at least from QA/Devops to Development). I have a Devops Engineer right now that wants to make a similar transition, and he has the fire, but idk if he has the actual coding ability (we're also not looking for any more developers right now so he's kinda SOL).

I work with someone who has been doing QA at the same company for like 20? years maybe? It's definitely dead end, but if you become "that guy" you're probably doing it for a long time.

But I only have like 8 years of experience now, and the 3 places I've worked, 1 of them was extremely volatile and the other one fell through and declared bankruptcy.

I don't find QA/Devops interesting enough to do for a profession. I would get extremely bored, especially at the glacier pace that all of the Devops I know work at.

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grimhilde00 posted...

In both cases, devs are expected to own their projects which includes running our own test plans and writing extensive unit/integration tests ourselves.

Yeah where I work now (and I assume just about anywhere), all the devs know how to write tests, so it makes me wonder like what the point of my job even is. I guess it's to split out the man hours that would be better spent having them actually develop, but having a skillset that feels like it could be absorbed into other positions is a little scary.

grimhilde00 posted...

There's more than writing code. Designing systems that scale, are flexible, maintainable. Things get complex. Knowing best patterns, security concerns, monitoring, etc.

Isn't that more part of a software architect's role? Idk how it works everywhere, but at my current job we have architects specifically to make those kind of decisions. I could see it being different at smaller/newer places though.

grimhilde00 posted...

No harm in doing that I think? Would make your resume a bit better and you can see if you like it, and make further steps simultaneously.

I'm bored of my current company though and the pay sucks for the industry. I guess it's not necessarily a choose one or the other scenario (jump ship or transition in current role), but I don't know, I just don't really feel excited about adding that to my plate unless it's going to be with a change of scenery.

Wander_Nomaddd posted...

From my experience, you still end up doing a bunch of regression testing and redlining test procedures even when you're developing software

Well but I'd have to do that on my current path, so I'm fine with that if I still gain more career prospects overall.

Judgmenl posted...

I don't find QA/Devops interesting enough to do for a profession. I would get extremely bored, especially at the glacier pace that all of the Devops I know work at.

I don't really know what DevOps really is, we have it at my company but from what I hear from some of the people in it here, we don't really do real DevOps. They seem to spend a lot of time monitoring systems and responding to alerts and shit all the time which sounds miserable to me

There's not much use for Atari BASIC anymore.

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Ashamed to say not. I had so many opportunities to learn from school, internet etc but never was interested in it whatsoever.

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Wander_Nomaddd posted...

I wish they would've had a programming class at my high school

My high school programming class was horrible. Really bad teacher, and me and another kid who did things as a hobby just finished the projects in a day (I even did some additional photoshop for UX for funsies) then spent the rest of the time playing games. We probably should have helped the other kids... But also wasn't our job.

GrabASnickers posted...

Isn't that more part of a software architect's role? Idk how it works everywhere, but at my current job we have architects specifically to make those kind of decisions. I could see it being different at smaller/newer places though.

Well I'm a senior dev so that's part of my role. Architects in my experience typically set the tone for higher level what direction we're going in, what tech options we have, and weigh in sometimes. But generally think about a bigger company wide picture, not how to design individual projects fully.

I still have to look at the myriad of things we have and how to use that as I design the my project and the details, how everything works together, when and how to process things, how to implement it with all those things in mind. Even when it gets down to the very bottom with how you code things, you can do it in ways that are more scalable than others (making use of caches, batching, parallelism, etc).

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im learning python right now. Going to move on to objective C when I am done.

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MeteoricBurst posted...

Ashamed to say not. I had so many opportunities to learn from school, internet etc but never was interested in it whatsoever.

I don't see what's shameful about that. I don't think you're really missing out on much but a decent paycheck, but maybe other people feel differently. To me it's just not that genuinely fulfilling, especially as the industry grows and gets filled with bootcamp grads, and I realize that I'm not actually as smart as I think I am, I just work in a field that used to be uncommon enough to fool myself into thinking I'm smart. Not to mention like I said before, it wasn't really even what I wanted to do when I went to college, just had various things push me that way.

So hopefully you are at least doing something you enjoy.

MeteoricBurst posted...

Ashamed to say not. I had so many opportunities to learn from school, internet etc but never was interested in it whatsoever.

There's no reason to feel bad about that. Not everyone needs to code (although it can help automate tasks in non-dev jobs too, so knowing a bit could always come in handy).

A lot of people burn out after they spent years getting a degree in something they actually don't enjoy and just did it for money.

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I can do a little bit but I'm not proficient enough to code to start a business.

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GrabASnickers posted...

we don't really do real DevOps

DevOps is a no true scotsman. Nobody does real devops.

Dmess85 posted...

im learning python right now. Going to move on to objective C when I am done.

Learning a good language to immediately go to an awful, proprietary language


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MeteoricBurst posted...

Ashamed to say not. I had so many opportunities to learn from school, internet etc but never was interested in it whatsoever.

No need to be ashamed about not knowing how to code. If you look at most coders and people who started successful internet or pc software businesses, most were self taught and had early access to a PCs but for most American's that isn't the case.

If we look at Bill Gates as an example, he was fortunate enough to come from a good home with somewhat wealthy parents who had the opportunity of exposing him to PCs back in the 1970s when most people had no clue what a PC was so for most of us who can't code or who code a little bit, that's no reason to be ashamed.

Look at Mark Zuckerberg, his dad began teaching him code in middle school beginning with Atari Basic but that's the exception rather than the rule. How many of us (I did not) had parents who were pc literate.

So your upbringing and what you were exposed to all play a role and for some like Gates and Zuckerberg having successful parents certainly didn't hurt them because their parents could afford to send them to schools that exposed them to PCs when most kids in America weren't exposed especially if you attended public school.

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BUMPED2002 posted...

So your upbringing and what you were exposed to all play a role and for some like Gates and Zuckerberg having successful parents certainly didn't hurt them because their parents could afford to send them to schools that exposed them to PCs when most kids in America weren't exposed especially if you attended public school.

The guy you're quoting did say he had opportunity.

But yes all good points. I had access to PCs growing up, but my parents weren't computer literate and discouraged me from spending time on programming until I started making money off of it with my first internship in college lol. But even just having a family PC is a privilege.

I would say a large percentage of peers in college and work had engineer parents that really influenced them.

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Judgmenl posted...

DevOps is a no true scotsman. Nobody does real devops.

Learning a good language to immediately go to an awful, proprietary language

its the closest branch in terms of work because i am a product designer for iOS apps and i work very closely with iOS developers. I think i would like to get into C+ if i get the chance.

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