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by nxsynonym 3245 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.

1 comments

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.