

How many people reading Hacker News do not have any programming skills? - klbarry

This includes being able to make pretty much any sort of computer or internet program or app, basic html not included. I ask because, though I do not code, I find HN great and wonder if others feel the same way.
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robfitz
Slightly different question: If you don't program, why? Because it doesn't
seem relevant, or you've tried and don't like it, or you've tried and can't do
it, or other people can do it well, or it seems scary, or your expertise is
elsewhere, or...?

I meet lots of people who want to build things that require programming but
don't program for whatever reason, and I've always wondered what the root
cause there is.

Also, happy new years ;)

~~~
jaysonelliot
I don't program because I'm a user experience professional. My expertise
requires full-time learning as it is.

I do work closely with programmers, though, and I consider our relationship a
symbiotic one.

~~~
fluorescentLAMP
I don't do much UX, but I have a friend who loves it but is a little
disillusioned with his education.

I am curious, what kind of schooling / experience do you have?

~~~
jaysonelliot
I went to college in the early nineties for art & design, started out by
working as a print designer, and launched an independent magazine in 1992.

That led me to the web in '95, where I learned HTML by working right on the
server, using vi as my text editor. We had a tiny shop, so everyone did
everything. Graphic design, front end coding, content - the only thing I
couldn't do was back-end stuff.

Eventually we were bought by Razorfish, and they decided some people would be
called "information architects," so in 1997 I took the title of IA, and went
from there.

I've studied with various mentors, but my best education has come from Nielsen
Norman Group's usability weeks, and constantly pestering people in emails, on
message boards, listservs, conferences, you name it. The UX community is
pretty tight-knit, and people really help each other out.

In the years that I've done IA and UX, I've worked for IBM, Disney, and
several large agencies. I started as a usability freak, but have expanded my
horizons to realize that there's a whole spectrum of things that are important
to a good experience.

The best wakeup calls I had were when Don Norman published "Emotional Design,"
and when Peter Morville made his UX honeycomb (
<http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php>)

I'm now executive director for a large NY agency with offices worldwide, and I
have a very diverse group of UX people in the different offices.

One thing I look for in a UX practitioner is a diversity of experience and
background. Someone who studied IA in college and has only been on one path
often has trouble empathizing with real world users.

I have hired people with degrees in library sciences, human computer
interaction, design, computer science, psychology, human factors, even
theater. It's all about how a person solves problems to me, not the degree
they pursued.

I'd encourage your friend to spend more time on listservs like IXDA or SIGIA,
going to conferences like Adaptive Path's UX Week and N/Ng's usability week,
and making that his new education. It's incredibly rewarding.

~~~
fluorescentLAMP
Great reply. I have sent that along to my friend. I enjoyed it as well.

------
bryarcanium
I've been reading HN for a while now- I discovered Graham's essays in high
school, a year or two before he started the y combinator. I was a soon-to-be-
aerospace-engineering major, then.

I haven't really programmed since my freshmen year, when I switched to
anthropology. Had an interesting year, post graduation, doing archaeology for
CRM firms. Then I decided I kinda liked getting paid, and now I'm doing
instructional design for a retailer. I am slightly less broke.

I am also going, "Hm, all my engineering co-horts are not broke. And jeez, why
do I read HN all the time? Maybe I should start playing around, again..."

But, no, at the moment, no skillz.

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Naomi
Not only can I not program, but in addition to that I am a female. In the past
I've tried to ask questions from throw away accounts, which were poorly
received. So I limit myself to reading and refrain from posting anything. It's
better that I don't participate anyway, since I would be wasting a lot of
valuable time, which I need to use for my other projects. The amount I've
learned in the last year is staggering, and I recommend this site to friends.

~~~
Mz
I resemble some of those remarks: I also can't program and I also happen to be
female. And my questions tend to not get much feedback. But I have a long,
long history of falling on my face in that regard, starting well before I ever
heard of Hacker News, so I don't think it's "them". I'm pretty darn sure it's
me. I participate anyway. It's been a growth experience and I like it here.

YMMV, and probably will.

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zugzug1
Count me in. Can't say how many ideas I've head for some startups but always
fall short because I lack programming skills. For me, time is of the essence -
and it hasn't been easy to wrap my head around programming therefore I
estimate at least 5 years of learning to accomplish my ideas.

I've been reading about how no tech people will partner with someone just
because they have an idea and frankly I'd like to give the middle finger to
those authors, however they are most likely right as I cannot seem to find
anyone to help me out.

I just wish there was a place to find good programmers with free time who want
to take an idea and turn it into reality.

Any tips?

~~~
duncanj
Do you ever mention your ideas to programmers at all? Or do you not know any
at all?

~~~
zugzug1
Truth be told I don't know many. The few I know are always busy with something
even though it doesn't seem like it ever takes them anywhere. Tried hiring a
few and communication always seems to be a huge problem, thus projects going
unfinished.

~~~
noahc
I am some what of a jack of all trades. I'm not a programmer, but I know how
to program. I can make things work in a hacked sort of manner. Just spending
two weeks working through a basic book on python would fix this problem. I've
hired developers and designers and just being able to talk to them in their
own language even at a basic level helps a ton here.

It's hard to hire a good x, when you can't do x your self. You don't know what
to look for.

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trotsky
1,273.

If you've recently learned programming but haven't been in front of one of our
supported surveillance platforms lately you may still be counted in this
number - please feel free to update it!

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FiddlerClamp
I'd love to learn how to code, but I grew up with BASIC (TRS-80 CoCo variety)
and I'm a linear, spaghetti-code thinker.

I've dabbled in VB (back in 1991), used Prolog for a law school AI assignment,
made great use of WordBasic (Office 95) to save a company thousands of dollars
a year by autogenerating indices...

More recently I played with Android App Inventor and created a basic "English
Nanny" (shake the baby) app, which took a couple of hours. C++, C#, Java etc.
just seem too difficult to learn.

Any advice would be appreciated, of course :)

~~~
jdminhbg
"C++, C#, Java etc. just seem too difficult to learn."

In a lot of respects, they are -- there's a lot of ceremony and boilerplate
around getting started that's there to please the compiler (and programmer job
security) rather than the programmer. If you want to learn to code, I'd try
something like Python, Ruby, or JavaScript first -- you say you're a "linear,
spaghetti-code thinker," but that pretty much describes everyone who's
starting out. Something in the Python/Ruby/JS mold would make it easier for
you to see relationships between different parts of your code and make the
leap from linear thinking to something more organized, without the noise that
languages like C#/C++/Java impose on you.

Good luck!

~~~
FiddlerClamp
Thank you for the tip - I guess I should've been clearer and say, "I'm
interested in Android programming and some basic Windows 7 stuff, but Android
Java's too hard and App Inventor's too limited." :)

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XFrequentist
I don't program (aside from SAS/R statistical programming and LaTeX). I'm
planning on learning how.

I have the feeling that there is a lot of potential good that an epidemiology-
oriented hacker could do.

Problem is, I have no direct external pressure to motivate learning, and no
direction on what to learn. Reading Hacker News is a way of gaining both
motivation and direction.

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gopi
I am a engineer and a unix admin in a previous life so i can code simple
scripts, read/understand php/javascript (or copy some code snippet from the
interweb and modify to my liking). Also as a electronics engineer i can
understand high level comp sci theories...But obviously i am not a real hands-
on programmer and it didnt stopped me from making millions from web projects!

~~~
vegashacker
Which projects made you millions?

~~~
gopi
Sorry, i can't name names!

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nhangen
I can't program enough to bring my ideas to life, and it frustrates the hell
out of me. Yes, I'm capable of outsourcing, and I do, but boy do I wish I
could do more than I can right now.

I've got 3 or 4 books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf open on my iPad at all
times, and I toy with online tutorials, but learning Farsi was much easier :)

------
gnokbb
I don't code because when I was a youngster it didn't exist at all. On the
other hand I wonder why a lot of coders can't play music. It seems like the
two things are so closely related except with music it's more like writing
code with an audience. You don't know if what you wrote works until you get to
the end of the piece. Every time.

~~~
warwick
I wouldn't claim the jargon file as an authoritative source, but the entry on
music claims that at least one study found a correlation between music skills
and programmers.

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ldayley
Until very recently I had no meaningful coding experience besides a little
Excel macro-ing and modifying WordPress' PHP. My New Year's resolution is to
make my web app a reality, but I don't know how to code. I am on week 3 of
learning Python through MIT's OCW (and many other resources), and I'll let you
know when I'm done with my app!

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luckyisgood
I'm not a developer, but software development is my business, since I run a
web development software company. HN is a great way to learn as much as I
possibly can about this business and stay ahead. I am learning how to code
(python), but I am not (nor ever will be) a software developer.

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evac
That would describe me as well, though I've taken up self-teaching myself web
development since about a week or two ago. Though I come from a (traditional)
business and psychology background in my studies, I feel most at home in the
strong entrepreneurial culture of the tech space.

~~~
zugzug1
Are you taking up self teaching because you can't find anyone to help you as
well? Have you had any success yet?

~~~
evac
I'm taking up self-teaching by choice and habit because I often like to learn
things on my own at first. (Half of my "education" from middle school to
current college studies have all been self-taught in a variety of subjects
during my spare time.) And with all the resources available -- books, online
tutorials, quora.com, wikipedia, etc -- it's not difficult to pick up the
basics on your own.

As for my progress so far in web programming, I'm starting from the front-end
basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript first. The past two weeks were spent on
relearning HTML and CSS (I picked them up back in middle school but forgot
over the years) and will hopefully start on basic javascript in about a week.
By my personal metric of success, I'm pretty satisfied with my daily progress
and can at least build basic websites that meets established web standards.

------
malabar
I have absolutely no programming skills. I thoroughly enjoy HN and appreciate
the coders point of view since I have worked with a bunch throughout the
years. For 2011 I resolve to learn Python or Ruby.

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urban_kitsch
...Does working in close proximity to engineers count? I truly believe I'm
absorbing their brainwaves.

~~~
Athtar
ha ha. Me too. :)

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naithemilkman
Im trying to move from the non-technical camp to the technical camp!

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nussbi
here's another one, besides HTML and some simple PHP I never programmed...
just never had the time to properly learn a programming language

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dotcoma
me! :)

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DirtyPowder
I just started to learn how to code (Python) two weeks ago, but I have been an
HN reader for about the last four months. The stories here often inspire me to
progress and push myself in other areas of my life. I also like hearing about
the leading edges of technology.

