Sometimes I Surprise Myself

[snoopy369]

Fast + Cheap = happy client, regardless of the process, I've always found...

[Zkribbler]

Even during economically good times Che, you always seem to have difficulty holding a job, or finding a stable job.

Q: What are your long-term employment goals?
A: Installing a Communist government in the U.S. with me as Party Chairman.

[rah]

What's the old joke, there's quick, cheap, and high quality.
Choose two of the above. You can't get all three.

[MrFun]

They're called consulting firms.

Seriously though, che -- what's going on? Living as a freelance contractor is not the way to go. Too stressful, too long between jobs, too little opportunity to network.

Asher speaks the truth.

[MikeH]

My current project is an "agile" TDD/test driven development project.

It sounds nice and fancy to the clients, but what it boils down to is we distill the core business functionality of the app into a set of unit tests, then write ugly utilitarian code in those tests just to make the thing work. Some of the ugliest, most redundant, and inefficient code you'll ever see -- but damn does it get written fast.

Then we clean it up after. We spend about 75% of the time refactoring it and just moving things around. Identifying common functionality and extracting it. Realizing stuff like "hey, you know what'd be cool? an adapter class. or a factory. hell, maybe even a facade." It's basically reverse-engineering our own code, and it's awesome.

The client sees this well-architected solution and is impressed, but if they knew how it came to be I assure you they would not be pleased. It's catching on, TDD... especially for short-cycle projects like I usually get put on. But it's so ****ing basic.

Honestly, I'm surprised not more people are jumping on the software dev bandwagon. It seems criminal to me how easy it is versus what people pay for it.

Yeah, we do this. Good thing is that from early stages you have something that'll do the job, even if a lot of it is total **** until the closing stages of the project.

[Solomwi]

As folks may remember, I'm on unemployment. I talked to someone in the Agency for Workforce Innovation in early January or late December. I was told that my extension would automatically kick in as soon as my regular unemployment ended, which was Jan 3rd.

Well, when it came time for me to claim my weeks, I was told by the computer I had no weeks available. :/ Well, maybe I got caught up by the waiting week (the first week of unemployment, you get nothing). So I tried again next week, and then again, and again today. Still the same message.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to call in and talk to someone, but because there are something like 85,000 new people on unemployment in South Florida alone, never mind the rest of the state, suddenly, you can never get a human being on the phone.

Okay, I'll go to the office. :/ Hmmm, little problem, despite one third of the population of Florida living in the three counties of Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami Dade, (I live in the middle one), the nearest unemployment office is in Orlando!?! It's 180 miles from me, add another 30 for people in Miami. WTF!?! (I wrote to my state legislators about that.)

So I start dialing, and redialing, for days. Occasionally I'd get in, and I'd have to play phone tag, being told that no agents were available, going back to the menu, selecting operator again, eventually getting kicked out of the system and then not able to connect for hours.

I got lucky today. I got a human, twice, only to be told the computers were down

Finally, I get back in, and this time I take more time with the menu. I spend about 10 minutes playing tag, when finally I think, well, I never tried this option, "File a new claim." So I go into it, and it tells me that I will need to talk to an agent, it puts me in line and . . . VOICE MAIL MESSAGE!?!

And then a human comes on . . . :hope: the computer's working.

And she fixes everything, I'm getting the whole back month of missing unemployment.



Now I don't have to worry about March rent or February bills.

Charles Tyler Clark would be proud of you, che.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

And then a human comes on . . . :hope: the computer's working.

And she fixes everything, I'm getting the whole back month of missing unemployment.

Deus Ex Machina

[Felch]

I work with some guys in their 30s who don't come from a compsci background but pull in six figures doing software development. Guys that have music and philosophy degrees... there's some tricks to the trade and ways to nail interviews, and once you do that it's pretty easy sailing. Take a week and do some hardcore studying on design patterns and modern development techniques (like agile development, which is a nice word for cowboy coding) and drop some of those in an interview and you'll even have a leg up on most compsci grads.

I avoided Comp Sci in college because I'm afraid of second year Calculus.

Are you saying that if I buckled down, and got back into programming (I was into it back in high school), perhaps put together some sort of portfolio, I could go and apply for work doing that? No degree needed, just skills?

That would be sweet.

[Asher]

I avoided Comp Sci in college because I'm afraid of second year Calculus.

Are you saying that if I buckled down, and got back into programming (I was into it back in high school), perhaps put together some sort of portfolio, I could go and apply for work doing that? No degree needed, just skills?

That would be sweet.

It's definitely much harder to get your foot in the door without the degree or college diploma for it, but not impossible. You just need a solid portfolio and knowledge of it.

Calculus isn't used at all in the real world for software development for 99% of people. It's mostly just logic and knowledge of best practices, that's really all there is to it.

The main problem is the screeners. You're going to get a lot of HR people who discard your resume for lack of a degree in compsci, especially at the big firms. The guys who work here sans a degree basically got their start with small shops and built up an impressive repertoire of work. Some made their mark with open source projects in their free time while they worked other jobs. The degree makes it easier, though, much...

[Felch]

Well, it's good to know that it's a possibility.

[Asher]

I think Funko is another example. IIRC he's got a science/physics degree or something? But he apparently does software dev now.

The Team Lead on my current project majored in music.

[snoopy369]

Okay, I have to ask. WTF does second-year calculus have to do with computer science? Stat, sure. First year calculus, I guess (even that's sort of 'huh'?). But second year calc? Unless you're at an engineering college (and are assumed to be focusing on engineering-focused compsci, I guess) or going into AI or compsci-as-physics or something else, I can't see why you'd need it for a run-of-the-mill computer science degree.

That said, I think Chicago required it, but they required 'second-year calculus' (ie, math beyond basic calculus) from their political science students, and entirely possibly their philosophy students, more as a 'rounded education' concept, which is rather odd even for Chicago IMO.

[Asher]

Okay, I have to ask. WTF does second-year calculus have to do with computer science? Stat, sure. First year calculus, I guess (even that's sort of 'huh'?). But second year calc? Unless you're at an engineering college (and are assumed to be focusing on engineering-focused compsci, I guess) or going into AI or compsci-as-physics or something else, I can't see why you'd need it for a run-of-the-mill computer science degree.

That said, I think Chicago required it, but they required 'second-year calculus' (ie, math beyond basic calculus) from their political science students, and entirely possibly their philosophy students, more as a 'rounded education' concept, which is rather odd even for Chicago IMO.

Any good school will require it for compsci. I know mine did.

Computer Science itself is an extremely math-heavy field. Software development is not for the most part, but can be. Most people who study computer science in school end up writing software, but anyone can write software. The more rigorous mathematical backing to computer science is to demonstrate the capacity for highly analytical thought, which can be very useful when applying software engineering principles to more complex projects.

From what I can tell, being able to program and program well will give you a great career, but it plateaus pretty early. To get past that point, you'll need to leverage more of your education to get there. You can go the management route, in which case understanding stuff like second-year calculus or number & set theory will be less useful. You can also go to the more technical side of things, where the mental tools you build to comprehend and use high-level mathematics also come in handy when doing algorithmic design or system architectures.

All of developers can "code in C++/C#/Java/etc". But when you start doing more advanced things, the math background becomes more essential. Eventually you need to start thinking outside the box. Lambda calculus, for instance -- it's kind of alarming to me how few developers actually understand that, even people who supposedly have CS degrees. Understanding Lambda calculus can lead to very elegant solutions that tend to be highly efficient, whereas a developer who doesn't understand them will implement long-winded, less efficient, and invariably more bug-ridden methods. Formal proofs are also frequently helpful when determining the correctness of an implementation.

Outside of technical domain, application domain is another consideration. I spent basically two years as a software consultant working almost exclusively in the investment bank world. Advanced calculus are part and parcel with that application domain. When I work on graphics engines, including the time I spent on that Wii game (thankfully, shortlived), I leveraged what I learned in advanced linear algebra and graph theory from school.

Calculus itself is just one of many areas, in CS you basically get a shotgun experience with various fields of mathematics. IMHO, the most useful are linear algebra and graph theory as they seem to cross more domains than others...

But being able to program is only part of it. You can't program a solution unless you can design/architect that solution, which may require the math skills. You can't even understand many problem domains unless you have the math background either. Try implementing much of the financial models they used in the financial services world without at least a Calc III background and see how far you get.

As an aside...one of the shortcomings of not having a CS-degree background and working as a developer surfaced today. My team lead was looking over my code and became perplexed when he came across a section that made heavy use of the C# Lambda operator combined with bit-shifting and bitwise operations and some bit-based arithmetic. A lot of these non-CS guys can see the big picture for how these apps work in terms of modules, control flow, etc but sometimes when it comes to thinking about how the computer itself is processing this information in terms of bits and bytes, and how they can be toyed with, they start to get a bit fuzzy.

[Felch]

including the time I spent on that Wii game

You poor dear.

[Asher]

Thanks.