IDC: 40 Percent of Developers Are 'Hobbyists' 148
itwbennett writes "A new IDC study has found that 'of the 18.5 million software developers in the world, about 7.5 million — roughly 40 percent — are so-called hobbyist developers,' which by IDC's definition is 'someone who spends 10 hours a month or more writing computer or mobile device programs, even though they are not paid primarily to be a programmer.' Lumped into this group are students, people hoping to strike it rich with mobile apps, and people who code on the job but aren't counted among the developer ranks."
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not me, coding for fun and 10 hours a month is way better than 40 hours a week on stuff you don't really care about.
Re:1% (Score:5, Insightful)
95% of everything is crap. I don't know if you've tried to interview people for serious programmer positions lately, but about half of applicants seem to outright fabricate their credentials.
Re:1% (Score:5, Insightful)
Any number of which I'd probably fail as pulling random function names/jargon out the air isn't my forte. OTOH, I've been coding for 35 years, know where to find the answers to anything I need to know and can crank out pretty much bug free code until the cows come home. As an e.g., last task I was given was to monitor an IBM MQ for SWIFT payments, parse them, pull out the good stuff, validate it and put it in an oracle DB. Wrote it in ProC. Never used ProC (had used C though), Oracle or MQ before yet amazingly it went through testing with only one minor bug and that was a problem with the spec rather than the code. I even threw in diagnostic modes you could select with switches at run time to give verbose logging. Last count I've used 20+ languages from Assembler to 4GLs, across various Unix, DOS, Windows and VMS. As I said though, I'd be amazed if I could answer more than a handful of questions on the spot even though I was (so long ago..) a MCSD or whatever the MS dev training used to be called.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are mistaken, I'm a 40 hour a week programmer, and I enjoy the code, just not the resulting application. I achieve more in 10 hours a month when I'm making something interesting than I ever could with 40 hours a week on the job.
Re:I find the term "hobbyist" to be offensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, hobbyist isn't a synonym for bad.
I never liked this title:Hobbyist (Score:4, Insightful)
The funny designation people say when talking with HR is,"Oh, you actually made money with this home business, then I guess it counts as work."
It doesn't matter you busted your tail for 10 years in projects that failed, suddenly the less ambitious one you did that made a couple bucks actually counts as work.
So lets drop the hobbyist title. If someone is working a home business that isn't yet profitable because there is an awful lot of overhead to code first, they've been working that time.
Re:Too narrow a definition (Score:4, Insightful)
Another recent /. post (about scientific data loss) makes me think that little, if any, research code is really `throwaway'. That code -- along with the data it processed -- represents part of the work effort leading to the published results. Data without that code is almost useless because the next researcher who wants to built upon his predecessor's work will likely want to know how you went from the data to your result. Without the code all they can assume is that some magic was involved. Or, if they go through the process of re-processing the raw data and get different results draw the conclusion may be that the original results were faked.
Re:1% (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't need to use mod for fizzbuzz. It's likely the most effective (besides precomputed tables), but there are several alternatives. To name some:
1. Create your own mod function (you can most likely leave out dealing with negatives and overflows as long as you just point that out). Given dividend X and divisor Y, while X>=Y: X=X-Y and finally return X.
2. Take human approach and convert the number to string. Skip 0/print it depending on definition. If last number is 0 or 5, it's dividable by 5. For dividable by 3, you loop thru the string and sum the numbers. Repeat until the length of string is 1. Now compare it to 3, 6 and 9 (you can convert it back to number or just compare the string of those). If it's true, it's dividable by 3.
Surely you could create at least one of those in some language you know?