Give a Dev a break...

My freshman year of college I had this """great""" idea to minor in computer science because I like computers and it is a helpful skill, right? I knew several programmers types from my high school, work, and college circles so my first semester I would go to them for help/pointers/mentoring with assignments. It was a loooong semester of invariably being told "what [other paid professional programmer or advanced star student] told you is a dumb dick embarrassment to coders everywhere, do it this way", rinse, repeat. My conclusions on the way to change my degree plan: in order to program you must maintain your logic while simultaneously being clinically insane.
Also, learning programming in a classroom is the wrong way to do it. Free time and passion trumps paying for outdated information every time.
 
My freshman year of college I had this """great""" idea to minor in computer science because I like computers and it is a helpful skill, right? I knew several programmers types from my high school, work, and college circles so my first semester I would go to them for help/pointers/mentoring with assignments. It was a loooong semester of invariably being told "what [other paid professional programmer or advanced star student] told you is a dumb dick embarrassment to coders everywhere, do it this way", rinse, repeat. My conclusions on the way to change my degree plan: in order to program you must maintain your logic while simultaneously being clinically insane.
Also, learning programming in a classroom is the wrong way to do it. Free time and passion trumps paying for outdated information every time.

Sorry for the rant, but I always say this when some you kid reading a video game forum might interpret a post as: 'college degrees don't matter'...'You can learn all you will need without going to school.'
I agree with you that passion trumps classroom learning, but a 4 year degree is super important. I spent 8 years partying and walked away with a 3.5 average and 2 year degree (after changing major 3 times and being to 4 universities...long story short...) I lose out on 3-4 out of every 10 jobs because of it, even though I have TONS of valuable XP. Literally, some companies wont even entertain my resume because policy is "no hires without a college degree." I would suggest that a 4 year degree in computer science is a smart way to spend your college years before you go for a masters, and I would also suggest that you will learn a lot more about IT/IS than if you are a general studies major... If you can program you might be lucky enough to find a decent job right out of college, and you certainly will never starve. Most likely you will find a decent job eventually make your way to the upper middle class, unless you branch into upper management or are truly a star. (Masters is the new bachelors...)

Back on topic:
I find this article hits home so much because anyone who has worked in the computer world knows that shit is constantly broken. Like, everything all the time. We spend 9/10ths our time with duck tape and 1/10th or time with a paint brush. No one is ever happy with your work for long, and true satisfaction is few and far between. For fuck sake, I can't even keep my personal printers working full time. I have spent many a moment wanting to stab the person who created specific models of Kyosera laser printers. I'm sure this person also hates their life because of the fact that they rushed to create a printer that constantly breaks. And fuck all those jag bags who don't test their code well before implementing into production and then change companies post implementation. I'm over fixing your shit, and I'll shank you good.

Office Space man, Office Space...
 
Masters is the new bachelors....
Truer words....

It is true that a lot of companies have policies about requiring a 4 year college degree for hiring. My dad (engineer) and a few good friends (programmers) absolutely hate these policies where they work because their companies end up hiring "cookbook engineers" fresh out out of college who know next to nothing without a textbook in front of them and someone telling them exactly what to do. They pretty much all actively push for hiring the people who can demonstrate competency (practical tests: interpreting schematics and writing code, respectively) over people with fancy pieces of paper [now would be a good time to mention I teach at a University lol]. They are being proven correct time and time again with hiring outcomes and most are gaining traction with changing, or have seen a change in, company hiring policies.

I think it is fair to say that a degree is important all other things being equal. More education is almost invariably a good thing. That said, many companies have lazy/stupid hiring policies that sort through candidates with easy to define parameters (college degree- yes/no) instead of taking the time to do a little work actually figuring out who they are hiring. That speaks to how awful most HR departments are more than the value of education.
 
i started my dev adventure with little/no experience in coding, but enough determination and outside help that i knew it could figure it out. when i was making the 6 man in the deepshade, i broke it somehow during balancing and couldn't figure out why. i tried fucking everything. scoured over the code. changed a million little things. it made no sense. after about 8 hours of failure, i sent it to either marza or zaela, i dont remember. within a minute they were like... umm, yeah, you missed a ;. i am not ragey at all, but i nearly fucking smashed my keyboard. it's a lesson everyone learns at some point

but hey the work was worthwhile
 
That's what is wrong with hatesfury, check the semi-colons! (Article was a great read/laugh, thank you.)
 
within a minute they were like... umm, yeah, you missed a ;. i am not ragey at all, but i nearly fucking smashed my keyboard. it's a lesson everyone learns at some point

Hahahahahahaha. So true. Been there friend. Many. A. Time. Yet, I still come back for more.
 
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SAS programming (statistics) gives the same sort of headache except you don't end up with a cool game, just a histogram or some regression plots. Shit ain't fun. QUIT;
 
i started my dev adventure with little/no experience in coding, but enough determination and outside help that i knew it could figure it out. when i was making the 6 man in the deepshade, i broke it somehow during balancing and couldn't figure out why. i tried fucking everything. scoured over the code. changed a million little things. it made no sense. after about 8 hours of failure, i sent it to either marza or zaela, i dont remember. within a minute they were like... umm, yeah, you missed a ;. i am not ragey at all, but i nearly fucking smashed my keyboard. it's a lesson everyone learns at some point

but hey the work was worthwhile

HAHAHA, We have all had those same sort of issues.

I was coding this dynamic T-SQL thingy which integrated the old PIVOT command, used cursors (bad me), a few stored procedures, and it ended up being a few thousand lines. Honestly, I don't even remember what is was for other than insurance stuff. Needless to say, it was a cluster fuck to look at. I spent hours trying to debug one tiny thing, and finally called it for the evening (not in production yet.) The next day I opened it up after lunch, and boom found the issue within the first 2 minutes of looking. (I don't even remember what was actually wrong.) After all that wasted time I just remember proclaiming to my office wall, 'mother fucker!' and kind of sitting there for a few minutes thinking about all the wasted effort.

This sort of thing happens to anyone who codes, and I'm guessing it happens once every couple of months.
 
Says the self taught savant.

you just haven't seen enough real programmers

i started my dev adventure with little/no experience in coding, but enough determination and outside help that i knew it could figure it out. when i was making the 6 man in the deepshade, i broke it somehow during balancing and couldn't figure out why. i tried fucking everything. scoured over the code. changed a million little things. it made no sense. after about 8 hours of failure, i sent it to either marza or zaela, i dont remember. within a minute they were like... umm, yeah, you missed a ;. i am not ragey at all, but i nearly fucking smashed my keyboard. it's a lesson everyone learns at some point

the old scripting system kind of fits this thread a lot in general...

Although we've had a new scripting system using a real scripting language for a year or two now, most of our scripts still use our old ad-hoc scripting... thing. It's pretty terrible all around: scripts are retained as plain strings, copied, re-parsed, and modified in place to resolve variables (well, value-returning functions, there are no real variables) to their values -- textually -- before any logic happens, every single time an event with scripted behavior associated with it occurs. Not to mention that it does a lot of usually-unnecessary processing besides -- some of it even if there is nothing in the script associated with the event. It's basically an anti-programming language, and all the re-parsing, repeated allocations, and handling everything as text makes it about as slow as it possibly could be.

This is particularly bad for some of the later-made raid zones. The original scripting system scales poorly -- longer, more complex scripts take exponentially longer to process. This isn't helped by it not having reliable nesting of conditionals -- meaning complex scripts are also extremely repetitive out of necessity.

All the old scripts should probably be converted to the new language. This could probably be done, but it's not a very interesting project. The old system has a lot of odd constructions, quirks, and one-off functions that would be a pain to have to port over or write around. ("Variables" being pre-determined at the start of the event and therefore not updating in real time is just the tip of the iceberg.)

...
 
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