Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2013)

My dad was the ops officer on an Air Force base in the 1960s. His job was to keep the base operational. The Vietnam War was ramping up, and the AF's need for transport airplanes outstripped their jets, so they pulled a bunch of propeller transports out of retirement.

The mechanics, however, were unable to get the old propeller engines to produce the rated power. They followed the directions in the manual, and it just didn't deliver. Frustrated, they pulled out of retirement some old mechanics from WW2.

Those old guys never looked at the manual, they just listened to the engines, tinkered with them, and soon got them delivering the power.

There's a lot of specialized expertise that never makes it into any manuals. But I still love the idea that those giant engines were tuned by ear :-) Those mechanics were the real deal.

I think this is also highly relevant to perceptions of the value of higher education within programmer circles.

I can see how CMU's Systems or Theory courses might seem like a complete waste of time outside of the Industry Cluster, where you really don't need to know all that stuff. But I also see the fairly obscene 10x+ difference between the "first job out of undergrad at NoName" programmer salaries and the "first job out of PhD school at MIT" programmer salaries.

If you're going to bet your whole career on an unrivaled mastery of the minutiae of Postgres performance, then you better like the Bay Area. If your focus is to be a maestro of credit derivative trading, then I hope you don't mind spending your life in New York.

But general-purpose skills like sales, management, and accounting are likely to be valued almost everywhere. And therefore give you the freedom to live nearly anywhere. It might be scoffed down by the ultra-skilled industry professionals. But a guy who knows how to run an ice cream shop in many senses has a lot more career freedom and stability than a Google engineer or Goldman trader.

Im not an engineer, im far closer to an architect and an analyst. But those things are both from other fields and confuse things.

A programmer needs to be across aspects of engineering, architecture, business analyst, designer, copy editor, ux, accounting, lawer, marketer and even a bit of project management.

That doesnt even begin to cover the domain knowledge often leaking into network admin, sysadmin, operstions, support, and various other functions I get thrown into.

Engineer, in my experience, just doesnt quite cut it.

We are general purpose knowledge workers with the single defining characteristic of continuous learning.

If i had to put a new label on it, id say we are process automaters. But since our focus is on programming computers to achieve this automation and "bring in the automators" makes us sound like robots or bankruptcy auditors, i would say programmer is a pretty clear good fit.

Up until that point it had never occurred to me that someone might apply for a programming job who could not write the simplest programs. Thus it would never have occurred to me that someone asking me such a simple question just wanted to see the obvious simple answer.

I'd have assumed they wanted me to use as much of the language as I could. So if they asked me to do it in Python, for example, I'd have tried for something like this:

  def fizzbuzz(n, *args):
    cur = ['' for x in range(1,n+1)]
    for m, postfix in args:
      cur = [y+postfix if x%m==0 else y for x, y in zip(range(1,n+1), cur)]
    cur = [str(x) if y == '' else y for x, y in zip(range(1,n+1), cur)]
    return cur

  print("\n".join(fizzbuzz(100, (3, 'fizz'), (5, 'buzz'))))

Most good developers are already employed, so there's this constant pool of unemployed programmers (the 1% who can't do fizzbuzz) applying for all the jobs they can.

I'd question the heck out of it looking for tricks. Then I'd probably think "no they want something complicated. It can't be that"

I'd probably totally fail it. I've been writing code every day for over 25 years but if you asked me that in an interview, I'd totally completely utterly fuck it up.

I'd walk out and the interviewer would think me profoundly incompetent. Then I'd go home and have a terrible day thinking "wtf was that? All he wanted was that. You could write that when you were 7 on an apple 2, wtf were you doing?"

So now I'm just enjoying my time contributing to open source. Whatever.

It's a great time to not work, unemployment is lucrative.

Two of the four couldn't finish fizzbuzz (in the language of their choice) in 30 minutes. It feels a bit unethical to name their employers, but they were companies that would be familiar anyone who reads HN.

When I worked for FAANG, IIRC, the ratio was about the same, so I don't think it's a problem of recruiting.

Codility and Leetcode... screen that folks can code, but the folks who tend to be good at a quick grind don't always produce good code. Not a huge fan of it. I don't even look at the report anymore.