Are programmers changing?

its all about passion. Young or old.
Us old programmers had / have the passion or we would not be here.
The 'new' programmers either have it or not. That will make or brake them.
It was never a 9 to 5 job for for me, It's my job and hobby and has been for 25+ years.

In the end... Is the customer happy? SCORE!!!!
 
I don't agree with the statement that college boys have a better insight due to their degree and algo's that they learned.

It all comes to experience and insight into solving things and that is something that comes by the years and it's not something you can learn on 3 extra years of school.

On my previous job I was a mid 30er and most of the colleagues 20-28, only 1 of them was interested into programming
and had a nice diploma which I don't have
(I'm an industrial electrician specialized into cooling technics on paper but never did that which is not even high school degree :) )
and stuff that he was working on for weeks/months got back to me and got solved in 1 or 2 days just because the experience difference and in depth knowledge of the system(s).
 
sorex said:
I don't agree with the statement that college boys have a better insight due to their degree and algo's that they learned.
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Noone said that. That would be stupid. It is not at all the idea I wanted to explain. Many programmers in the 70's or 80's learned how to program by themselves. It's my case. It's also the case of my father. But also many programmers learned it at school. When your job is to rewrite code produced by these two populations, I can tell you that you will quickly prefer the "academic" way of writing apps. And experience put apart, the programmer that learned mathematics, logic, and computer science at school have more strings to his bow than me (I have diplomas in electrical engineering and linguistics, which do not really help in my everyday job). I have two friends who are 10 years younger than me. They have the same passion for computers but, contrary to me, they learned their job at school. Their knowledge of algorithms and new technologies is a lot greater than mine and, without pretention, I think I'm far from being bad in this domain. I know probably more languages and write probably a more robust code because I'm used to the pitfalls of many kinds of problem, but I can't tell that I'm better or they are better. We are just different, with different approaches, and in the end, what matters is: is the job done? Does the app work as expected?
Nowadays, most programmers freshly hired around me come from universities. Self-made programmers seem to be more and more uncommon in my professional environment. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? It's one of the subjects of the debate initied by HotShoe.
 
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Given that I think you have to be born brought to the Logic, in most cases, people who have had good teachers IN THE PAST normally are better than those who have studied for themselves.

I emphasize in the past, because decades ago, it was harder to be self-taught: Internet was not at today's level. Today Internet can take the place of good teachers very well (as long as you study instead of copy and paste).

(As you can see, I did not study English well :D)
 
Self endeavour and experience teach you how to program, school teaches you how to code.

General rule with exceptions in both sides.
 
I hadn't really considered the point Informatix is making. As a full disclosure, I have a degree in software engineering and a degree in automotive engineering. So, I am not completely self taught, just in the early years before college and afterwards.

--- Jem
 
Erel said:
I agree. Learning is the key to being a good programmer. While sites such as stackoverflow can be very helpful, you must also understand the more basic concepts.

One of the great things with developing tools such as B4A / J / i is that I'm "forced" to learn new stuff all the time. I think that I read more than 5 books about Objective C / iOS in the last couple of months.
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Erel, can you give the references of those books concerning Objective C /iOS you read?

Thanks

Patrick
 
If you are experienced enough with Java then I recommend you this excellent book:
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You know Erel, that's why I don't want to even try to learn Java.
If an experienced person with Java is referred to an excellent book on Java to study!
 
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