
Real-World Development - danso
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/real-world-development/
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cblock811
> During my internship, I have gotten to know other developers at The Times
> and discovered that many of them didn’t start coding at five years old —
> some started as English majors, while others worked as chefs — proving it’s
> not what you know coming in that matters the most, but instead how well you
> can learn on the job.

Coming into this industry it can seem like everyone has a CS degree. I have
yet to work with another dev from a non-traditional background. It is
encouraging to be reminded that they are out there.

~~~
jlarocco
No offense, but I'm glad coders without CS degrees are a minority.

I've worked on two large C++ projects where non-CS, non-SE people were
dominant and originally wrote most of the code, and they were a mess compared
to the projects written by people with CS or software engineering degrees.

I'm not saying it's impossible for people to code without a CS degree or
anything like that (hell, even CS/SE grads screw it up all the time), but I'd
be extremely hesitant to work on another project started by or even mostly
written by non-traditional software engineers.

~~~
cblock811
Not offended at all. It's something that I've encountered and understand.
There are certain fundamentals that can be hard to pickup without someone
teaching them. I definitely feel the difference between myself and people who
have CS degrees. I do, however, try my best to keep my code clean and
organized (and am always open to advice from others).

I find that I end up in an intermediary role at times in meetings, translating
between engineering and business. It's pretty fun.

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angersock
_This sounded fun and manageable, so I felt fine. Then, as we discussed the
technical details of the project, I started to get nervous. I was going to be
pulling data from a MySQL database using PHP (although after some trial and
error, we decided to use Go instead). I would put the data into an Amazon S3
bucket and then create an API to pull the data from S3. Finally, I’d add a
page to an existing UI written in AngularJS where I would present the data in
beautiful and informative charts (created with D3.js)._

This reads like everything I consider wrong and offensive about our industry.

Congratulations to this person for pulling it off, but it's really sad how
many different things they had to contend with to get something going
(seriously, 2 weeks setting up a dev environment? wtf?).

~~~
dcre
This bugged me a bit too, but to be fair, it was "two weeks setting up my dev
environment ... and learning MySQL and PHP." Plus I'm sure she spent plenty of
time just talking to people.

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M8
_" I spent the first two weeks setting up my environment"_

Linux?

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rememberlenny
From 2014.

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bjwbell
She sounds so young and enthusiastic. I don't think I was ever quite like
that.

