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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Programming by itself is a borderline useless skill, just knowing python gains you very little. There are many fields where Python is an important skill, but that is because it allows you to perform other tasks faster. That is the importance of programming, the fact that you can automate work, and do large amounts of analysis faster than you could otherwise. If you want to program embedded devices, just knowing C doesn't help you if you don't understand how processors, memory, motors, sensors, etc work. Knowing python can help you leverage your mathematics or statistics knowledge to work as a data scientist or a quant, but just knowing python isn't sufficient. Knowing python alone is not sufficient for devops, since you also need to know how operating systems, networks, cloud infra, etc. works.

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> Programming by itself is a borderline useless skill

That's a terrible take. Programming is often a rarer and more difficult skill to hire for them many of the domains programming jobs touch. Most places will hire you just based on programming knowledge, and will train you in the domain knowledge.

All of the jobs you've listed are highly technical fields, and unusually specialized among programming jobs. A general SWE position doesn't often require much more than just programming.

> Most places will hire you just based on programming knowledge, and will train you in the domain knowledge

I have not been able to find a place like that, most have a long list of requirements. Can you suggest any?

> Programming is often a rarer and more difficult skill to hire.

The problem is, the employer is probably wrong (they did not do the correct requirement analysis on this), and actually don't want a "just a Programmer", they want a "Requirement Analyst"/"Functional Analyst"/"Design Analyst", and those are the rarer and more difficult skill to develop and find at all.

I've never worked as a programmer, despite 30+ years of programming experience.

Based on my observations, biased due to my specific niche, most people who program just ... well ... shouldn't. If there were doctors practicing medicine as bad as some people who call themselves programmers program, then we'd have riots!

Really curious, what counts as "programming knowledge"?

I would say Python is used pretty much everywhere in the industry, even outside of the data science niche it seems to be popular in right now. Its ease of use and extensive standard library makes it a great choice for one-off CLI tools as well as quick prototyping, and it is not uncommon to e.g. have Python scripts as part of the build pipeline for a C++ or Rust project, or to develop the first iteration of a web app using Flask or even Bottle.

In my opinion Python's strength does not lie in the language itself but rather in its third party package ecosystem. Libraries such as NumPy, Requests and PIL/Pillow provide optimized (and often native) black-box implementations of common tasks and wrap them into simple APIs, turning Python into basically the modern equivalent of shell scripting. You can usually "pipe" data from one library to the other and create complex pipelines in just a few lines of code, without sacrificing too much performance since most of the magic happens within the packages' DLLs. I guess this is what made it popular for data analysis in the first place.

I would strongly recommend OP to familiarize themselves with NumPy and other popular packages, including the data-science-oriented ones, as they might come in handy when writing nontrivial scripts. Writing simple command line tools is also useful for getting used to the standard library.

While this is ultimately somewhat true, it's a bit of a doomer perspective - knowing "some programming" is the gateway to learning other things.

When you see a list like "processors, memory, motors, sensors, etc" the first thought might be "Oh no I don't know any of that", but that's not a problem. Nobody starts off knowing it. You just pick a problem you want to work on and you start reading and trying things, usually failing over and over along the way until it works.

I only knew a little programming when I started on a web development career, and I just learned a lot along the way.

Imo, this is an awful take. Programming can have such a deep knowledge that you may have very little other skills.

I'm surprised this comment even showed up on HN.

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