

Ask HN: You've been programming. What surprised you? - mcartyem

When you look back at the time when you started programming and look at where you are now, what surprised you the most?<p>Is there something that turned out to be the opposite of what you originally thought it would be?
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eeagerdeveloper
Great code is not required to make money and does not neccessarily help
increase revenue. Customers cares more about issues being addressed now than
how well it is designed underneath.

~~~
meric
Does great code at least help with addressing issues later?

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lumberjack
When I started, I was very creative, had little restrictions and thought
naively that programming was mostly about problems solving. However in my day
to day programming work, 30% of the time is spent learning new tools others
have developed, 5% is spend deciding what tools to use to build something and
how to glue everything together, 25% is spend implementing the project, and
the only problem solving is the tedious debugging that occupies the remaining
40% of the time.

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alphast0rm
Try and learn as much as you can, even if it doesn't fall into a realm of CS
that you are interested in. Little tidbits of knowledge will accumulate over
time and in the end you'll be a more well-versed engineer than someone who
didn't pay quite as much attention. This is coming from personal experience,
best of luck! :)

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iKlsR
DON'T try to memorize code, only way you can learn it is by repeatedly typing
it over and over again until you brain absorbs it.

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ankurdhama
Every time I look back I feel like how stupid I was back then.

~~~
z0a
In that case, wouldn't you always be stupid?

