
Hard Truths about Programming - turingbook
http://anna-oz.tumblr.com/post/158300535300/hard-truths-about-tech
======
alkonaut
Who would be peddling the myth that programming is easy? Those who sell boot
camps of course but who else?

I like to liken it with playing an instrument. It's easy to make sounds but
how long before someone will pay you to play for them? That's programming (and
sports, and cooking, and any other craft that is superficially easy but deep
and complex crafts to perform professionally)

~~~
kentt
I sometimes do. I understand and agree with the authors point. On the other
hand, I feel like I'm well paid in a very comfortable job for doing stuff I
already liked doing. I will likely never get fired from this job and have
numerous other offers without looking. From that perspective, a job in
programming is "easy".

I'm not missing that there are hard things and to be honest, today is a
particularly difficult day, but I understand when people say it's an easy
career path.

~~~
alkonaut
Yeah I also think I have an easy life/career but I'm already an experienced
dev. That we get paid handsomely to have a comfortable career is, I think, a
sign that the job is hard, not easy. Pro athletes live pretty comfortably too
- it's getting there that's hard.

------
throwaway2016a
Edit note: Some of the points in this article are really good so this is
mostly just a rant on coding bootcamps from a bitter Computer Science grad who
had to work 20 years to get where I am :)

Meanwhile to some of these points... we had a client recently where we built
their mobile app. Large app, over $50,000 with a full API backend. Not a
simple hello world. And then they hired someone straight from a boot camp to
manage their mobile app, API, website, everything. And gave that person a
Director title.

Yes, I know, titles are cheap at startups. But I guess you can learn to code
in three months and not only get a job but apparently be director level.

~~~
user5994461
Amateur mistake ;)

Truth be told: Titles are meaningless, the only thing that matters is the pay.

Giving impressive titles is simply a very cheap and efficient way to make
naive young employees feel important and valued, while really they are not.

#ForwardDeployedEngineer

~~~
throwaway2016a
Until you have to hire more team members in which case you may have a problem.
That is how companies get absurd things like three different technology VPs
and a CTO in a 10 person company. (exaggerated obviously)

~~~
mistermann
Or your environment is an absolute flaming disaster but your manager gives you
a bad review because they don't understand why someone would want to write
unit tests to run across distributed databases to confirm consistency and
correctness. So, your environment remains in a broken state, reports have
wrong numbers, and development moves at a snails pace because of constant
issues. And the person that actually knew enough to identify and fix the
problem is fired for insubordination.

~~~
throwaway2016a
Or that...

------
amelius
Some more truths:

People look down on IT people.

Your boss wants to outsource your job.

You'll be mostly doing "plumbing" with data.

You'll make far more money from a dumb audience than a smart one.

~~~
illys
I specially like your last point, and you will make even more money if what
you produce makes them smarter.

It is all the point of IT: increase the human capacities (computation, data
handling and understanding, productivity, communication...). People who
already master all of that do not need you so much.

------
bogomipz
I was struck by the following passage:

"Job search in tech is extra long and frustrating:

For tech jobs add about 3-5 more interviews + technical tests, online and
onsite, if you even make it past the first step because a lot of times you
will never hear from a company after sending in your application, or the
company will stop responding to your emails at some point in the interview
process. The tech hiring process also seems to take about 3 times longer than
in other industries. Brace yourselves!"

Sadly this is a very common refrain. And unfortunately this is now true even
if you have years of experience. Hiring is just plain broken. Full stop. This
is also a fairly recent development in the industry. The hiring process was
not broken like this 8 or even 5 years ago.

It's sad that an awful and unprofessional experience is now the norm and
something that should be expected. I blame recruiters for much of this
unprofessionalism but I also blame the companies that either permit such
unprofessional behavior or else are simply unaware at how bad or broken their
process is.

Its strange that the industry seems to have whipped itself into such a
neurosis about the possibility of "false positives" that it has created a
uniquely miserable experience that seems to embrace absurdity and disrespect
as a matter of course.

The fact that industry seems to collectively trend hop - Whiteboarding! Take
home projects! Hacker Ranks Tests!

This "everyone else is doing it" mentality only serves to perpetuate this.

~~~
flukus
> It's sad that an awful and unprofessional experience is now the norm and
> something that should be expected.

That's because there are a lot of awful, unprofessional programmers out there
trying to get jobs and we need a way to filter them out. Even then these
methods only filters out the worst of the worst, the developers that can solve
fizzbuzz level problems. We either have to put up with this or have some sort
of industry certification.

>The hiring process was not broken like this 8 or even 5 years ago.

All of this was happening 8 years ago, it was even worse then with "why are
manhole covers round" levels of stupidity.

~~~
reitanqild
_That 's because there are a lot of awful, unprofessional programmers out
there trying to get jobs and we need a way to filter them out._

Agree. After being told a couple of times how happy <company> are to finally
see a real, competent programmer when I enter the room and just answer simple
questions I've come to accept that there must be a few people out there
pretending to be programmers in their applications.

 _Even then these methods only filters out the worst of the worst, the
developers that can solve fizzbuzz level problems._

Well, the problem is that the sum of these methods (clueless(?) recruiters,
keyword filtering etc) often filter out me before I even get to an interview.

The ones who hire me tend to be very happy though :-)

~~~
flukus
> After being told a couple of times how happy <company> are to finally see a
> real, competent programmer when I enter the room and just answer simple
> questions

One of the more depressing experiences I've had is heading into an interview
(on the interviewer side) after seeing someone completely fail a fizzbuzz
test. Everyone looks at each other thinking "well maybe if they knock it out
of the park during the interview...". It's like dating as an extremely lonely
person.

> Well, the problem is that the sum of these methods (clueless(?) recruiters,
> keyword filtering etc) often filter out me before I even get to an
> interview.

I've never had a problem with this, except maybe lately with angular. I
structure my resume to include the keywords but in a format actual hiring
managers want to see, eg, Experience with a number of MVC frameworks including
ASP MVC, Monorail, Ruby on Rails (ROR). I don't know if that's the reason it's
never been an issue for me, but I hope it helps.

~~~
bogomipz
>"One of the more depressing experiences I've had is heading into an interview
(on the interviewer side) after seeing someone completely fail a fizzbuzz
test. Everyone looks at each other thinking "well maybe if they knock it out
of the park during the interview...". It's like dating as an extremely lonely
person."

This is exactly the situation that a recruiter _should_ be preventing. That
person shouldn't have made it through door. Your process was broken..
Unqualified people applying for jobs is not unique to the tech industry.

~~~
flukus
The interview was immediately after the technical test, it's either that or
you have to schedule people to come in again, which wastes the time of the
good candidates.

------
pacaro
I'm trying to teach myself foot juggling (a.k.a. keepie uppie), fundamentally
it's not hard, it just takes a lot of practice. Many of my friends growing up
were really good at it. I could never understand how they were so good and I
couldn't do it at all.

I'm not sure whether programming is hard or not, but when my friends were
practicing keepie uppie in their back yards, I was practicing programming

There are concepts that are hard to understand in the abstract, but one of the
things that a good programmer has practiced is how to understand those kinds
of concepts

10,000 hours is an overly literal idea, but IMVHO the core requirement for a
large amount of intentional practice is the most significant hard truth about
programming

------
daly
Hard? I never finished a paid project in Grad school because of a compiler
error (PL/I 'copy like' bug).

On my first job they gave me a paper tape containing the binary to control a
robot... no source available... and I had to fix a bug that caused the robot
to do something wierd (atan 0/0) on a computer with no "developer software"
(aka no compiler, libraries, etc. ... just a raw machine with a front panel of
switches).

On my second job I spent a couple days trying to figure out how a tape drive
delivered duplicate records (worn tapes caused hardware 'reread').

On my third job I spent a week tracking down a memory error in a mainframe
memory that caused many crashes on a computer used by over 70 programmers
(every crash resulted in hex listing of 4 megabytes of memory (2 ft stack of
paper) delivered to me).

On a later job I had to hand-recover a hard drive that contained all of our
software when the "extended second drive" died, causing the machine to fail to
boot (had to write code to read the raw drive by controlling the electronics).

I was nearly fired because a C compiler contained a bug that took me a week to
find (bad code generation). The boss thought I was unable to program and had
no idea what a compiler was, only that my project was late.

One boss was newly promoted. She forced me to end a several-year research
project, threatening to fire me if I didn't. She was fired for the threat but
I still lost the project.

One boss decided to fire me so he lied on my performance report. He falsely
quoted comments from other managers. Even when the other managers called HR
and gave me glowing reports HR refused to change the result. Prior to that all
of my reports were highly rated.

At one job the whole project (fixed cost, 5 programmers for 5 months) ran long
(10 programmers 18 months) and they fired all the programmers.

One of my open source projects forked twice in one week over a dispute about
goals, with the side-effect of destroying the community.

One of my jobs was to take over code from a programmer that died. He used the
GCC -MM option to automatically generates C++ makefiles for code which
generated C++ and then generated makefiles from that code. Not a line of
comments anywhere.

That C++ code generated classes DURING THE CALL SETUP of a procedure (who knew
you could do that?) so classes that occur nowhere in the software "appear"
magically at runtime. Again, no comments anywhere.

I spent a day applying the brand-new "Design Patterns" to our software on my
whiteboard. The chief designer saw it, got angry, and I got fired.

I was hired to move teaching software (400 Flash Videos) from laptops to the
new iPad... and then Jobs announced that the iPad would never run flash.
Goodbye job.

I maintain open source software that has run on Unix-based systems since the
early 80s... and then stopped working because GCC switched to a "new C
standard" that changed the meaning of "inline", breaking the build everywhere.

I was hired to write "pinch zoom" for a touch display and camera setup. The
camera driver only worked on Linux, the touch display driver only worked on
Windows. Neither manufacturer would port their driver, nor release their
driver source code.

My AI project required recognizing lugnuts... did you ever try to find "big
data" for lugnut images? Or try to create a "big data" dataset?

I taught Data Structures at a University. At a Google "job interview" I failed
to remember the complexity of an algorithm... and never got the job offer.

I have many more "war stories" but they all have one thing in common.
Programming isn't hard, in fact it is often the only joy on the job. But being
a programmer is really hard for a lot of reasons you won't find in boot camp.

I love programming. I turned down 8 job offers to become a manager (or, as I
say, "retire into management"). I love programming. I do it every day. And
every day is another day of frustration except for the final hour when it all
seems to finally be working... and then back to programming and frustration,
bugs, hardware crashes, lost data, impossible tasks, really late nights, and
clueless bosses.

But I have done it for 46 years and never once had any regrets about
programming. Programming is the easy part.

~~~
UncleMeat
> I taught Data Structures at a University. At a Google "job interview" I
> failed to remember the complexity of an algorithm... and never got the job
> offer.

The large majority of applicants at the big firms are not hired so this may be
entirely unrelated to your outcome. But surely somebody who has taught data
structures could analyze an algorithm rather than needing to simply remember
the runtime complexity, right?

~~~
reitanqild
_But surely somebody who has taught data structures could analyze an algorithm
rather than needing to simply remember the runtime complexity, right?_

IDK but it sounds like he failed to remember it on the spot and didn't get a
chance to analyze it.

~~~
daly
Yes, I can derive more than just the worst case complexity (which was all he
wanted) as I did in class. But the interview was short and the interviewer had
clearly just graduated from college where Data Structures was probably his
last class. I can't really call it an interview as none of the interviewers
bothered to look at my resume despite having brought a copy with them. It was
really just a "pro-forma pop quiz" and a waste of time. They did give me a
free Google t-shirt as consolation prize.

------
lordCarbonFiber
I think the biggest source of confusion is the question of semantics. When
people sit down, even here in this thread, there's this distinct undercurrent
where neither side has a clear idea what the other means by "hard" and "easy".

Programming is "easy" in the sense that you don't need to be a savant to do
it. A lot of software development is built ontop of very well designed tools
and abstractions which means you can work (in some fields) with computers
without having a college understanding of higher level maths or electrical
engineering. Programming is "easy" in the same way any trade is easy. With
instruction and practice most (if not all) people can learn to some degree of
professional competency. In the same way one might learn to become a plumber
or an electrician a student can learn to be a "developer" (this I'd argue is
separate from a "computer scientist").

On the other hand programming is "hard". It is "hard" in the sense that it's
completely alien from most people's day to day. In the same way most people
don't think about what it takes to wire a house to code, operate a lathe, or
fix a broken pipe, most people don't ever need to think about SDLC or
debugging strategies. Programming is "hard" because if you try to learn from
fundamentals you quickly exit the nice tools and abstractions that make the
professional world go and into the maths that are considerably less trivial.
Programming is "hard" because of a cult of people determined to ignore the
above reality and tune interviews to be time intensive and rely almost
exclusively on your knowledge of university concepts as opposed to day to day
tooling.

I think it's important to remember that the field is still very nacient and
the responsiblities under "programmer" still vary widely from job to job and
industry to industry. Until this matures, a better jargon is developed for
describing roles, and a more realistic attitude is reached in terms about what
skills are needed for said roles I don't see how we can avoid sending mixed
messages like the ones that frustrate the OP.

------
xupybd
Is programming really that hard, if you compared it to learning another skill
as an adult? Like having to learn to read?

------
BleachNut
I really don't wanna see pretentious here, but does anyone actually think
autodidactism is hard?

I have diagnosed and unmedicated ADD and I can still self-learn without too
much difficulty.

Again, I don't wanna sound too full of myself, but is any of this stuff really
as hard the author implies?

~~~
wry_discontent
As somebody else with diagnosed and unmedicated ADD, what do you do to manage
it?

~~~
BleachNut
The number one tip I always give is to write down everything you think off
when you get off topic and start drifting around. I don't know what's
happening neurologically, but it trains you to snap back once your train of
focus breaks, it might not work for everyone, but I got pretty good results.
It's also helped me with forgetfulness.

I use apple's native note application, but evernote looks about the same or
better.

FYI: it'll take a couple weeks to start working

~~~
reitanqild
_The number one tip I always give is to write down everything you think off
when you get off topic and start drifting around. I don 't know what's
happening neurologically, but it trains you to snap back once your train of
focus breaks, it might not work for everyone, but I got pretty good results.
It's also helped me with forgetfulness._

Another way that _might_ help some people is to write down whatever you are
about to drift into, the keep focus until timebox is finished (pomodoro
technique).

The best explanations I have are:

As far as I am aware ADDers tend to have shorter stacks (3-4 compared to 5-7
shortterm memory slots).

(My theory.) Many productive ADDers are keenly aware of this and the fact that
if it slips now it might never come back until it is too late. This causes
stress and you want to follow the train of thought even if it is unrelated to
what you should do _now_.

(I.e.: oops, I see something that reminds me that I _need_ to call <x> today,
I know I'll forget it as soon as I focus on my code again. Write one line:
call <x> about <y>. Continue work. When your timer finishes: do call <x>
immediately after stopping work (somewhat different from pomodoro but adapted
for this kind of ADD).

So in short: if you can, write down the interruption, then finish whatever you
were doing but use a "timebox" to remind yourself to stop, "snapshot" your
work (comments, journal, commit as far as possible) and then take the call,
stretch, grab the water or coffe you tried to interrupt yourself with and be
on track again.

Of course this is the ideal flow. I have sympathy for people with ADD as it
seems they have to work harder and smarter to get the same results as others.

------
NicoJuicy
I think it's hard, not for me mostly, cause I love it.

But I tried helping out a friend with simple assignments and the concepts are
just way off too what someone is used to.

Same with someone doing wordpress, I do the servers myselve. Which is way too
much info to share... ( Other OS)

------
motet_a
I don't know if anything similar exists in other coutries, but in France there
is a growing "workshop" trend - which are basically short web curriculums (a
few weeks learning Rails, jQuery, Symfony or others) - to turn anyone into a
"developer". I've heard many salesmen or others saying "I will learn it". They
don't realize how hard it is. You can't simply write any program with pyramids
of jQuery callbacks. You need automated testing, fuzzy string matching,
automata theory, murky x86_64 assembler and much more.

------
keithnz
not sure that many of them are truths. Seems more like like millennial speak.
"Things are hard!" no...relative to you and your experiences it might be the
hardest thing you've gone through, but in absolute terms, they aren't hard.
Learning programming has never been easier. Us oldtimers can tell you stories
about "Hard".

~~~
throwaway2016a
As a millennial I reject that categorization and we need to stop using it.
Millennial is too broad. I'm a millennial and I learned to program in the mid
90's from actual paper books. I share almost nothing in common with the people
graduating college right now.

Edit: Also, for every "life is hard" millennial I have met many hard working,
extremely intelligent, and charitable ones. Some of whom need to work multiple
jobs dealing with the fact that our generation has almost no upward mobility
unless you do something like learn to code. The fact that a terrible houses
cost amounts of money that years ago would get you a mansion (even when
adjusted for inflation) and where spending $100k on college does not even
remotely guarantee you a job. Where pensions don't exist and retirement is a
pipe dream. Every millennial I know over 25 has been laid off, some multiple
times.

Edit 2: furthermore, in the United States, my generation has never known a
time where we were not at war. And we are the ones being sent to those wars.

~~~
keithnz
the categorization is statistical representing common patterns, it's not
defining the traits for all individuals.

I don't live in the US... perhaps vote for someone who will help change it to
a better system?

~~~
throwaway2016a
I wasn't the one generalizing all millennials. The post I was replying to was.
My post is specifically about not generalizing.

Also, to think one person (the president) can magically fix decades of
compounding problems is naive. It's also naive to think we are isolated from
the rest of the world and we can magically unlink our economy from it. With
that said, about 50% of millennials voted last election and 83% are registered
to vote. So I'd say a large number of us did vote for the person we think will
change things.

Edit: and almost without exception the millennials I know who didn't vote did
it because they felt neither candidate was acceptable.

~~~
keithnz
you were claiming that a generalization doesn't hold for specific cases...
which will never invalidate a generalization, because a generalization works
"in general" not for specific cases :)

you only get to vote for the president?!

do you live in a democracy where you can vote to get things changed? or
perhaps people in america just like it that way.

maybe it is naive, but other democratic countries are moving ahead with more
progressive ideas.

~~~
throwaway2016a
> you were claiming that a generalization doesn't hold for specific cases...
> which will never invalidate a generalization, because a generalization works
> "in general" not for specific cases :)

Very true

> you only get to vote for the president?!

We vote for the president, senate, congress, and local representatives. We
rarely vote for individual issues (like say Brexit) on a national level, those
are usually decided for us.

> do you live in a democracy where you can vote to get things changed? or
> perhaps people in america just like it that way. maybe it is naive, but
> other democratic countries are moving ahead with more progressive ideas

America is a Constitutional Republic not a true democracy. We don't even get
one vote per person. Our votes are broken up into statistical areas that are
winner take all. And I can assure you that many Americans don't like it that
way but it is very difficult to change in a two party system. Which is why
many people (millennials more than any other group) are pushing to end the 2
party system.

------
oldandtired
From the outset, Programming is hard. Anyone who says it is easy is missing
the salient point of programming.

That salient point is that you as the programmer have to gain an understanding
of the target field you are programming for. Programming is about solving
problems for someone, not just writing code to a specification.

A lot of the comments, so far, are talking about programming languages,
programming tools, programming frameworks.

These are NOT programming, these are the tools you use to program an adequate
solution to your problem. Unless you are continually gaining knowledge in
every field that you are programming for, you are staying a novice. This does
not mean that you have to be a subject matter expert, but it does mean that
you have to gain enough knowledge in that field to be able to provide a
solution for the subject matter experts (or others that will be dealing with
your solution in that field).

Too often, I have found that "so-called gun programmers" have not only NOT
understood the the field they are providing a solution for, they dictate what
that field is supposed to "put up with".

I have spent nearly 40 years programming and I have come across many people
who can churn out code much faster than I, but many of those cannot provide an
adequate solution for the problem at hand. They cannot and have not been
taught to think outside the "box".

I have also worked with many who cannot churn out the code but what they do
give you is (at the minimum) an adequate solution to the problem at hand. They
effectively solve the problem as it actually is.

Many years ago now, I took over the maintenance of a small system that was
being used by 6 or so people. By the time I was finished, it was handling 60+
people simultaneously in at least 7 different fields for a single
telecommunications project. The reason I tell this is for the following:

The base system in use was that venerable old girl, MS-Access 2000. This was
one of the constraints of the system.

The original programmer was a highly paid foreigner (British) who basically
told the subject matter experts that this was how they would have to work.

Part of the process I undertook was to find out what and how they needed to
work and rebuilt the system to do it appropriate to the needs of the project.
The satisfaction and appreciation was very encouraging.

Once this was seen, each of the other functional areas wanted to get on board.
The application was then expanded to include these additional groups.

I got various complaints from various people about how hard some of their
tasks were because MS-Access could not do want they needed. They had been told
this by management. Finding out what they needed became the incentive for
providing a solution. That meant for one person, I cut their after hours
report production down from 3 to 3.5 hours every night to about 3 minutes
(included production of reports, formatting, emailing to international
management, emailing to national management and local report printing). His
wife and daughter were very happy to get him home at night at a reasonable
hour.

Programming is understanding the problem at hand and providing a workable,
efficient solution using the tools at hand. This means that you have to be
able to understand the subject field with enough detail to provide that
solution and make it easy for the end user to use.

Early in my working life, I had people who encouraged this mindset and multi-
discipline learning. Not everyone is capable of this, or even wants to do
this. This then leads to the shmozzle that is the industry today and its
continuation is the outworking of many of the major IT industry players who
are interested only in the easiest way to make a profit.

Programming is hard because you have to become a "jack of all trades" as well
as an expert in your own. You have to be able to document all the assumptions
that have controlled your development activity, the "whys and wherefores", the
paths taken and in some case the paths not taken and why. Too many
"programmers" think that documentation is not really needed. They are happy to
show off their "tricks" to enhance their reputation as good or great
programmers, but anything too hard to do is left for some other shmuck. To
those of us who are tasked with expanding, maintaining, correcting or even
rebuilding applications, we find that the lack of intelligible documentation
just makes the entire process that much harder. It does then behoove us to
provide said information.

I have extended family members still in their teens who are recognised as
brilliant programmers, yet they fail to appreciate that knowing programming
languages, frameworks, tools and toolsets is only the beginning of the process
to becoming a good and maybe in the future a brilliant programmer. My job as
an old programmer is to expand their multi-disciplinary education is as many
ways as possible, so that they become much better than me.

Programming is hard and it is not what a lot of programmers believe it to be.
It is much much more.

------
herbst
Most points seem pretty obvious honestly. Hard to tell if this isn't just low
afford clickbait (sorry if it isn't)

~~~
gyardley
You're not the intended audience for the article.

There's plenty of people for whom it's not at all obvious - in particular,
people who're being sold educational materials and courses so they can get
those big tech salaries.

~~~
herbst
I see how those could fall for that miss information but I fail to see that
someone serious is even telling these

------
drxzcl
Can we stop with this "programming is hard" business? In a CS program, the
programming classes are going to be the easiest ones you'll do. The hard stuff
is the math, theoretical computer science and algorithms.

~~~
wvenable
Your statement is valid but your conclusion is wrong. The programming classes
will be the easiest one but the average graduate still produces absolutely
terrible code, in my opinion. Even my own code from when I was a student
wasn't what I would accept as a manager now.

Software development is so difficult that it's hard to teach and most students
don't get it -- consequently the classes are far easier than they should be.

A large number of CS graduates can barely program at all.

Being a good developer requires a lot of experience.

~~~
spyhi
The lack of emphasis on software engineering/programming/implementation at my
program has been an ongoing complaint of mine. I went to school as an adult,
so I know what the workplace needs and I know a lot of universities are
missing a critical component of that.

Do you have any preferred resources for getting up to speed on the software
engineering side of things? I'm picking up stuff here and there, but always
looking for more or for convergence.

~~~
wvenable
I went to a very good school for my computing science degree and they spent a
good amount of time on software engineering.

But one of my coworkers is going to a terrible school and I'm literally
_appalled_ at their degree program. Without going into too much detail, it's
just _awful_. Anyone taking that program would be better off taking their time
and money and learning on their own.

My coworker is very talented developer; she gets A's without going to class
and she is specifically going to _this_ school to get an _easy_ computing
science degree while working full time.

A good school should teach the foundations of software engineering; what I
learned in school was a good foundation for everything I've done since. We
learned about agile. We did an entire semester long waterfall project
(teaching by explicit example why the waterfall method is terrible). I suspect
it's even better and more modern now.

I don't know if there is a good convergence of information. I don't think
there is no one-true-way to do software engineering yet everyone proposes
their own singular method. The best way to go is often to pick a little bit of
experience from everywhere.

------
lucb1e
Okay I'm being serious here. I'll comment on the main points because I feel
like they're pretty much all wrong.

"Learning programming is hard" I just kinda rolled into it as I grew up.

"Self-directed learning is hard" It's automatic for me. I'm interested in
things.

"Attending one workshop or a couple won’t turn you into a professional
developer." Well yeah. Does anyone think a couple workshops turn you into a
professional blacksmith?

"It takes time: You won’t become an developer in 3 months." Fair enough,
though I think if you study full-time, have fun doing it, and have a friend
helping you a few evenings a week, you can probably be good enough for a
junior position by 3 months.

"Finding your first developer job is hard." Is it? Haven't heard that from
people.

"Finding any kind of first job in tech is hard." Yeah this definitely isn't.

"Tech interviews are terrifying." Not really. I'm generally nervous for
interviews, but not more than is healthy I think.

"Job search in tech is extra long and frustrating." What planet are they on? I
hear bad stories about people that did psychology as a study, but tech?!

"Some people won’t make it." Fair enough.

I've stopped reading there because I just can't see what the author is getting
at. Is this just me? Or is it perhaps applicable to Silicon Valley
specifically, where developers are abundant (are they?)?

~~~
ivraatiems
To be honest, I think in this case it might be just you. Not everyone - and
perhaps in this case not most people - experience(s) the things listed here
same way you do. (As a corollary, just because you find something obvious
doesn't mean most people or everybody does.)

Plus, you're not really disagreeing with the points raised. You're just
providing one point of anecdata, your personal experience, and saying "yeah
this can't be right."

~~~
imjlu
Agreed, learning programming (even in great classes under great guidance) is
obtuse if not largely inaccessible to lots of people I know or have heard of.

