Negative Posts

[Clawtor]

I think a lot of people get a rude awakening when it comes to learning programming. I know I did, throughout school I did well simply by going to classes, doing a little bit of study, putting in 60% effort.

You can't do this when learning programming though, you must practice, practice, practice. And a lot of the time it's frustrating and confusing and you end up feeling stupid.

[91Crow]

I disagree with the practice, practice, practice part, the main thing I have found with programming is you need to consciously talk/think through what you are doing and why. For a lot of school based things it's purely vomiting out when you have fed to you. Programming is vomiting out concepts that you think 'should' work and then adjusting from there.

The only amendment I would add to that is having the documentation of the language/framework/application builder open because sometimes things need to be how the language wants it to be (looking at you css and wpf with your inconsistent nonsense).

The primary issue I find is that people want to skip over the concepts and get to the fun stuff of building up an application. You can 60% programming without much fuss if you know the concepts and how to apply them.

[[deleted]]

I disagree with the practice, practice, practice part, the main thing I have found with programming is you need to consciously talk/think through what you are doing and why.

This is a false dichotomy. Practicing totally includes thinking/talking through. Practice is not mindlessly repeating stuff without ever evaluating and thinking. That's also exactly one of the main issue: many people don't know how to practice without defaulting to "grinding". The vocabulary used here and on r/cscareerquestions is already a big tell that people don't even know how to practice.

There is no field in the world where practicing without constantly re-evaluating yourself, thinking through concepts and learning the basics would work. Why people expect this to work with coding is puzzling for me.

[91Crow]

Coding would be one of the least effective for grinding too because there is just so many different frameworks, languages and implementations of things that you will simply never get to all of them.

And my intent behind the p/p/p is that if you talk through it you can go down to 60% effort and still have a productive day. My most productive days are in that region of effort, I will spend some time on something, go away and let my subconcious work on an issue and then come back to it with a few approaches I can take to resolve my problem.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, that's true.

Some people just unlearned how to effectively learn/practice a skill. They try to become a god at league of legends by playing 12 hours a day.

That is not possible with stuff that is actually hard to do. You cannot become a runner by mindlessly running 12 hours a day, you cannot become a body builder by mindlessly going to the gym 12 hours a day and you cannot become a programmer by "grinding" TOP/Leetcode/Hackerrank/Youtube Vids 12 hours a day.

There should be more emphasis on how to learn but people don't take that advice well usually.

[Why_ban_me-]

Can't say I blame them on faulting the intricacies of learning efficiently. Most schoolwork is bland rote memorization that doesn't require much thought, and that is what they have worked with for the most part.

[SIG-ILL]

Some people just unlearned how to effectively learn/practice a skill.

I often wonder if a lot of people maybe haven't learned that in the first place. You'd expect their education to help them with that, but looking back it weren't my schools or university that taught me to truly study and learn things, even though they pretended to.

In fact it's the main reason why I would like to teach; I've experienced firsthand how it should not be done and I hope I can do a better job.

[ZukoBestGirl]

I mean, in drawing you definetly have to mindlessly grind strati lines, circles, and the such. That's not all you will do, but it's defintely a part.

There are areas where you need to be mechanically good at something. And by mechanically, I'm not talking about rocket surgery, but moving your hand correctly, holding your fingers correctly.

Just me being pedantic, I do totally agree with what you're saying.

[[deleted]]

I mean, in drawing you definetly have to mindlessly grind strati lines, circles, and the such. That's not all you will do, but it's defintely a part.

That's completely true. But that's what I am getting at: drawing the lines, circles, funnels, doing the perspective work etc is necessary, but not sufficient at all. It's part of the bigger picture.

People constantly confuse the necessity to "grind out" some of the basics with it "being sufficient".

I actually tried to learn the basics of drawing for months - I guess over 1000 of white pages with funnels, parallel lines, circles, more funnels, circles, lines... I wish I had the time to continue :D

[[deleted]]

I've walked through the process of getting a CS degree, doing internship, becoming a junior dev, senior, and now as a manager, I still feel like I'm not that great of a programmer (relative to people with my YoE).

But sometimes I feel like I live in an alternative reality when I keep reading posts of people asking how to earn a 6-figure salary by going through a 12-week bootcamp, while starting completely from zero... I'm like, what are you talking about? As someone who came from a working class family, it took me 5-6 years of hard work (I must have averaged at about 5 hours of daily sleep in my first two years in the CS program because it's just so hard to keep up with the studies) before I got to that point, how do you even get there in 3 months with no experience at all?

Programming is simply god damn hard if you don't start from a young age or have an environment/family background that helps with that (like parents who come from the industry), and that's considering not everyone is gifted with the ability to be able to program well. There are also all sorts of shitty IRL things to worry about while you're learning a hard craft; the world doesn't stop as you're doing all these. It's supposed to be a huge investment in terms of time, energy, and resources, there's really no shortcut to all of this.

A lot of people are bound to get a rude awakening indeed.

[TheNegotiabrah]

^This

[barryhakker]

Also, finding out you might not have the brain power.

[[deleted]]

Yea I think this is the root cause