Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by CodeMage 3244 days ago
At the risk of sounding like a cranky old codger, I'd like to point a couple of things out. If all you have are "plug and play code monkeys", all you'll have is shitty software. The fact that shitty software is "enough" for so many businesses is just another symptom of the biggest problem with our society: we optimize for profit and damn everything else.
1 comments
nxsynonym 3244 days ago
Oh I agree completely. I just take issue with the fact that it somehow is a "youth problem", as is being pointed out by the parent comment. It's a business problem, not a lazy millennial/education problem.

Stop hiring shitty coders and you'll stop getting shitty interviewees. Less shitty interviewees means less need for these types of "beat the coding interview" services/blogs.

Honestly a lot of times the comments in these threads amount to "I was a geek and it wasn't cool, I know CS from the ground up, and nobody deserves to have an easy path to being a coder". It's an exhausted form of gatekeeping and doesn't make anything better for anyone.

link
CodeMage 3244 days ago
I'm not defending such comments, but there's more to them than just gatekeeping. Speaking from my own point of view, the "I was a geek and it wasn't cool" sentiment comes from feeling betrayed by having your lifestyle become an industry that too often focuses on profit more than on quality; the "I know CS from the ground up" comes from frustration with all the people who dismiss learning from the ground up without understanding all the insights it gives you; and "nobody deserves to have an easy path to being a coder" is an exaggeration of "when you try to make learning easier than it can really be, you end up dumbing things down".

Recently I found myself struggling to formulate my attitude towards software development and the best I could come up with is "lifestyle coding": sure, it's important to me to make something people will use and like, something that will improve life in some aspect, but in the end, I'm in this because I love to create programs. To me programming is more than my job, more than just means to an end, it's what I truly enjoy. People like me will often feel bitter about many aspects of our industry and it takes a conscious effort to keep aware of that feeling and to make sure it doesn't taint our decisions.

link