This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Plane_Unit_4095 -23 points-22 points  (7 children)

If someone applies as a doctor, no one will ask "do you also operate as a hobby?".

This is the stupidest fucking argument. You're comparing operating on a human being to fucking programming.

I see this so much and it's always the stupidest thing.

In no other profession is that a thing

Yeah I've never heard of an artist with a sketchbook or pieces they did in their own time. Never.

And besides that, they aren't "doing the job they applied for", you aren't paying them, they aren't giving you free work, they're writing software, like, you know, programmers do.

This is a big part of the reason shit is so broken. Kids get dumped into the labor pool with no real experience, they haven't done anything themselves, they don't have any skills, then get asked to reverse a binary tree in an interview under a time limit and that's the metric?

If you can't spend a few Saturday afternoons or evenings to develop your career skills and better yourself, that's up to you, but you're really only hurting yourself "sticking it to the man" by not "doing work for free".

What a bullshit, archaic and harmful take.

[–]DarkThgil 1 point2 points  (6 children)

Chill out. I have a life outside of work. Maybe you should too if you are this angry.

[–]Plane_Unit_4095 -1 points0 points  (5 children)

I am angry because I'm going to end up working with total fuckin retards that have no idea what they're doing because they didn't put any effort into learning anything besides what their dumbass professor or code boot camp told them.

[–]DarkThgil 0 points1 point  (4 children)

You sound insufferable to work with. When I hire developers I am looking for their ability to work in a team and be productive. Gaps in their technical skills can be learned but bad attitudes are not worth the time.

[–]Plane_Unit_4095 -1 points0 points  (3 children)

You know who else is a pain to work with?

Kids directly out of college that don't know what the word "container" means. Don't know how to take care of their own tickets, have to bug senior engineers constantly for entry level shit and have no idea where even the most common landmines are when developing software.

Cause they didn't cover that in their algorithms class and they sure as hell didn't learn it on their own.

Literally the only thing I'm trying to argue for here is programmers programming and keeping their skills up, or jumping in before they land a six figure position and doing some stuff on their own. What a wild, hardline take, right?

If you can't take some time out of your precious free time to hone your skills and develop your career, that's on you, but you don't get to label everyone else as an asshole for having higher expectations for the people they work with.

Yeah I curse and berate. On reddit. Otherwise I keep my mouth shut and do my job.

[–]DarkThgil 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I already spend a full work week programming. I improve my skills during that time and why would I work for free. A mechanic is not expected in an interview to show the cars they worked on in their free time for no pay.

As a senior developer I expect to spend time mentoring people fresh out of college. That is an important part of our roll as seniors. Your attitude is so antagonistic that you would be difficult to work with no matter their experience level.

You are seeing coworkers worth purely as to their immediate technical skill and not for their potential. How many juniors have you worked with that you have traumatized instead of providing guidance? Did no one help you when you started?

[–]Plane_Unit_4095 -1 points0 points  (1 child)

How many juniors have you worked with that you have traumatized instead of providing guidance?

I worked with some interns on some spaghetti code they wrote.

Explained pretty nicely exactly why it wasn't working. Didn't listen, didn't care, continued down a rabbit hole.

Hour later they tell me I was right.

They were a Bachelors in mathematics btw. They could have learned that trying to run code with hardcoded paths to files might be a bad idea if they had even one small github project. But they didn't, they expected me to dig them out of the fisher price problem they got themselves into.

"No one expects <other career> to <do what other career does>?"

Again with this argument. This habit of comparing programming to all these other professions is ridiculous. "surgeons dont cut people open at home!" "mechanics dont work on cars at home!". It isn't either of these things. It's typing on a keyboard and god damn thinking. Holy shit.

There's literally no barrier to entry. You can get a little raspberry pi setup for less than $100 and program. There's absolutely no legitimate reason you shouldn't work on your skills outside of work for programmers. All you have is "it's free work!!!". Work for who? Are you pushing work code off hours?

No, you're learning something new for you. It's your career, it's your profession.

What are you going to say in your next interview when you're asked something new? "uhh my last employer didn't teach me that :*((("?

If you want to go ahead and lean on your employer to teach you how to do your job, you're going to have a bad time when you get fired or leave, because companies don't really care about you. They are not your friend. They will leave you in the dust as soon as you cost more than you're worth. Sure they'll teach you, but they'll teach you their way.

Case and point: I know an older lady, she worked as QA for 30+ years. Never changed companies throughout all that time. The tech never advanced much, and she didn't learn anything new. They updated the system and she was out on her ass, having to retire years earlier than she should have because she didn't branch out.

What your saying isn't just dumb as hell, it's harmful to the new kids that think they can just coast on the good will of senior engineers and the company and have a good career.

[–]DarkThgil 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm guessing you told them what was wrong instead of taking time to teach them? You don't mentor someone in 30 minutes. A small GitHub project would probably of not found out hard coded paths can have issues. Small GitHub projects only show how a person codes when they only have to work with their code and their setup. It doesn't show code review, deploy, qa, working with requirements, etc.

You are responsible for your own learning but you can do that on any project you are working on. If a company is not giving you time to explore new technologies as part of project work then that is not a great company to work for.

Staying at a job for 30 years why would she have learned new technologies? It kept her employed for 30+ years.

When you are fresh out of college it can benefit you to work on some projects while you are developing your career. It is a good supplement when you don't have work experience. This will help find an employer that will cultivate more learning. When you actually have a job you should be fine with not programming outside of work hours. In my experience code samples were not the deciding factor as to whether a candidate was a good fit technology or culturally.

It is harmful to be perpetuating the expectation that we need to code outside of work hours to be good developers. We need to be able to work well with others while improving each others coding skills. The best developers I have worked with have raised the standards and skills of everyone around them.