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Dec. 10th, 2018 00:18![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gemelenBoth are from the same person.
On the other hand, I am a competent developer who taught myself over the course of a half decade of intensive reading, project work, courses, etc. I'm extremely self-motivated, pride myself on my independence in problem solving, and hate wasting people's time.
But when I read your linked post, I find it to be one of the most self-aggrandizing, anti-social, snooty, condescending and egotistical things that I've ever read in the technical world. Being a busy developer does not suddenly give one carte blanche to act like a pompous blowhard.
Whether we like it or not, we're in a service industry. We build things for people. And guess what? People in every service industry the world over have to deal with annoying questions from "users" (and - gasp! - even coworkers). It's part of the gig. Imagine if your waiter tonight refused to bring you food and called you a loser unless you followed an arbitrary process he developed that involved trying to cook the food yourself.
...
If a new generation of developers means that this "follow-my-exact-process-or-I-will-call-you-stupid" attude disappears, I'm all for it, no matter how many videos they watch. Be nice to others, and be surprised at how much more pleasant and cooperative others are with you in return.
Sorry for the rant, but this attitude has been bugging me ever since I entered the industry.
My first day was the 12th! I am a lawyer, and worked as a lawyer for 6 years. During the latter ~3.5 years, I worked my lawyer job during the day and taught myself computer science and software development in the evenings and weekends. 1 of those years I spent working with a non-profit in my area to build them some .NET/WPF/C# software -- I'm like 99% sure this project is why I got hired with my insane background.
It took me a while to find someone who was willing to even take a flier on me with a phone screen. The legal background was just too weird. At one point, I had a screen with a mega-large corp. I could tell the HR rep hadn't read my resume before the call, and when she got down to my employment history, she wrapped the call up in about ten seconds. The whole thing lasted like three minutes.
Anyways, I finally was hired by this awesome, incredible local company. I have tons of programming and dev experience, but it's all been on my own, without formal training or team experience. I try to keep up with best practices, but there's only so much you can learn solo. This company is super devoted to mentoring, which is exactly what I need. The pay is relatively low, but they make up for it with incredible benefits -- 3.5 weeks PTO year 1, 5 weeks year 2; a $5,000 + continuing education fund per employee per year, 2 telecommuting days per week, and so on.
My first day I was terrified but so thrilled. This is something I've dreamed of doing for years. Like, I would just say out loud to myself, "I'm a software developer.." That's how excited I was. I had a tour and did some HR paperwork first thing. Then they dropped me off at my department. A good chunk of the dev team had been in my interview with me, and we're all just a great fit culturally, so I almost immediately felt at home. I spent some time getting the tools and environments set up; we all had lunch together; and then I spent the afternoon pair programming with one of the guys on some issue -- I was just watching, mostly, but it was so cool.
Now that I've been there a few weeks, I am finally starting to feel a bit comfortable. For the first weekish, I was doing almost zero actual work -- just learning and reading all try, trying to inject so much knowledge straight into my brain. I came home exhausted every day despite doing very little real work.
Now I'm at the point where I'm starting to pull issues out of our ticketing system myself. I've already had some Angular code I wrote deployed to production after a positive code review -- that felt amazing. I am still not super productive, and still feel like I know almost nothing about our code bases, but I'm really lucky in that everyone is very understanding and supportive.
It's really amusing when you have both pieces to read together. Not game-changing, but shows what "competent developer" could mean.
On the other hand, I am a competent developer who taught myself over the course of a half decade of intensive reading, project work, courses, etc. I'm extremely self-motivated, pride myself on my independence in problem solving, and hate wasting people's time.
But when I read your linked post, I find it to be one of the most self-aggrandizing, anti-social, snooty, condescending and egotistical things that I've ever read in the technical world. Being a busy developer does not suddenly give one carte blanche to act like a pompous blowhard.
Whether we like it or not, we're in a service industry. We build things for people. And guess what? People in every service industry the world over have to deal with annoying questions from "users" (and - gasp! - even coworkers). It's part of the gig. Imagine if your waiter tonight refused to bring you food and called you a loser unless you followed an arbitrary process he developed that involved trying to cook the food yourself.
...
If a new generation of developers means that this "follow-my-exact-process-or-I-will-call-you-stupid" attude disappears, I'm all for it, no matter how many videos they watch. Be nice to others, and be surprised at how much more pleasant and cooperative others are with you in return.
Sorry for the rant, but this attitude has been bugging me ever since I entered the industry.
My first day was the 12th! I am a lawyer, and worked as a lawyer for 6 years. During the latter ~3.5 years, I worked my lawyer job during the day and taught myself computer science and software development in the evenings and weekends. 1 of those years I spent working with a non-profit in my area to build them some .NET/WPF/C# software -- I'm like 99% sure this project is why I got hired with my insane background.
It took me a while to find someone who was willing to even take a flier on me with a phone screen. The legal background was just too weird. At one point, I had a screen with a mega-large corp. I could tell the HR rep hadn't read my resume before the call, and when she got down to my employment history, she wrapped the call up in about ten seconds. The whole thing lasted like three minutes.
Anyways, I finally was hired by this awesome, incredible local company. I have tons of programming and dev experience, but it's all been on my own, without formal training or team experience. I try to keep up with best practices, but there's only so much you can learn solo. This company is super devoted to mentoring, which is exactly what I need. The pay is relatively low, but they make up for it with incredible benefits -- 3.5 weeks PTO year 1, 5 weeks year 2; a $5,000 + continuing education fund per employee per year, 2 telecommuting days per week, and so on.
My first day I was terrified but so thrilled. This is something I've dreamed of doing for years. Like, I would just say out loud to myself, "I'm a software developer.." That's how excited I was. I had a tour and did some HR paperwork first thing. Then they dropped me off at my department. A good chunk of the dev team had been in my interview with me, and we're all just a great fit culturally, so I almost immediately felt at home. I spent some time getting the tools and environments set up; we all had lunch together; and then I spent the afternoon pair programming with one of the guys on some issue -- I was just watching, mostly, but it was so cool.
Now that I've been there a few weeks, I am finally starting to feel a bit comfortable. For the first weekish, I was doing almost zero actual work -- just learning and reading all try, trying to inject so much knowledge straight into my brain. I came home exhausted every day despite doing very little real work.
Now I'm at the point where I'm starting to pull issues out of our ticketing system myself. I've already had some Angular code I wrote deployed to production after a positive code review -- that felt amazing. I am still not super productive, and still feel like I know almost nothing about our code bases, but I'm really lucky in that everyone is very understanding and supportive.
It's really amusing when you have both pieces to read together. Not game-changing, but shows what "competent developer" could mean.