Video The Grumpy Programmer has Advice for Young Computer Workers (Video) 120
Robin Miller: Bob Pendleton, you call yourself the Grumpy Programmer. Which came first? Grumpy or programmer?
Bob Pendleton: I’d say grumpy.
Robin Miller: Really? So, you became a programmer because you were grumpy?
Bob Pendleton: No. No, I got grumpier after being a programmer for a long time.
Robin Miller: Which is how long?
Bob Pendleton: Started at 19 and I’m almost 62.
Robin Miller: Wow.
Bob Pendleton: For 40-some-odd years.
Robin Miller: Okay. Most of our audience members, shockingly, are somewhat younger than yourself. So, using the benefit of your advanced years and huge experience, tell them how not to get grumpy.
Bob Pendleton: How not to get grumpy? I would say lots of exercise, meditation, a good lover and don’t program.
Robin Miller: All right. So, let’s say these poor guys are already in a circumstance here where programming is the most money they can make.
Bob Pendleton: Okay. The number one thing is don’t put your ego into it. I once I knew Art Evans, the guy who wrote the story about “Always Mount a Scratch Monkey” who once said, you tend to fall in love with what you make love to. And that’s especially true of a programmers, you spend months, weeks, years writing a piece of code, you tend to fall in love with it. And that’s the worst mistake you can make. Every piece of code is basically a mistake from the beginning. You can’t know exactly how to do it when you start it. And no two pieces are the same if they are worth writing. So, you just have to assume you are going to make mistakes. You are going to have to throw away big chunks of it. You are going to have to start over sometimes. And what’s the concept? Keep a beginner’s mind. If you think you know what’s going on, you are wrong no matter what and keep rambling like this for a while, but
Robin Miller: So, let’s move to this. What languages have you worked with and which ones were the worst and which were the best? I’m talking about from your mental health perspective.
Bob Pendleton: Okay. I’ve worked in probably half a dozen assembly languages. Fortran, COBOL, ALGOL 60, Pascal, C, C++, Simula 68, TRAC, LISP and a whole bunch of others. The best from my mental health?
Robin Miller: Yeah.
Bob Pendleton: Probably, LISP. Or maybe Scheme. Done both of those. Scheme is a little more easy to understand. Assembly language can be a lot of fun, but probably LISP. Yeah, definite.
Robin Miller: I have a friend, an old friend named Marty Connor and he agrees with you. He loves LISP.
Bob Pendleton: Yeah. Here’s a test to take. I once went into an interview and the guy who was interviewing me was an ex-English professor. He said, what kind of poetry do you like to write? Now I’m a programmer, why would you ask me that? Well, the answer is, an awful lot of programmers are writers, musicians, artists. And so I told him, I like to write haiku sequences. And he says, you’re a low level programmer, you’d like to write assembly language or low-level code. And I said, yeah. And he says okay. And he took out his book and he wrote it down. He had something like 200 people he had interviewed. And he knew what kind of poetry they all liked to write and if they didn’t like to write poetry, he’d only consider them if they were exceptionally good at a musical instrument or at some kind of visual art. But he preferred poets.
Robin Miller: Code poets.
Bob Pendleton: Well, it works that way. I was actually studying creative writing, my second major in college. When I got fairly – I had been taking computer science and math classes because I’m crazy and one day, I read through some algorithm and I had the same experience I got from reading a truly great poem. And in my poetry writing class I was taking at the time, I turned in a poem and one of the students says, that’s poetry, but it’s symbolic logic. And I reread it and realized it was actually in poetry form – a recursive algorithm.
VIDEO TWO
Robin Miller: The best Perl programmer I know personally – or maybe one of the best – is a guy named Chris Nandor. He went to college, studied journalism, and he is a heck of a musician, so there?
Bob Pendleton: Oh, hey. Some of the best programmers I’ve ever met were anthropologists and English majors of various sorts. And when I was in college, both undergrad and grad school, about 2 o’clock or 3 o’clock in the morning all the instruments would come out. The rear door guard was a fantastic fiddle player. And the computer science faculty and everybody else would bring out their instruments and they jammed from about 2.30, 3 o’clock till around 4 or 4.30 and just set the whole building ringing with music.
Robin Miller: Where was this?
Bob Pendleton: University of Utah.
Robin Miller: Oh, good, I’ll tell people to go there; people go to the University of Utah, it sounds like fun. There have been changes, you haven't been going to college for a while, right?
Bob Pendleton: No, no, I went back, took a long online course a few years ago, but no, I’ve got two kids in college and it’s here in Texas and it’s completely different. Also the University of Utah at the time I was there, there was a computer science department, but they never felt comfortable with the name, and when, oh gosh, the guy who founded Adobe, Warnock, right?
Robin Miller: I don’t remember the name.
Bob Pendleton: But he went there and he donated a bunch of money so they could build a new building and they became the school of computing. If you go down there now, they give you a computing degree, not computer science. It’s very hard to justify the term computer science actually.
Robin Miller: Really? Well, let me ask you another question, change of subject, you’re not young, have you found
Bob Pendleton: No.
Robin Miller: No, neither am I, you’re within a year of my age.
Bob Pendleton: Okay.
Robin Miller: But probably older, I have to be younger than somebody.
Bob Pendleton: Okay.
Robin Miller: But age discrimination in employment, have you encountered?
Bob Pendleton: Oh, absolutely. I got laid off on my 49th birthday and haven’t been able to find a full time job since.
Robin Miller: How about finding freelancer contract work?
Bob Pendleton: A little bit for the – almost enough to survive for the first four or five years and then I switched over to teaching part time, because they won’t hire full time people if they can possibly avoid it, and so then I taught until, well my health started giving out, one day my wife said, Bob you’re retired. And I go, oh okay, that means I can stop trying to get a job. So now I’m the Grumpy Programmer.
Robin Miller: But do you still work?
Bob Pendleton: Well, at home.
Robin Miller: Also like me, I am working right now.
Bob Pendleton: I have no paid employment.
Robin Miller: Oh, okay.
Bob Pendleton: Haven’t for a couple of years.
Robin Miller: Okay.
Bob Pendleton: It’s really, really hard to find.
Robin Miller: So, I gather what we’re saying here to the young ones is sometime around your 40th birthday, you might consider a career change, am I right?
Bob Pendleton: Yeah, I had the opportunity to go into management in my early 40s and I hated it and so I went back to programming and that’s about the only way you can stay employed in a technical field after that or if you can get a job with the federal government or a state government, they will actually keep you employed forever because they don’t pay very well, but they have great benefits.
Robin Miller: And I used to have job stability, I don’t know, Texas, Florida, it’s not stable working for the government.
Bob Pendleton: Texas, actually my wife works for the State of Texas and even during the worst part of the recession, they didn’t have really huge lay-offs, mostly they just stopped hiring people and stopped replacing people, so as long as you kept working you kept your job.
Robin Miller: I assume that was in computer fields as well.
Bob Pendleton: Especially, they have a real hard time hiring people. Other places, if you specialize in COBOL, on MVS on IBM Mainframes, you can go to work for any of the Fortune 50 and work until you die, because they just can’t hire people to do that, nobody wants to learn it, nobody coming out of college knows anything about it. And nobody wants to do it, but there are literally mega lines of COBOL code out there running everything, the whole billing system and even most of the rest of everything at – all of the phone companies, it’s COBOL.
Re:Incredibly wise advice (Score:2, Interesting)
So live below your means and invest everything you can, so that once you hit that limit you will be financially independent.
Also, don't have kids. They cost a fortune.
And also, don't get married, because divorces tend to wipe out 50-70 percent of your net worth.
Re:Incredibly wise advice (Score:5, Interesting)
And also, don't get married, because divorces tend to wipe out 50-70 percent of your net worth.
Or just don't get divorced. It is common knowledge that half of all marriages end in divorce. But that hides huge variations. If both partners have college degrees, the divorce rate is about 20%. If both have engineering degrees, it is about 10%. It helps to marry someone trained in problem solving, and capable of rational thinking.
2014... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's 2014 and we still have streaming video served up as FLASH???? ON SLASHDOT?!?!?!?!?! What a joke.
Re:Programming: You're doing it completely wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually more often I have seen the opposite: claims the new stuff is going to be faster, the compiler is not smart enough to figure out that they are the same, and thus you should use the new stuff.
There was a coworker who insisted that using C++ std::foreach for loops was faster because "the compiler knows you can't break out of it and thus can optimize the whole thing". I had two objections to this: first of all it would be a really stupid optimizing compiler that could not figure out there are no "break" statements inside the for loop. And second the C++ was still allowed to throw exceptions in both cases.
The other objection I had was that the functors were unreadable.
Yet another objection is my suspicion that the optimization would be far worse on the functors due to the enormous header files of templates they actually used and I expected the optimizer for the simple for loop to have fewer bugs in it. But I did not test this.