Real-World Development | Hacker News Reader

Real-World Development

open.blogs.nytimes.com

41 pointsdanso10 comments

> During my internship, I have gotten to know other developers at The Times and discovered that many of them didn’t start coding at five years old — some started as English majors, while others worked as chefs — proving it’s not what you know coming in that matters the most, but instead how well you can learn on the job.

Coming into this industry it can seem like everyone has a CS degree. I have yet to work with another dev from a non-traditional background. It is encouraging to be reminded that they are out there.

No offense, but I'm glad coders without CS degrees are a minority.

I've worked on two large C++ projects where non-CS, non-SE people were dominant and originally wrote most of the code, and they were a mess compared to the projects written by people with CS or software engineering degrees.

I'm not saying it's impossible for people to code without a CS degree or anything like that (hell, even CS/SE grads screw it up all the time), but I'd be extremely hesitant to work on another project started by or even mostly written by non-traditional software engineers.

I work with a lot of bioinformaticians (many of whom come from the biology side, and are self taught programmers) and sadly I see a similar pattern. Not all of them are bad, but a large number of them don't seem to give a shit about code quality, even when its production related work that has to be run day after day.

Not offended at all. It's something that I've encountered and understand. There are certain fundamentals that can be hard to pickup without someone teaching them. I definitely feel the difference between myself and people who have CS degrees. I do, however, try my best to keep my code clean and organized (and am always open to advice from others).

I find that I end up in an intermediary role at times in meetings, translating between engineering and business. It's pretty fun.

This sounded fun and manageable, so I felt fine. Then, as we discussed the technical details of the project, I started to get nervous. I was going to be pulling data from a MySQL database using PHP (although after some trial and error, we decided to use Go instead). I would put the data into an Amazon S3 bucket and then create an API to pull the data from S3. Finally, I’d add a page to an existing UI written in AngularJS where I would present the data in beautiful and informative charts (created with D3.js).

This reads like everything I consider wrong and offensive about our industry.

Congratulations to this person for pulling it off, but it's really sad how many different things they had to contend with to get something going (seriously, 2 weeks setting up a dev environment? wtf?).

This bugged me a bit too, but to be fair, it was "two weeks setting up my dev environment ... and learning MySQL and PHP." Plus I'm sure she spent plenty of time just talking to people.

Is it really that bad though, for an internship? I've never done a development/tech internship but my assumption is that interns aren't expected to do "real" work right away, and part of what they get from being an intern is learning how things are set up in a professional environment...

And in this case, it's not just learning, but contributing something to a live production, one that could potentially be seen by millions of people (case in point, NYT's most viewed feature of 2013 was a project built by an intern)...2 weeks sounds about appropriate for not just learning the parts of the stack and environment, but that there even is such a thing as environment and dependencies.

Also, to be fair to the OP, she says (emphasis added): "I spent the first two weeks setting up my environment — apparently a necessary evil in the real world — and learning MySQL and PHP."

[1] http://knightlab.northwestern.edu/2014/01/20/behind-the-dial...

"I spent the first two weeks setting up my environment"

Linux?

From 2014.

She sounds so young and enthusiastic. I don't think I was ever quite like that.

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