I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.

  • PragmaticOne@lemmy.world
    191·
    3 days ago

    That science and programming are hard.

    They are not. It’s just a bunch of rules much like learning a spoken language.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      2 days ago

      I can’t speak for science because I’m not a scientist.

      Programming is easy, but most people won’t ever make good programmers. I’ve seen people with 8 years of experience perform worse than enthusiastic fresh grads. Not “doesn’t complete as many tickets” worse. We all know fresh grads won’t be super productive, that’s fine. No, I mean “senior engineer doesn’t REALLY understand how or why to do something” worse. Basically, learned one tech stack years ago, worked with it for several years, then had to start working with a radically different framework in the same programming language and… a year in, still doesn’t get it, uses LLMs as a crutch. Was eventually fired for poor performance (Yes, relying on an LLM without understanding the code being generated is seen as a bad thing at that company)

      I think it’s nearly impossible to be good at it without being passionate about it. I used to think it’s about intelligence, but nowadays I’m pretty sure that’s not it. It’s more about having real interest in the subject, which makes it easier to learn.

      Also most of the difficulty isn’t in actually writing the code, it’s figuring out what actually needs to be done and how best to do it. If you just don’t care, you never learn to do this part well.

      Maybe I’m wrong, but this is what makes sense to me.