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I don't buy this. To be peerless in this profession probably this description makes sense. But I know a lot of physicists that came to programming because of the paucity of jobs for BS Physics, and they were, at the worst, very competent, up to extremely good. I know plenty of others for whom programming is a means to an end - they want to make robots, gather data to answer social questions, or what have you, and the programming is a means to an end. With that said I did find myself wondering whether the author is a programmer, or slings code around. If you have the right kind of mind its not so hard to figure out how to tell the computer to do something, especially with a powerful SW stack; it's another thing entirely to deliver, say, 300K lines of code that is readable, robust, maintainable, extensible, and somewhat future proof, or to make the stack itself from the ground up. Of course, many of the "I've been programming since the age of 10" can't do that either. And, with that said (:)), I probably share your suspicion of wanting to 'do a start up'; it's hard to throw a stick here (SV) without hitting somebody yacking about a start up. Problem is, 'start up' is so often the idea. It's rarer to hear "I want to build a device to help the blind, I reviewed my options, and VC money turned out to be the best choice for me because..." (VC money is often a terrible option, it depends on your business situation). But I am straying off the subject, which is the blog said to learn to do something, dive in and actually try to accomplish something. I am wholeheartedly behind that. I'm trying to learn a topic for work, and am reviewing some Coursera courses. And, not getting far - I need to immediately try to apply the ideas to a real problem to get traction, I think. I think I will succeed just fine, despite not having tried to do this particular thing (Machine Learning/AI) since the age of 10. |