The Case For the Blue Collar Coder 233
theodp writes "U.S. tech talent shortage discussions tend to focus on getting more young people to go to college to become CS grads. Nothing wrong with that, writes Anil Dash, but let's not forget about education which teaches mid-level programming as a skilled trade, suitable for apprenticeship and advancement in a way that parallels traditional trade skills like HVAC or welding. Dash encourages less of a focus on 'the next Zuckerberg' in favor of encouraging solid middle-class tech jobs that are primarily focused on creating and maintaining tech infrastructure in non-tech companies. Dash also suggests 'changing the conversation about recruiting technologists from the existing narrow priesthood of highly-skilled experts constantly chasing new technologies to productive workers getting the most out of widely-deployed platforms and frameworks.'"
Coding is a skill, not a profession (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes sense to me. Most of the best programmers I've known are guys who otherwise would be installing air conditioners, fixing big trucks or re-wiring buildings.
Coding is not a profession. It's a skill, which is a part of a series of job descriptions and career paths, but in itself it's a form of knowledge more like what an electrician has than what professionals like architects, doctors, lawyers and assassins must know.
Apprenticeship is an excellent idea since most of the "best practices" can't be taught at a school, and apprenticeship allows people with applied skills to shine, instead of schools where those with excellent detail memorization shine. Most of the best programmers I know either never went to school for it, or didn't do all that well at school.
Bring back the hacker aesthetic. Professions are for those who want to super-specialize and master specific high-level skills. Hacking is something anyone with the gumption and dedication can do. As the world expands into mobile devices, ordinary people are writing code every day.
That being said, CS needs to find a new career type that might belong to professions. I suggest "product architect" (like Steve Jobs) and "total systems integrators" (like what the Google guys do, interoperability) for those who will need college degrees or equivalent and a professional mindset.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
That's all well and good until you find out they've been using floating point for currency calculations, and they can't figure out why their bubble sorts are so slow.
I've worked with programmers with associates degrees. Some bad; some good. I'm not entirely against them, but I would not want an entire team made up of them. They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.
Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession (Score:5, Insightful)
And I've seen guys with Master's degrees in CS and systems science using floats for currency calculations. I've even been the one to clean up after them, despite the fact that I dropped out of college and by the standards of some people should be the one using hash tables where I should be using lists, floats where I should be using decimals, shouldn't know what a modulo operator is, shouldn't have a clue when it comes to how the quicksort algorithm works, should never even have heard of big O notation...
Just as you shouldn't assume that everyone without a degree is completely lacking in skills you also shouldn't assume that a degree somehow makes someone competent, there are hordes of developers out there who took CS in college in the late 90's because they thought "computers = big money" and somehow managed to graduate. Hell, looking at a lot of the guys I went to HS with who went on to major in CS in college I suspect most of those just thought "I like computer games so why not study something with computer in its name?", I even had a few people like that as classmates in college (gotta love being the only one in a four man team actually writing code, the others all volunteered to write the documentation)...
And no, I don't think I'm a "rock star coder", I'd consider my skills as a developer to be pretty average. A decent enough CRUD and business coder who writes some slightly more interesting code in his free time.
Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed point is very much a lost art. There should be an entire class dedicated to it and anyone in ME or EE that wants to do robotics should be forced to take it. We have to train every single CS, ME and EE that comes in how to do it in Simulink (We use auto code generation and fixed point everything before production).
I do embedded controls and floating points are 'expensive' with most of the chips we use. They're still not that common. But people don't understand how much faster they can be than floats when your stuff doesn't have an FPU.
I picked up an Arduino and ran some floating point vs fixed point benchmarks:
Each of these calculations was run 500,000 times.
d=a+b; e=c+b-a;
f=a+b+c; g=a*b*c;
Floating point:
a=1.1298373 b=2.3249869 c=3.8923873
d=3.4548244 e=5.0875368 f=7.3472118 g=10.22
Execution Time: **14528 ms**
Int:
Integer Representations:
a=36 b=74 c=124
d=110 e=162 f=234 g=2656
Floating Numbers:
a=1.1250000 b=2.3125000 c=3.8750000
d=3.4375000 e=5.0625000 f=7.3125000 g=0.0625000
Execution Time: **348 ms**
Long Int:
Long Representations:
a=36 b=74 c=124
d=110 e=162 f=234 g=330336
Floating Numbers:
a=1.1250 b=2.3125 c=3.8750
d=3.4375 e=5.0625 f=7.3125 g=10.0625000
Execution Time: **1951 ms**
Now when you're using a 16 Mhz controller to make das blinken lights it doesn't matter. But when you start getting into autonomous control and trying to do real time processing of a few dozen sensors to make sure your flying robot doesn't smash into the wall it does matter.
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And then there is proper representation of datatypes.
If you can fit the values into 8 bits, and those adds and subtracts and maybe even multiplies can be done in hardware, you get a massive boost in performance.
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Huh? Floats is the standard representation of numbers almost everywhere.
It's true you can have pathological cases, but any efficient number representation you pick will necessarily be a trade off. There's a reason floats are implemented in hardware.
Floating point in financial transactions (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? Floats is the standard representation of numbers almost everywhere.
Not in financial transactions. While there are ways to do financial transactions with floating point numbers, they have an alarming tendency to introduce rounding errors. When you are dealing in money, rounding errors are an extremely bad thing because then the books don't balance anymore. One common way to deal with the problem of rounding floats is to treat the stuff to left of the decimal as an integer and the stuff to the right as another integer since there are no rounding issues with integers. While not as fast as floats, the extra accuracy is worth it in this instance. There are other ways to solve this problem but you'll find conventional floating point is used with great caution in the financial world.
There's a reason floats are implemented in hardware.
Which has nothing to do with why floating point numbers are often not used for financial transactions.
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And for even more fun, exact rounding rules may be defined in law, and differ.
Lying abstractions (Score:4, Informative)
The better answer is to use languages with arbitrary precision representations of rational numbers. You will not have to deal with integer overflows, you will not have to deal with losing precision, and you can spend more of your time developing the correct program logic. Yes, it will mean a bit more in resources -- which can be fixed later if it becomes a problem.
There's a reason floats are implemented in hardware.
Yeah, and it is the same reason we continue to use C and C++ to write high level programs: history. If we were starting from scratch today, using the latest technologies and research, it is almost certain that we would do things differently.
It doesn't matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of misunderstanding isn't what is causing the major pains in the industry.
Changing the educational emphasis won't address the major pains.
The major pains are caused by:
1) The perception that one cannot build a career on software development, because agism forces people to change to a completely different career sometime after they turn 35. True or not, this scares people away from the field, as it should, because if it is true then anyone talented/intelligent enough to do software development is talented/intelligent enough to do something else instead.
2) The perception that software development pays less than other fields that require comparable talent/intellegence. If true, it makes perfect sense that people who know they have what it takes would turn their noses up at a low-paying waste of their talents.
3) The perception that one is perpetually at risk for having their job outsourced to cheap foreign labor. Nobody likes working jobs where they don't know if they will still be employed the next day (and the deciding factor isn't even dependent on their performance).
4) The perception that developers are expected to overwork, sacrificing their personal lives for a company that won't even pay them overtime wages for it. Work-life balance is important, and people will shy away from careers that deprive them of it.
Address these perceptions, and address the issues that cause these perceptions, and you will see people naturally choosing to do software development again.
Refuse, and employers will face a lackluster market populated mostly by people with social/professional problems (or timezone, native language, and cultural acclimation problems).
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A nice primer: http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4322431/Mind-boggling-math-BCD-binary-coded-decimal- [edn.com]
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I always assumed that no-one used floating point except for games, and even then it's risky unless you normalise sufficiently frequently.
Unfortunately, you assumed very, very wrong.
Very few programming languages come with native fixed-decimal capabilities as a first-class operation the way COBOL does. Most (such as Java) have to do financial calculations using cumbersome support packages and some don't even have that much. Everyone else just fakes it using floating-point, and even a lot of Java and C financial code is done in floating-point because the pressure is on to "Git 'er Dun" and that means using something where you can type "balanc
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Why would you need fixed decimal at all?
Can't you keep track of pennies instead of dollars and just avoid that whole issue?
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Actually scratch that, I guess parts of pennies can somehow exist. Never mind that they can't be paid.
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Actually scratch that, I guess parts of pennies can somehow exist. Never mind that they can't be paid.
But by that stage, you may as well use floating point or fixed point binary. Fixed point decimal is no better at representing fractions than fixed point binary. Nothing wil help if you need 1/3 of a penny.
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Fixed point decimal is no better at representing fractions than fixed point binary. Nothing will help if you need 1/3 of a penny.
To be pedantic it is better - a bases ability to express numbers without fractions is dependent on the number of prime factors they have. Decimal has 2 and 5 so fractions depending on multiples of 5 can be expresses without recurring.
Third option: better languages (Score:2)
But by that stage, you may as well use floating point or fixed point binary. Fixed point decimal is no better at representing fractions than fixed point binary. Nothing wil help if you need 1/3 of a penny.
Better programming languages will help you:
Oh, look, an arbitrary precision rational number, created where we expected to see an arbitrary precision rational number. Yes, you can get a float, but you need to be explicit about wanting that because of all the problems it introduces:
Yes, you will see some performance hit when you use arbitrary precision representa
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Many LISP implementations will, actually, allow you to represent 1/3 easily and will store it as a rational. They will also enable you to use an arbitrary number of bits, and therefore an arbitrary number of digits, in an integer. What stops most people from adopting the language is the odd syntax.
Fractional pennies (Score:2)
Actually scratch that, I guess parts of pennies can somehow exist. Never mind that they can't be paid.
Not only can they be paid, they often are. Remember that most currency is not actually coins and bills. Most of it is just numbers in ledger somewhere. Stock transactions are often to as many as 5-6 decimal places. My company quotes parts with prices containing 4 decimal places. When you are dealing with many thousands of parts those fractions of a penny can add up to real money pretty quickly.
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I worked in a mixed environment. Our Cash Cow was a mortgage loan processing system. That system tracked people's load payments in dollars and cents (fixed decimal) and if things didn't balance to the penny, people got unhappy (IIRC, 0.01 in binary floating-point is an irrational number, and therefore cannot be precise within a finite number of bits).
However, I worked for a time in a mortgage portfolio valuation system (yes, the type that estimated the present and future values - badly, as it came out - so
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You are a sterling example of why programming should not be considered a "blue collar apprenticeship". Although your remarks may still be the end result of a University education and that's a scary thought.
No one should get any kind of CIS degree or certificate without passing a Numerical Analysis course.
Indeed:Coding is a skill, not a profession (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all well and good until you find out they've been using floating point for currency calculations, and they can't figure out why their bubble sorts are so slow.
I've worked with programmers with associates degrees. Some bad; some good. I'm not entirely against them, but I would not want an entire team made up of them. They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.
You see that also with people with BS degrees, and I know about those (and a lot more) when I got my AA degree. Truth to be told, I knew more about programming and CS when I left community college than my sophomore/junior peers when I transferred to a 4-year university... and I met quite a few senior students and even grad students who couldn't picture an array of pointers to structures with function pointers as fields (not that you want to do that every day, but c'mon a senior CS student or grad student should have no problem visualizing that.)
I got a BS in CS, went to grad school and now I'm trying to go to grad school to switch into a more hardware oriented degree. I have 17+ years working on this, and I can say with great confidence that most "enterprise" programming tasks do not require a BS-level education in computer science.
More importantly, a good community college can provide, via a AS degree, all the tools needed to do work : systems analysis and design, structured and object-oriented programming, all that mixed with an intro to the basics of algorithm analysis (without the proving part), hands-on RDBMS, basic network/sysadmin skills and other fundamental skills like using/setting source control and bug tracking systems and technical writing.
You are right when you say you don't want to work with a group made solely of AA/AS graduates. I know; I started my career with a AA only, and I know for a fact that such a group needs more senior members to give technical direction.
But, for IT and the typical enterprise programming, we really do not need to know about the pumping lemma, prove the equivalence of turing machines to lambda calculus or the differences between micro kernel and monolitic kernels or proving some something on the structure of bizantine problems.
Blame it on the dot-com that we had a push for MOAR!!!(10+1)! 4-year degrees for web page design, which in turn converted most CS 4-year programs into Java/.NET vocational schools (where a person can graduate w/o even understanding what a pointer or a segfault is.)
The correct thing back then would have been to promote more community-college level vocational education as 2-3 year AS/AAS degrees. It would have been the best for the career, the nation and for all the students involved.
I love CS, I love my degree, I love my grad education, and God willing, I will get my Ph.D, and I love my line of work. But hell that I will ever propose that a BS degree is the minimum required to work on IT/enterprise programming.
I pray to ${DEITY} that this will become a firm step in the right direction.
Have you ever worked with grad students? (Score:2)
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They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.
I'm sorry, but in the internet age this is not necessarily true. There are very good coders (and software engineers) out there with little or no formal college education who still have enough interest in computer science to study on their own. For a motivated individual, the only benefit education-wise of getting a 4-year degree at a university is the opportunity to surround yourself with people of similar interests.
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It's no different than a poor craftsman in any trade. If the guys with degrees actually understand that IEEE floats are not sufficient for all computation that involves a decimal, why do so few languages natively support arbitrary precision?
That's a Very Generic Thesis (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes sense to me. Most of the best programmers I've known are guys who otherwise would be installing air conditioners, fixing big trucks or re-wiring buildings.
There is a substantial amount of math and logic that should be used as a foundation for programming. I know the coworkers that would otherwise be installing air conditioners when I ask people if they thing we could use a more functional-type language for a new project instead of an object oriented language. You're usually met with blank stares.
Coding is not a profession. It's a skill
This could be said about anything that people pay you to do. Anything.
which is a part of a series of job descriptions and career paths, but in itself it's a form of knowledge more like what an electrician has than what professionals like architects, doctors, lawyers and assassins must know.
What? Look, I think you're trying to discuss what you feel is the percentage between creativity and regurgitation in each of the above subjects. And I will tell you right now that all those fields are diverse with jobs that require more than one of the other. If you want to say programming requires more creativity and that's something that cannot be taught then at least give me a compelling argument for that.
Bring back the hacker aesthetic. Professions are for those who want to super-specialize and master specific high-level skills. Hacking is something anyone with the gumption and dedication can do. As the world expands into mobile devices, ordinary people are writing code every day.
If only you could see the spaghetti code I've seen. Ordinary people are free to write code, in fact I love that and I hope that continues to expand. But when you're talking about commercial grade software being written for a company that is being sold to people for real money ... that's when I start to cringe that "good enough to tinker with in my home means good enough to be deployed to millions of personal devices across the world."
That being said, CS needs to find a new career type that might belong to professions. I suggest "product architect" (like Steve Jobs) and "total systems integrators" (like what the Google guys do, interoperability) for those who will need college degrees or equivalent and a professional mindset.
Personally I value my liberal arts college degree and I think my employer does as well. I can communicate better with customers and I now understand much more of the world now than I did in high school (when I thought I knew everything).
You're free to apply to jobs but when you're going up against people who have rigorously studied mathematics, logic, philosophy, English, etc you have to be ready to show an employer what you're made of before your application is automatically rejected by some routine resume sorting algorithm. It's not that those algorithms are correct, it's just that employers are too lazy to spend two hours with every single person on the planet trying to find the right applicant. Instead, if I didn't go to college, I'd buy a virtual private server and be going to town on developing things that look good so I can show them off. Honestly, I think it was easier, more fun and more eye-opening (yet way more expensive) for me to go to a liberal arts college. It's your life, so do what you want. You can tell the recruiters they're doing it wrong but then again it's their job and that's their decision. This sounds like some very talented hackers venting about the problems with entering into the workforce.
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If only you could see the spaghetti code I've seen. Ordinary people are free to write code, in fact I love that and I hope that continues to expand. But when you're talking about commercial grade software being written for a company that is being sold to people for real money ... that's when I start to cringe that "good enough to tinker with in my home means good enough to be deployed to millions of personal devices across the world."
Have you seen the wiring put into houses by people who are "good enough to tinker with in my own home" when it comes to electrical work? It makes spaghetti code look straightforward. I've known several people who were very good "handyman" electricians. If you needed one new outlet run, or a single light fixture added, they were very bit as good and reliable as a certified electrician. But, if they wired more than five or six circuits in a house (usually only happened if it was the house they owned and lived
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You never heard of a breaker finder?
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My god, it's a liberal arts major :) (Score:5, Insightful)
I enjoy your comments on the site, so you'll get more than the standard drive-by response from me.
First, I'd like to make it clear that I am not scornful of these fields. Air-conditioning installing, building wiring, etc. are not devoid of creativity and intelligence requirements.
In fact, like programming, there's a huge gulf between doing it and doing it right that is determined by degree of intelligence and creativity.
You may find that intelligence level is the difference between the blank starers and the thinkers, if you look back over the years.
I'm not communicating effectively here. I'm not trying to make this a comparison of creativity levels, or regurgitation, except to say that I think education over-emphasizes regurgitation, which is not the skill that differentiates an excellent programmer from a hum-drum one. This was a statement I made in support of the apprenticeship idea.
Professionals are different from all other careers in two crucial ways: first, they must be able to handle a huge amount of detail and balance those details against one another; second, they are responsible for greater impact than most others, and as a result need to have critical thinking, leadership and human perception skills that are not normally required.
I'm thinking of doctors, lawyers, CEOs, architects and probably a few other groups here. I don't know if creativity is what is needed; most jobs call for inventiveness, or the ability to apply different forms with a bit of fudging so that new uses arise. But so does life itself.
Are we shuffling too many people into these professions? Yes, unquestionably so, just like we're sending too many people to college. This doesn't mean we should forget what these professions actually require, especially since most who attempt them fail.
Why do you assume I haven't seen similar forms of spaghetti code? The first workplace skill I mastered was Lamaze breathing so I could avoid shouting expletives when looking over other people's projects. However, I'd be lying if I said these people were not well-credentialed. Some came from what are considered good schools and had good resumes, and make more money than just about anyone else.
Ordinary people are going to be writing more code. For most coding, what is required isn't a mystery. In fact, it's well known and well publicized, so that cut-paste-and-modify programming will continue to be the norm. If you haven't looked at the average web developer these days, you might take a peek, and you may see where programming is going. Mastery of libraries, frameworks and commonly needed syntactical devices has replaced the roll-your-own coder.
Doesn't look that way (Score:2)
From the post:
That's a degree in the liberal arts, unless he chose a deliberately awkward "liberal arts college" + degree formulation.
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Personally I value my liberal arts college degree and I think my employer does as well. I can communicate better with customers and I now understand much more of the world now than I did in high school (when I thought I knew everything).
Liberal arts degree, 'eh? Your comment's great, but there's one too many "now"s in this sentence! XD
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There is a substantial amount of math and logic that should be used as a foundation for programming. I know the coworkers that would otherwise be installing air conditioners when I ask people if they thing we could use a more functional-type language for a new project instead of an object oriented language. You're usually met with blank stares.
So very sorry but I must take exception with this. The "substantial amount of math" comes down to the 4 basic operations. Even partial differential equations come down to it with lots of looping. Really good programmers are not mathematicians for the most part. Really good programmers understand the machine and mathematicians dream up equations that do "something" and then explain in terms that can be translated into code.
And as to the bit about functional -v- object oriented languages, your tipping you
Oh, Lisp and Prolog Are Based on C? (Score:2)
So very sorry but I must take exception with this. The "substantial amount of math" comes down to the 4 basic operations. Even partial differential equations come down to it with lots of looping. Really good programmers are not mathematicians for the most part. Really good programmers understand the machine and mathematicians dream up equations that do "something" and then explain in terms that can be translated into code.
No reason to apologize, without exceptions we wouldn't have any conversations, discussions or debates. I find it incredibly interesting that you seem to consider some parts of programming to be mathematics and you can even go so far as to say that "really good programmers are not mathematicians for the most part." I will quote Donald Knuth [progfree.org] since he is much wiser than I:
Therefore the idea of passing laws that say some kinds of algorithms belong to mathematics and some do not strikes me as absurd as the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416. It's like the medieval church ruling that the sun revolves about the earth. Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.
Understanding the machine is very important as well but any programmer should know mathematics first and foremost. I use logic daily in w
Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing lacking in the traditional CS route is understanding of the business one is coding for. I managed projects for a large taxing authority. We found it much more productive to take existing employees who understood the various tax procedures and workflows in the department and train them to program versus hiring CS graduates and train them in tax policy and procedures. People from the "floor" have a totally different insight than management and CS graduates and their insight leads to much more efficient ways of doing things. Of course, the people we pulled from the floor did have an aptitude for programming and desingFor the record, we also hired some CS graduates, depending on specific skill sets needed.
Business IT shops would do much better to consider apprenticeship programs. What is taught in most CS programs did not transfer well into what we needed most. My recommendation to students wanting to pursue a career in IT would be to get a business administration degree with various CS classes as electives (or even minor in CS). That is, unless, you want to work for the big tech companies, in which case, I would flip that and go CS with a minor in business.
At least that is how it works in the Midwest of the US.
Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession (Score:4, Insightful)
Training existing employees in needed skills represents a conscious desire to improve the skill set of your existing employees, so you gain ability without the expense and hassle of finding someone new to hire. It treats your employees like assets to be improved, not liabilities to be minimized.
Unfortunately, ISTM that most employers would rather rip off an arm than provide training for their employees. Their logic is that helping employees to expand their skill sets only leads to freshly trained employees that quickly leave because they can make more money/improve their working conditions/get away from a horrible manager by going to another employer. The problem is, while it's short-sighted, they're right. Keeping employees happy is expensive, complicated and time-consuming. Lots of times, it requires a change in the corporate culture. It's hard to go from treating your employees like liabilities and cost centers to treating them like assets. It's *very* hard to convince employees that the culture has genuinely changed; they'll assume it's just another case of management saying all the right things while not actually changing anything of substance, which they have more than likely done before.
In an ideal world, companies that treated their people like shit would quickly find themselves without employees, having had said employees leave to go to another employer that treats them like human beings. (The free market in action, no?) The trouble is that, in practice, the employee is at a severe disadvantage when it comes to how their employer treats them. Their employer basically controls their entire lives (literally, in the case of employer-provided health insurance). Wage slavery is a real thing, and the norm. Most companies treat their employees just well enough to keep them from leaving immediately, which results in employees doing just enough work to not get fired. Management does not want to provide the employee with more ammunition in the battle by making them more marketable as employees; they like them right where they are. Yeahh, I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday, mmkay?
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I write software in the retail industry. Aside from having worked in retail in my younger years, I know how to write quality software. What I have learned is that to get the best software, I need to sit and talk to an expert in the problem domain. If I were writing tax software I
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Coding is not a profession. It's a skill, which is a part of a series of job descriptions and career paths, but in itself it's a form of knowledge more like what an electrician has than what professionals like architects, doctors, lawyers and assassins must know.
W
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????
A "skill" isn't a "knowledge", it's an application of knowledge. Not everyone who knows how to operate dangerous equipment should be allowed to do so. Not everyone who knows how to cut gemstones can cut them reliably.
Furthermore, there's at least a myth that mid-level coders will someday be senior coders and in an era where even the entry-level people are expected to know and do everything, the whole idea of a static "mid-level, semi-skilled blue collar coder" is just plain absurd. Unlike, say, appre
A craft is not a profession. (Score:2)
Traditionally, blue collar work has included artisans and craftsmen, and as I recall that's where the apprenticeship method started.
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We already have apprenticeships, but we call them internships. If you have a demonstrable natural talent for coding, companies will claw over each other to hire you as an intern. I know, because not even half of the interns we hire were even remotely productive, but the others could write their own tickets.
Keep it real (Score:2)
Maybe. But if you're going to go with blue-collar coding, you'll need to stop with the uber-coolification of programming.
I'm talking about stuff like the obsession with adding functional programming to Java. Java's a perfectly good language for the blue-collar programmer. It lets you check and find a lot of your bugs at compile time. The static nature of the language lets your IDE give you Intellisense-type (code completion) features, very handy for the blue-collar programmer.
A very General Motors factory l
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For fuck's sake, a business dataset is never going to be so small that "bubble sort is fine".
You see, people? Do you see? This is why we fucking need college.
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Except that for most businesses you don't write your own sorting algorithm implementation but take the dataset sorting method instead. Reinventing the wheel - or worse, reimplementing the wheel - is often a bad idea.
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That is completely irrelevant, though it explains how someone who is completely ignorant of why some sorting algorithms are classified as better than others could be gainfully employed.
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And there is nothing wrong with that. You don't need high skills for work that can be done by a code monkey and it is better than to outsource the same kind of menial work to India.
Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession (Score:4, Insightful)
The real issue here is talking about the sorting method to begin with. Coding is like playing with Legos. You plug in the "sorting brick" and forget about it. Whatever library you are using should have a properly optimized sorting algorithm with any necessary speed hacks or whatever else is required. Such a library should be well-tested and proven.
Unless you're a Ph.D. candidate looking into sorting highly specialized data sets such as Google's search index, you have no business implementing a search algorithm. You need to be using whatever standard implementation is defined by the language or framework libraries.
At this point in the evolution of Computer Science, "sorting" is a problem that is solved. People smarter than either of us have proven that O(n log n) is the fastest it gets, and we have multiple algorithms to do it. Other smart people have plugged these algorithms into standard libraries and frameworks. People dumber than us decide to reinvent the wheel. /facepalm.
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There are two egregiously flawed assumptions in what I quoted, and neither of them have anything to do with the prevalence of standard libraries.
One is that it is acceptable for enterprise software to be slow, presumably because it always is. That is the broken window theory [wikipedia.org] in action. People with that mentality will never be anything but the mediocre programmers and will never seek to undersand anything beyond what it takes to not get fired.
The other is that the difference between sorting algorithms is sim
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How many hours did you sit in class learning how to sort? It was probably an hour. Why spend years in college for something you could research online in less time than your college registration would take. I'm simplifying but meh.
Architecture and craftspersonship (Score:2)
This is a good point.
Coding is, in my view, one tool in the belt of a CS grad. The biggest skill is how to apply technology, and that's where
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Already blue collar (Score:2, Insightful)
It's been a blue collar job for most of us ever since I've been coding professionally (since about 2000).
Programming is applied Math (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would we want more un/under educated programmers? Programming is applied Math and very few high school students are going to be equipped to do it well.
Re:Programming is applied Math (Score:5, Insightful)
Programming, in this sense, is applied method calling into your supporting libraries and framework. It has more similarities to designing a nice-looking Word template or using Excel in not overly creative ways. If a programmer of this kind ends up designing her own algorithms or even worse a full class hierarchy, it will surely end up on thedayilywtf. The thing is, they should not need to. You don't expect a household electrician to rewire stuff with a new transformer design just because it seemed fun to do for one specific customer and maybe 10% more efficient. You do standard stuff in standard ways. It's not trivial, but it's all done within well-defined bounds.
I would never want this kind of a job, but if you consider how many things that are still done manually in one way or another by people having GFLOPS on their desktops, it's also obvious that cheaper and more plentiful access to people able to just crank out code to do stuff has a tremendous value.
Computer Science is applied math (Score:3)
Why would we want more un/under educated programmers?
Because there is a lot of work that needs to be done that doesn't require a degree in computer science and people with those degrees tend to be expensive. You don't want under educated people but there is a cost to having over-educated people as well.
Programming is applied Math and very few high school students are going to be equipped to do it well.
Computer science is math whereas programming can be a bit more abstract than that. Programs are a set of instructions to a machine and sufficiently abstracted it really doesn't require deep knowledge of math for someone to do useful work. While ultimately an
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To drive wages down, that is what this is really about.
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Yeah, it is. So's bartending.
Face it, the level of math knowledge that you need to be a competent programmer is really not that high. Probably no more than what's required of carpenters or electricians. (There are some math-heavy sub-fields, like crypto or 3D rendering. But most of us don't need to delve into them.)
I'm sure that a carpenter could benefit from going to college and taking courses in math, physics and engineering. Would it be worth 4 years of his life + $100,000? Probably not.
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I think everyone that wants to equate programmers with plumbers or electricians need to actually to go out and do these trades for awhile and ONLY THEN come back and try to feed us this line of bull.
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Programmers might not know set theory in a formal sense, but as a programmer you pretty much have to use set theory in some way (even a boolean expression on integers expresses a set).
I am a blue collar coder (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW The closest my school had to Computer Science was a couple of Commodore Pets and a maths teacher who thought all that was involved with CS was logic. Ah well where there's a geek there's a way :)
Of-course (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been arguing this [slashdot.org] for quite a while [slashdot.org], there should be more apprentices and fewer university graduates with insurmountable debt, however this is not going to happen given the labour regulations, tax incentives, even inflation. All of these prevent jobs from appearing. A businessman doesn't need an incentive to hire people, his incentive is to make more money, it exists already. What he needs is not to have incentives to do things that are not actually useful to him. A business could have a bunch of apprentices, if it was possible to pay them a very low wage. As things stand (never mind the inflation, which kills savings and jobs), the labour law makes it illegal to hire people below minimum wage while still allowing to have students as 'apprentices' who have to work for free. All this does is incentivizes the kids to go to higher education, where they don't actually need to, while working for free as apprentices, while getting deeper and deeper into debt. Instead the kids must be able to skip school entirely and learn the trade at work making a little bit of money, that would give them an incentive to show up and do the work, while not getting into debt and learning the skills. This is something that businesses have always done before governments screwed this up.
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Maybe as individual programmers we should hire apprentices.
They could fetch coffee, make copies, and clean up compiler warnings behind us.
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clean up compiler warnings behind us
Die in a fire. If you are not writing your code in a way that does not produce compiler warnings, you are doing something seriously wrong.
Apprenticeship is under-rated (Score:2)
When we graduated college, an old-timer said something to the effect of, "Now that your degree program is over, your education can begin."
What followed for the lucky amongst us was finding people in our industries who could teach us from the benefit of experience. Education tries for comprehensive and lacks in application; an apprenticeship teaches application.
Both are necessary, but one can be had by cracking a book on
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what use? (Score:3)
What we need is more specialized, difficult, and deep CS programs, not programs that people can sleep through and come out of with little technical knowledge beyond Java application development.
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Unfortunately that's all businesses care about nowadays - you're more likely to get a job because you know how to use Visual Studio than you are if you know how to program effectively. Today much of the technical expertise is being eroded in 2 ways:
Developers being given RAD tools where coding is more "if you do this it just works, don't think how it works, just trust it does". This is particularly relevant in the .NET world where Visual Studio isn't a tool to help you code, its a tool that defines your env
batch file versus kernel (Score:3)
If your design can be done by someone with the education levels or mental faculties of a welder, it can be done by outsourced talent more cheaply anyways.
Apparently you have never tried welding if you think welders are dumb. (hint, it's really quite difficult to do well and requires a LOT of training)
That said, there is a lot of coding that is not practical to outsource. I am not a programmer professionally but I do some coding here and there as a part of my job. I'm not about to write a linux kernel or anything like that, but some simple coding to do my job more effectively is useful. Should I have to go get a CS degree before writing a few macros or a
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What we need are a small number of software architects with C.S. degrees, and a large number of code monkeys with trade school educa
Germany - 1960's (Score:5, Informative)
They've had that in Germany since the 1960's.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematisch-Technischer_Assistent [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
A highly misleading post, not least since the link is in German.
Yes, MTAs have been around for quite a while, but they require either a "Realschul" Diploma or a full-blown Abitur (says so in the linked article), which more often than not includes material that's usually taught in freshman years at colleges in the States.
So, it's back to the main point, namely, that you need to go to college for at least a year in the States. Then you might as well finish your CS degree.
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I think Fachinformatiker - Anwendungsentwicklung is more fitting
Proven technologies (Score:2)
Dash also suggests 'changing the conversation about recruiting technologists from the existing narrow priesthood of highly-skilled experts constantly chasing new technologies to productive workers getting the most out of widely-deployed platforms and frameworks.
Wait, no more bleeding edge hacking? What in the world is left for the sales drones to do?
IT / tech needs apprenticeship not years of colleg (Score:3)
IT / tech needs apprenticeship not years of college with big skills gaps.
And the tech schools get dragged down by having to be part of the college systems and some of the college time table.
Not just coders that need apprenticeshipes Techs (Score:2)
Not just coders that need apprenticeshipes. IT Techs needs them as well even more so as CS does not tech the skilled needed to do IT tech work it's more for teaching coders
There is to much put on degrees and the name of sc (Score:2)
There is to much put on degrees and the name of school over real job experience and NON degree classes.
There are lots of people with degrees and big skills gaps and lot's people who have real skills but no degree or a tech school degree.
degrees take to long and can cut out people who ar (Score:2)
degrees take to long and can cut out people who are not college material. But can do the job / handle Community Colleges and tech schools as they are a better fit for people like that and are have more hands on learning.
Also degrees are a poor fit for continuing education in the IT field.
Also there is a lot fluff and filler in a degree and it can be cut down to maybe 2-3 years or better yet for some parts of IT a mixed 1-2-3 years of class room and on the job apprenticeship.
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Which leads to the contractos I have to deal with. They have no idea how anything actually works, just the knowhow of which button to press when in some program. If anything breaks they are lost, firing up wireshark and watching packets on the wire is totally beyond them. They would not even know what to look for.
The Case for the "Blue Collar" Coder (Score:4, Interesting)
"U.S. tech talent shortage discussions tend to focus on getting more young people to go to college to become CS grads"
THERE IS NO TECH TALENT SHORTAGE. What there is, is disinformation about what one needs to really
know to really program. Plenty of unemployed and students out there who have figured this out.
But they are blocked out of the market by both employers, employment agencies and state unemployment offices
who don't have a CLUE as to the nature of the skills needed and have created a ridiculous artificial set
of evaluative criteria.
In addition, there are brilliant programmers out there with no degrees or associate's degrees or liberal arts degrees.
Also, you do NOT need calculus to program or be a software engineer.
You do NOT need Dykstra.
You do NOT need to know how to write a compiler.
There is no "Blue Collar".... there are competent skilled programmers, reasonably skilled ones, screw-ups, and Ivy League graduates with big degrees who would not last a 10th of a second in real world programming. I know, I've worked with all of them.
There is one key JOB REQUIREMENT in this field. The ability to deal with the unknown, to learn and to adjust. Period.
Reading and communication skills are paramount too. Above all else.
From a retired Software Engineer of 32 years experience
Looking at things the wrong way. (Score:3)
The problem with looking at coding this way is too many people will fail. When you're looking for a vocation/apprenticeship the last thing you want is something risky.
It's also way too volatile. Training to be a "microsoft .net programmer" is insane. You're whole profession could get flushed down the toilet instantly.
All that education is necessary to constantly retrain yourself.
Overspecialization (Score:2)
Unfortunately, it seems like many degree programs are going in that direction as well.
Is This Rhetorical? (Score:3)
Can we? I've... never heard of anything like this. Which annoys me, because I'd really like to do it. I want to learn coding, but I am not a self-motivated hacker stereotype. I need a project given to me, and if I'm operating without guidance, there is a ceiling on the types of problems I can solve in a timely fashion. I'm not stupid, but I'm not brilliant either, or at least I haven't been called that since high school, (which I dropped out of) and generally programming is considered something only a supergenius should be allowed to do, especially by programmers.
I know this isn't true, as I've taken a programming course once at a community college and did well and enjoyed myself. But taking a course means I get to do a bunch of stuff that I never use because I can't find work related to it, if at all, and so I forget it. An apprenticeship is the only way I can think of that would supply me with steady work to cement the skills in my head. As far as I know, apprenticeships do not exist, because those who would be masters usually believe in the old-school cowboy hacker DIY-elitism. The most help they'll offer is "here's a book about a language you might be able to understand. Get to work, you pleb."
What work? I have no idea what I want to code! Just give me something.
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The next Zuckerberg? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean the next undergrad to drop out of college thinking he can change the world with one hot idea? Education would be wasted on the next Zuckerberg. Just introduce him to some venture capitlaist with money to burn and let the wheel of fortune spin.
Same old whine (Score:5, Interesting)
Beware anyone who calls your profession a "priesthood", because he operates under the assumption that he is entitled to more than you, is either jealous or contemptuous of your market salary and wants to put you in your place. For whatever reason our culture regards doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and CEOs as deserving the benefits of scarcity, but it is a huge problem when you can't you hire a computer nerd for less than six figures. If you aren't an extrovert, you don't deserve to be on top of the status hierarchy.
We already have vocational technology education, but it's widely regarded as a joke. Putting it in high school isn't going to change that. And if you have the knack for it, learning programming or learning computer maintenance is easy. After all, every time the subject of college degrees come up, there are always people very adamant that they didn't need one, and that "the best people I know didn't go to college". So if it is unnecessary, why are they arguing for "blue collar" programmers? These people argue "nature" in one breath and then "nurture" in the next. Dash is actually saying that the self-educated or non-degreed don't deserve to be considered "white collar" professionals.
Dash also makes the mistake of conflating programming with "IT", something the Slashdot peanut gallery is also apt to do. I'll leave that stupidity for a different flame war.
Uh, shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty skeptical of this entire story. In my experience whenever anyone talks about retraining blue collar workers for tech work it's just a desperate attempt to deal with the fact that robots and outsourcing have made these people obsolete, and we want to pretend there's something for them all to do besides starve...
Craftsmanship doesn't come without understanding.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Blue collar coder - it's redundant (Score:4, Interesting)
All developers, programmers, researchers - we're all blue collar. People working in administration and accounting are considered white collar.
As a scientist, I don't feel insulted to be "blue collar". I'm fine with that.
I don't think apprenticeships are it... (Score:3)
Part of the reason I don't think an apprenticeship model works for teaching programming is that by its nature it is a scholarly profession. I don't mean that in the ivory tower way, I mean that programming is largely research based and requires an active mind. You need meta-skills of the kind that allow you to assess, filter and process a lot of information, but be able to focus in on and find the particular bits that are relevant to you. Doing an university degree often teaches this skill indirectly and some people develop it themselves though natural dedication (autodidacts). I don't think an apprenticeship style of learning gives people the time or inclination to do this. More practical experience and mentoring is definitely valuable, but it shouldn't be the sum total of a programming education.
I also think that there is also a defensive thinking mindset required to properly produce robust software that requires a certain level of formal knowledge as well as practical experience. Degrees at the moment don't necessarily teach this, but you do see a lot of software written without this knowledge and quite often it becomes obvious that it's only going to work *some* of the time and quite a lot of this software comes from people with a weak formal education (but not all of it).
Yes, not everyone needs to know everything (Score:2)
To build a house, you not only need the architect, but the guy who hammers nails and lays flooring. Similarly, to build a program, you don't necessarily need to know much about virtual void functions, but you'd better be able to handle integers, strings, arrays, if-then statements and loops. These are the hammers and nails portion of the industry.
Full Circle (Score:2)
When I grew up in the 1980s, computer jobs were treated as some sort of blue-collar skill suited for autistic personality types that were incapable of relating to other human beings. "Respectable" people were supposed to go into law, medicine, or business. Before resumes became computer-searchable, "respectable" people avoided mentioning computer skills, since employers were turned off by technical jargon.
collar color is how you do your job (Score:2)
Very Insightful Article (Score:2)
What he means when says 'blue collar' (Score:4, Insightful)
What he really means, in a nutshell: "Programmers are paid too much."
origin as female clerical trade (Score:2)
One consequence was
classic programmer vs developer argument (Score:2)
The problem is, I have NEVER seen that in my 15 years of developing. The technology landscape is constantly evolving, we need developers that know how to learn to do stuff
Blue Collar needed, but so are White Collar (Score:2)
They need the cheap blue collar coders to just get it done and working.
Once they get it working the business starts making money and expanding beyond the original programs ability. That is when they bring in the expensive developers that can program it the right way so that it can be secure and handle everything the business throws at it.
We need both kinds of developers. The cheap ones help create jobs
An interesting Asimov story (Score:2)
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I see this all the time in business, sports, entertainment, investing, etc. Most people are willing to work for a tangible reward, but only a few are really ready to risk everything for huge success.
I'm not ta