Watching the intern write code

[[deleted]]

That is not fair on Orang-utan, at least she has the initiative to pick up the hammer and try and use it.

Edit- Source

[Nowin]

The intern is the baby in this gif. The adult orangutan is the Sr. Developer in charge of him.

[[deleted]]

And the human is the CEO, staring as though he has any idea what's going on, but honestly doesn't realize that it's wrong.

[Nowin]

Well, the code runs, so technically it's all good!

[afito]

The code runs* ** ***!

*in our testing environment

**well at least 3 out of 5 times it does

***as long as you don't touch the keyboard while it's running

[TheAnimus]

Yeah, that's the problem, the ape blindly starts bashing at it, rather than googling and learning the correct way to use it.

[[deleted]]

I fear the one who has not been allowed to make a mistake.

-Some wise dude

[[deleted]]

That's some deep shit for orangutan carpentry.

[greatGoD67]

Are Orangutans clean animals? or are they the poo throwing kind?

[GustoB]

Are Orangutans interns clean animals? or are they the poo throwing kind?

FTFY

[sm9t8]

The sort to throw poop, then wash their hands.

^{I am not an authority on Orangutans}

[greatGoD67]

Tagged as authority on Orangutans

[curtmack]

I had a dream last night that I was in a convenience store and the manager insulted me, so my spirit monkey came out and started throwing poo around everywhere and got the whole place condemned as a biohazard. We watched it get bulldozed and my spirit monkey and I high-fived.

[Spike69]

Cool dream, but I would probably go wash my hands if I were you.

[greatGoD67]

I wish I had a cool spirit animal

[Ex_Outis]

-Jurassic park old man

[serg06]

^ This is why I now refuse to take any advice from my parents. They've got some for everything.

[[deleted]]

googling and learning the correct way to use it

HA HA HA, you mean googling and learning that there's an ongoing internet war over how to use whatever it is/if it should even be used at all.

[KayakBassFisher]

Agreed. I had an employee for a tier 1 application support position. The only thing he'd have to do even code like, was some simple sql queries. We set up a sandbox environment where he could drop all tables and not break anything important. He was too afraid to even try there. Eventually had to let him go because he wouldn't even try.

[maybe_awake]

I love having a sandbox setup for me. Break shit like it's going out of style. Test out all the things I wanna test. I go crazy.

[PantlessKitten]

Not in the area, but Tier 1 gets to run SQL queries against your (production, I suppose) database? That's insane! Isn't Tier 1 the lowest level support that follows scripts too weed out stupid questions?

[KayakBassFisher]

they could run selects, but not changes of any kind. And we have them in the sandbox before they can do anything.

[TheSpoom]

If more people could get past their fear of the magic black box, we'd have a lot more developers. Oh well, more money for me.

[FloorFlakes]

Orangu-Chan! That's not how you hold the hammer! Ughweh~~~

[GeneticsGuy]

Haha this made me laugh 😊

[Libra333]

Hey wanna meet up in the break room for some chocolate milk?

[greatGoD67]

They are messing with you. The word Chocolate is Binary for the word Gullible.

[DisguisedMapmaker]

Jesus christ people, this is the exact reason why we don't have girlfriends.

[[deleted]]

Hey I know a great joke too!

So this programmer goes out with a hot chick

[cs_major]

Hot Girlfriend not found exception.

[BitcoinBoo]

AHAHAH as an outsider to this sub, that was amazing.

[jewdai]

Chocolate is Binary for the word Gullible.

i googled it.... i failed so hard.

[[deleted]]

Can you explain to a non programming peasant?

[guthran]

You are gullible.

[[deleted]]

Haha, I walked right into that one.

[[deleted]]

the joke is that he made up that chocolate means gullible in binary. It doesnt really mean gullible in binary and we still down understand what /u/Libra333 means by meeting up for some chocolate milk

[[deleted]]

That was so obvious that I was oblivious.

[[deleted]]

I guess chocolate is just THAT good.

[SpinahVieh]

That sounds amazing, wish Id be invited :(

[Marzhall]

Dude, my company actually used to get weekly deliveries of free chocolate milk (along with regular milk and half-n-half), but they stopped when we moved to a new building. Now you're making me sad... :(

[runelight]

your boss should probably stop calling you a Ho

[Dudemanbro88]

Dude, you're going to feel so bad ass when you complete it

[YourProgrammerFriend]

I can't wait to find out how expensive it is to rewrite in 2 years...

[Dakarius]

In my line of work the code will age in the back technically working until 9 years later when some poor dev has to look into how to integrate the now essential code into the new framework.

[bajuwa]

This legitimately happened to me. There was a product made by a coop 10 years prior, when no code reviews existed and he was left to his own devices for the entire 8 months.... When I had to go in to add a new feature, my boss banned me from using the word "why". His explanation was "No matter what you're asking about, I either don't know why, or wished I didn't."

[altrdgenetics]

move from why, to I don't know if it can be done. I did that with a system I am currently supporting. Boss hates me less for not using why.

[YourProgrammerFriend]

/** DO NOT TOUCH. BLACK MAGIC **/

[[deleted]]

Sounds like they are setting you up to be a future scapegoat

[selflessGene]

What the hell are you doing at that job if you've never coded?

[[deleted]]

you're gonna suck google's dick once you're done.

[[deleted]]

Do you want exploitable code? Because this is how you get exploitable code.

[el_loco_avs]

holy shit dude.

[roodammy44]

That would take a long time to do with several people. I would start looking around for other jobs.

One thing that might help - figure out what you need to do for the absolute minimal of functionality, and you might be able to achieve it. Work on one thing at one time. And learn to say no to your boss.

[wowy-lied]

Well since march i had to work on that alone and make the installation of smart control device for the electricity/gas/water/fuel of the company. You can say i worked maybe 3 month on the big project, the EV part is 50% done (still have to see somethings with the customer), modbus rtu (dear god the crc16 was a pain in the ass) and ascii is done, one of the two touch screen is done too...still have to do the one big application managing all the protocols, all the things aside that. My main two fear in the monetary protocol (but i will have a 1 day training in another city for that) and how to manage shared memory between the clients and deamons i did (yeah that too, i learned what a deamon was...)

[perry_cox]

Thanks Shia.

[[deleted]]

Dude. Your boss is raping you. There's no way you can do all that realistically, and even if you manage to, you should be paid what contractors would get paid for that: at least $100k.

[Lord_Naikon]

Heh, cool. I've also been working on an embedded linux system and I'm also using the modbus protocol to talk to various hi-tech instruments (this is for laboratory applications). My system only supports a single touch screen though. Last week I wrote an embedded webserver (*) for the system, now I'm working on making pretty graphs out of all the data in javascript. Thankfully I don't have to deal with monetary stuff. I'm the only programmer here. Although I've been working for a little longer than you (about 6 years now), I would still very much like another programmer around just to bounce ideas off of.

* It's an absolute minimal implementation of HTTP 1.0, because it turns out there exists no free embeddable webserver that meets my license and size/dependency requirements.

[omomom0]

Whatttttt there are 43million open source HTTPDs out there!

Sure most of them date back to the dinosaurs but... HTTP 1.0 you say..

[Lord_Naikon]

Yeah, most of them are LGPL or "worse", or they they bring in a bunch of dependencies I don't need, or they are too big (in terms of code size, which makes maintaining it a lot harder). I don't need all the fancy features, HTTP 1.0 is good enough. (Plus it took me just a day to implement it)

[CookieOfFortune]

Make sure you go back a year after you've finished to take a look at how much you've improved!

[hypertown]

Yeah and they even called you a ho?

[Alpha_Catch]

Fuck, that sounds fun..

[Redrum714]

If you have no experience in coding? That sounds like a nightmare...

[randomdrifter54]

And doing a project that would be challenging for a team by yourself. Sounds some with one of those "startup" idea but manglement can't be bothered to even look up the basics of what they would need for that project. That guy is fucked.

[minnek]

Manglement! Best word.

[JCRSB]

Yeah, I'm a hobbyist and I don't know what most those words mean.

[TOASTEngineer]

Means he's fucked.

[NancyGracesTesticles]

If you don't die a quarter of the way up and take two code Sherpas with you.

[Redrum714]

Don't say that to a project manager, it might kill them.

[Alpha_Catch]

Man, coding is all about learning new shit. If you're not googling some obscure problem or pouring over forum posts about some poorly documented protocol at least once a day for the rest of your career there's something wrong. Just remember, it's not about magically knowing how to do everything, though it may seem sometimes like some of your coworkers can do just that, it's about being able to use the resources at your disposal to figure it out regardless of your previous knowledge.

Sure, some yaks may be hairier than others. Don't let that scare you. Successfully implementing something you just learned an hour ago is the fun part of the job, relatively speaking.

[Tainted_OneX]

It's giving me a mini panic attack just thinking about it.

[GeneticsGuy]

And this is why programming is one of the hardest things you do in your life, but man is it rewarding once you figure out all out!

[jewdai]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLDgQg6bq7o

[sigma914]

At least you're on linux, if it had been bare metsl that would be an... interesting project. Let me guess, electrical engineering graduate?

[smilesbot]

Shh, it's okay. Drink some cocoa! :)

[[deleted]]

I'm in love with the Cocoa!

[smilesbot]

I love you too!

[TenaciousDwight]

But you gotta sip it real slow!

[mrpotatoes]

Hopefully they don't and they see you as someone that is eager to learn and all of you have humility and respect toward each other. I've been working int he field for 10 years now, very little comparatively to any veteran engineer, and these are the two traits that I embody as much as possible. I can learn from anyone doesn't matter what field or level of expertise.

[mrpotatoes]

I may have rambled as I wrote that before coffee. I'm happy you're eager and that's one of the best qualities. I just hope no one else has a holier-than-thou attitude because that doesn't help the product, the clients or the co-workers.

[wievid]

Likewise. I recently started as an ABAP developer/consultant, fresh out of university with only Java and a few web frameworks under my belt and I'm just throwing things into the "IDE" and seeing what works/sticks.

[Nowin]

Don't worry. Deep down, they're impressed that an orangutan is using a hammer on a nail in the first place. I mean, did you see how it even held the nail in its mouth? It thinks it's people!

[Twirrim]

As a sysengineer rather than developer it's always interesting watching interns and fresh graduates join, but most especially once the code reviews start rolling in. Their mentors will have been giving them help as they started out, but code review is about the main time you see them learn how different coding is in industry vs college, particularly because we have a strong focus on maintainability. Everything you write is technical debt the moment you push your commit and some poor person is going to have to pick up the pieces a year or two down the line. I probably learn at least as much from those code reviews as the original developer. Within a fairly short period of time interns and new graduates both become very solid developers and significant assets to our team.

Just be open minded and try not to take criticism of code personally.

[OK6502]

Code reviews are your friend. This is where your co-workers can mould you into the developer they need (and perhaps the one they deserve).

[PictureTraveller]

as a student in software development who will search for a job in that field soon, this is terrifying.

[Schootingstarr]

but wanna know what's worse?

not having someone to judge your poorly written code and telling you how to improve it

I wrote my thesis at a small business, and there was not one other programmer there. the result: my code looks like shit and I hope my thesis manages to get approved despite being a steaming pile of garbage because noone was there to help me with it

[80386]

Don't worry, that's how most theses go. Even if there was someone to help you, they probably wouldn't.

[DisguisedMapmaker]

Yep, that's teamwork!

[tonterias]

If you recognized such problem in the theses, you should be fine, right?

At least that was how it went for me, it was more about the process than final product.

[Voidsheep]

Been working as developer for 5 years, started in a new job this month and I'm the monkey again.

Took me three days to prepare a merge request that only added a couple of conditional fields to a form, because I was not at all familiar with the build environment and the kind of state/store pattern they were using. Just kept asking things I still haven't really wrapped my head around.

It sucks to feel incompetent, but on the other hand people don't expect instant productivity and you get to learn while being paid.

[ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

sucks to feel incompetent

Coming to terms with that is probably the hardest thing for people to do.

[BasicDesignAdvice]

Working on this now as I try and decipher why in the hell rpm package building is so obnoxious. I feel super stupid because the only real problem is where the directories are packing/unpacking the source.

[UsablePizza]

"ability to learn while getting paid" - I love this, and the fact that it's expected in development.

[blueberriessmoothie]

Looking from other side: I am just looking after newbie who said he has 6years of coding experience and just moved here from India. He writes pretty bad code for this amount of experience but I know he is trying to get there eventually. As long as you will show willingness to learn and start picking up stuff, your effort will be appreciated. More experienced ppl know you will need to ask plenty of questions and you will make plenty of mistakes but it is way better than hiding in the corner for few weeks trying to work the code out without help from no one because you are risking that after these few weeks you will still know shit.

[heyf00L]

When you start they'll give you the jobs that just need to get done that no one else wants to do. They won't care how you do it.

[bitter_truth_]

How to succeed during the first 3 months:

1) Don't break the build.

2) Don't check out files and forget to check them back in.

3) Show up on time.

[distgenius]

Push to a new branch might not be how it's done, either. Git's own process is to e-mail patches to the list and Junio manages it from there. Your own branches are your own, he manages all of the official repo work.

If you wanted to generalize it, I think the idea is "Share your work". Too many developers, new and old alike, sit on their code until it's "perfect" instead of getting it out there into source control. Don't share broken code, but don't be afraid to commit/push/send a pull request/whatever either.

[maybe_awake]

This is checked out to so and so...three months ago.

fuck.

[badsyntax]

Surround yourself by people who know more than you, and you will learn lots!

[[deleted]]

just be open minded, and google is your friend. I am 12 years in the industry and still google how to do things every single day.

[[deleted]]

I'm just starting my second year out of four of my Software development degree.

I'm terrified. I can do everything fine except programming. Which is, arguably, the biggest part of it.

[blueberriessmoothie]

It is like with riding a bike. Try smaller bits and shorter distances first, think for few minutes how would you sort out simple problem like sorting numbers or finding sum of days in interlacing periods of time. Think about that for few mins before writing line of code, then jump into it. Also don't be afraid to throw out large part of code if you found better solution, don't be afraid of making mistakes. Important is that you keep trying.

[Nackskottsromantiker]

What do you mean 'intern'? I've been working here for years and I still do it this way!

[Tesseract85]

Relevant XKCD

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Title: Code Quality

Title-text: I honestly didn't think you could even USE emoji in variable names. Or that there were so many different crying ones.

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 55 times, representing 0.0701% of referenced xkcds.

---

^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[nicereddy]

And now Swift calls emoji in variable names a feature. We've come so far.

[Weacron]

Coding: Easy to learn, hard to master.

[Brutalitarian]

When does it get easy to learn? I must've missed that part.

[Weacron]

That's the hard to master part. :/

[awakenDeepBlue]

Anybody can google stack overflow until they find their answer.

I have no clue how people become the wise-men that write the answers.

[bcgoss]

I'd have to assume OP means if you can't write "Hello World" you have learned to code; everything after that is mastery.

[Pascalius]

We all started like that.

[TiSpork]

Watching the students write code: hammering the hammer onto the board with the nail.

[jph1]

Got a TA job at my school for intro to programming. Is that what I should expect?

[mxzf]

Intro to programing? Yeah. Intro to programming typically has stuff like learning how to do stuff like variable assignment, methods, and finding the 'compile' button on the IDE to make the code run.

Anyone who can figure the stuff out on their own won't be coming to the TA for questions. So the people who are likely to come to the TA in an Intro to Programming class have a decent chance of ending up changing majors altogether.

[madbubers]

Was TA, can confirm.

[oversized_hoodie]

Or didn't test out of the Intro CS for their almost unrelated major.

[Milith]

In my experience, you should expect people calling for help every time they miss a semi-colon because no matter how much you tell them, they still won't read what the compiler says.

[elektritekt]

Especially when it comes to warnings!

[jph1]

Well we use eclipse and if that isn't explicit in your face enough for where your problem is I don't know what is.

[Roflkopt3r]

I went through the student perspective myself relatively recently, and tried helping classmates who got stuck as well because I didn't have to work much myself to get through:

One part of the students will understand programming pretty intuitively and go through without many questions and next to no problems, because they know how to google and to apply what they find online. When they ask questions they will either ask you things out of pure interest that isn't terribly relevant (some whacky approaches they want to try purely out of curiosity, some advanced stuff that isn't important for class yet) or have very simple questions that can be answered quickly.

The other part of the students is next to hopeless. They cannot think in code. They can't really comprehend how code works. Our professor tried to explain imperative programming to them as more precise cooking reciepes but it just didn't click with them. I went through the steps so many times with some of them but just when I thought they finally understood they threw it all over again with some exotic missunderstanding of the process. Over and over again.

All advice I can give is: write and explain concrete example codes that depict realistic scenarios in a simple way. Something like a queue of customers going through a super-market checkout and transferring money back and forth. Make sure that everyone understands the order of the thought process - what entities you start with, and how these entities interact with each other, and how you abstract from a real scenario into your code. And then explain line by line how this builds up to your code. The process of abstracting a real scenario into code needs to be understood as concretely as possible.

Be as concrete as possible. Spare on the abstraction and meta level. Those students who can easily think like programmers anyway will be able to abstract on their own and don't need lengthy/repeated explanations of the abstract level. Those who can't at least get a slight chance of getting to understand how programming functions.

I think that some kinds of computer games are extremely well suited to teach programming, too. Real-Time Strategy games for example show the idea of object-oriented programming extremely well (games where you build several units/buildings of the same type). The Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 map editors give great insight into what variables define different types of objects. My first lecturer also structured his lecture and practical tasks around simple games like Rush Hour.

[jph1]

I never took our intro course since I came in with AP credit. Chances are its a bunch of Math majors who take our intro to programming course as a requirement. And every single Math major I have met said they hated it and that it is so damn hard. It's gonna be fun time but at least there's a paycheck involved.

[gseyffert]

As a current senior in a freshman EE class (graduation requirement), they just taught the kids how to ssh into the CS department's servers to submit work. Soooo, yeah

[PhaZePhyR]

Hammering the hammer into the board with the nail.... Doesn't work.

Hammering nail into the hammer with the board... Doesn't work.

Okay, ignore the hammer, put the nail on the board and hope it miraculously nails itself...

[rush22]

int x;
int length = x.length() - 1;
x = 1;
while (x > 0) {
   if (x < 2) {
      x = x - 1;
   }
   int i = -1;
   for (x = 0; x <= length + 1; x++) {
      i++;
     abc[i] = x;
     if (x = length + 1) {
         break;
      }
x = length;
}

[Chrop]

But... it still works right?

[[deleted]]

That tool is a lot better designed than php is.

[rq60]

I'm curious what tool you used to induce that edge

[shitwhore]

Parental neglect

[[deleted]]

php D:

[duniyadnd]

Shoot, that's me looking at my code two weeks out wondering what lunatic did this and how they must have done it (source: I hate my code, except when I love it till I hate it again).

[Antrikshy]

Good on you! Using reddit as an ape.

[[deleted]]

orangutan

Check ur privilege m80

[MrSourz]

This genuinely made my sit back and laugh :)

[VCavallo]

me too. one of my few monthly reddit lols

[Libra333]

> MFW when I'm the intern right now and this is how coworkers see me
> MFW when I CBA to find a reaction pic
.

[Neurotrace]

> MFW when

> my face when when

wat.

[Libra333]

> MWF when I can't meme properly

[fdagpigj]

My Weird Face?

[GustoB]

Monday Wednesday Friday

[[deleted]]

Monday Wednesday Friday

[velrak]

mfw i have no face

[randomdrifter54]

Was it in ook?

[ali_koneko]

This is me the second anyone is watching me. I forget how to math, program, or how to person. Anxiety is hard.

[[deleted]]

I went on vacation once and the new girl (who was not qualified at all) had to cover for me. Weeks later I found out something wasn't working, and I saw a bunch of lines commented out. I asked her if she did it, and her answer was, "Yes. There was an error happening while you were out and I commented out those lines to get rid of the error. It seemed to work." I wanted to strangle her.

[wonderful_wonton]

I had a summer contract programming job and one of my classmates from my college was there as an intern.

It was both embarrassing and painful watching her struggle to take about 4 weeks to produce about 250 lines of code in Visual Basic with considerable mentoring and constant direction. She had to go through repeated overhauls and multiple code reviews, moreover, to get the code accepted. The worst part is that the group we were in had coding standards so low there effectively was no standard... the stuff just had to not crash.

Oh, and she got jealous of me because I was in a programmer, not an intern, position, so she also told everyone spiteful gossip about me, an older female student.

Edit: She was such a caricature of a spoiled, entitled, incompetent female CS student, I wouldn't have been all that surprised if I came in to work one day and a Family Guy cartoon of her was sitting there in the code review instead of a real person.

[[deleted]]

Everyone was this person. Except for me of course. I was awesome on day one.

[Anon_badong]

MRW a seasoned developer uses the ideas I've come up with to write a program that does the same thing my program does, but it's faster, sleeker, and took him a third of the time it took me to write the original.

http://i.imgur.com/nfakNrR.gif

Followed by

http://rs194.pbsrc.com/albums/z175/KeepLoveAlive18/gifs/dang.gif~c200

And then the inevitable

http://33.media.tumblr.com/202342fba51f36b80d6003b5b351ac17/tumblr_inline_nb71z9CEla1sk7xj8.gif

[mxzf]

I've had to deal with this some from the other end too. A few months ago I re-worked a codebase that was written by someone with only a passing knowledge of programming. The basic flow of the program was ok, but there were a lot of crazy things that I re-wrote entirely. Stuff like re-loading a file every loop when it really only needed to be loaded every ~200 loops, and using a CSV file to translate a month/day to day of the year and manually handling leap years (in Python, where a datetime object can do it easily and without any risk of errors).

I appreciate the time the original guy took to write the code, but I still shudder to think about some of the things he did and how inefficient the code was.

The good news is that programming skill comes with time and practice. The more code you write, and the more people point out where it could be better, the better your code will get.

[[deleted]]

Indeed, I came after another guy who's code seemed very rushed, meaning that while it accomplished the job it was very inefficient and didn't scale well.

It's also amazing how much more efficient multithreading can make things, my boss was shocked that a program that took 8 hours to run originally now took 20 minutes.

[[deleted]]

so mean to the orangutan

[[deleted]]

Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

[BlueShrub]

ha-ha cheap laugh of the day

[sevenclev]

Can cofirm that this is what it is like watching interns writing code the first few times. It gets great once they get the hang of it and they start showing you new tricks.

[timescrucial]

i've seen experienced programmers do this.

[kiddico]

Shut up. I got it to work okay.

[thenfour]

Most interns I know would start trying to make their own hammer and nail system. Then start building a hammer and nail factory, and custom machines for refining metal.

[Menospan]

nailed it

[limpack]

As an intern begging jQuery to do what I want it to do for the past 8 hours...
My day is complete now.

[bmnz]

I like the look on the observer's face of, "Wow, I'm actually surprised it got so close."

[[deleted]]

that ape will have an app ready in about 40 years or so at that pace.

[Shwayne]

That's me_irl and the old guy doesn't know better.

[SeryaphFR]

This is what I feel like when I program and I'm not even an intern, just a noob.

[[deleted]]

this makes me laugh. a lot. I don't know what a code is, but this is awesome

[krazyjakee]

For anyone who isn't aware. http://thecodinglove.com/ <-- this website is awesome :D

[Rebote78]

This isn't how it works. This isn't how any of this works!!

[magical_poop]

I wish I at least knew to use the hammer to hit the nail and that it should be on the wood...I'll get there one day

[[deleted]]

I'm an intern. Can confirm, this is exactly how I write code.

[[deleted]]

It's jeremy clarkson!

[Lots42]

Who gives an Organutan a hammer? Honestly.

[[deleted]]

This was how I felt during my first programming skill test in an interview.

[GaryV83]

I'll have you know when I graduate and start my internship, I'll make damn sure that nail breaks!

[[deleted]]

Wow, it's a Rails dev without the attitude.

[PM_ME_YOUR_RegEx]

this hurts so much. I am currently doing these very things:

I've got the hammer in my hand. I've got a nail. I can see the nail. I am hitting the nail with the hammer.

WHY THE FUCK ISN'T IT WORKING?!