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by shepardrtc 2311 days ago
> It comes from terrible "corporate drone" software developers in the 80s and 90s - the ones that would takes weeks to developer simple routines

They still very much exist. My previous job was at a bank and these people filled it.
1 comments
WJW 2311 days ago
Can confirm. Last week a PM was gushing to me it "only" took a week to implement a feature that was not much more than an extra if statement. This is not in a regulated industry either, just run of the mill web stuff.
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starpilot 2311 days ago
I do tech at a non-tech company. Colleague has been doing Python for about 6 months. He can't do for-loops. His brain just doesn't get the concept (among others), I've never seen anything like it. Other guys make general computing mistakes like trying to type into a command prompt while another window is in focus, then messaging me saying "there was an error."
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hnews_account_1 2311 days ago
This is not at all comparable to that insane example you just gave, but a lot of people are just tool users in non tech companies. I know because I've seen it in finance. They're absolutely brilliant in their statistical concepts, but their programming skills leave a lot to be desired for because they don't have the background.

For instance, when you move from C++ to Python, you kinda realise after a month or so that normal loops won't cut it for stuff like numpy arrays etc due to the huge overhead. I realised this personally because I knew how quick C++ was and I wondered why the same code in Python was so massively slow, and I read up online to understand it. Similarly in matlab, for loops are very fast but still inefficient. So now when I write code, I use inbuilt libraries as much as possible and in matlab, I make everything into a matrix operation so it is blazingly fast once I scale it to a million data points.

My colleagues have no idea what that shit is. They'll know every step of a complicated algorithm and implement it simply using loops.

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Aeolun 2311 days ago
> There was an error

When I get these kinds of messages I just want to strangle the person on the other end.

Cool, an error. What did you do to try and fix it? Or was your first step to contact me?! (hint: it is)

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