[edw519]

A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Fix Teeth. My own.

How a reasonably balanced individual nearly went insane

I was just a guy in a suit in an office with a vague healthcare idea. Then I decided to learn to fix teeth.

I overheard some guy at a happy hour bragging about how easily he was able to automate his overbite by using a technique called "4 Handed Dentristry". I thought, "huh, 4 Handed Dentistry." I went home, googled it, and within 15 seconds, I was working through a random 4 Handed Dentistry tutorial.

A week later, I went to my first dentalspace meeting. Everyone was talking about techniques like orthodontics, endodontics, and maxillofacial surgery. There was so much to learn. I borrowed three O'reilly books and got about 50 pages into each of them.

Most dentistry books start off nice and easy before making big assumptions about your prior knowledge.

A friend told me I should get good at drilling, and gave me his drill bits. I spent a few hours learning basic foot controls so I could further configure it.

Then some guy walked by and saw me drilling. "Why are you drilling?" he asked me. "Don't you know lasers are better?" "Hm. Lasers." So I started memorizing dozens of laser shortcuts.

Most arguments about restoration techniques are what dentists call "religious wars" - rooted more in historical differences than practical merit.

At the time, it seemed reasonable to think that the faster I could drill, the faster I could fix teeth. I switched to a hydraulic drillset because, hey, it was objectively the most efficient method a dentist could use.

Can you count how many letters, numbers and teeth are in their original oral positions? I'll give you a hint - it's in the low single digits.

On the days I could actually get my netbook to successfully boot DentalCAD - and that I was able to drill more than 10 teeth per minute - I studied oral surgery by working through books and Udacity courses.

After 7 months of grueling self-study and going to dental events, I landed my first Dental HMO job...

You kinda get the idea by now? I dunno, I think what we do is every bit as professional as dentistry. So why don't posts like OP's seem as absurd as mine?

[UPDATE: For those of you who have suggested that programmers don't have others' well-being in their hands, actually quite a few of us have, just not as directly as dentists. We are a profession and we do do important work. A few examples in an old post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2882620]

[jng]

Because one finds many self-taught developers out there who can outperform college-educated compsci majors day in and day out.

Because one can read universally-acknowledged figures explaining how a large number of people with a software engineering degree can't code their way out of a paper bag or pass the most basic "fizz buzz test". (1)

Because we can see non-genius 17-year-olds writing apps that are bought by top tech companies for $30MM, month in and month out. (2)

Because we call it "software engineering", but it still isn't engineering at all. (3)

Software development is still a very, very young field. The fundamentals are not properly understood yet. It will still take decades before they are, possibly over a century. We won't be able to put proper education in place before the fundamentals are well-determined.

Agriculture, livestock breeding and cloth making are many millennia old. Architecture, engineering, and the law are 2-3 thousand years old. Book printing and complex music are about 1,000 years old. Dentistry is centuries old. Cinema is over a century old. We know a lot about how to do those properly, and schools are pretty good at teaching the important parts. Software development is less than 50-years-old, and schools are still dismal at figuring out the important parts (practitioners are only so-so most of the time too). That makes it different.

It would be hard to get more misguided advice than what the OP received (pro tip: don't learn vim, Emacs, configure Linux or switch to Dvorak before you can write functional, working code). That doesn't mean teaching yourself is a bad way to learn.

(1) Why can't programmers program, by Jeff Atwood (http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/)

(2) Summly

(3) Just a random sample, but very representative: I developed a software package for building structure calculation about 20 years ago, helping an architect with the software part. There are manuals enumerating the exact steps to follow and excess safety measures to add: assume 50% extra weight, 40% wind-load force with higher percentages for higher structures, twice the amount of iron to be put into the concrete when certain conditions are met, etc... Those manuals are the law. If you are an architect or an engineer, and you follow those rules, two things happen: (1) you are not legally liable, and (2) the building doesn't fall down! Software projects fall down all the time (read: Obamacare). That is engineering, software projects with today's tools and techniques are not. This will happen some day in software. We are not there yet, by far.

[tjr]

That is engineering, software projects with today's tools and techniques are not. This will happen some day in software. We are not there yet, by far.

Sure we are, at least pretty close.

Commercial avionics software developed to DO-178B standards calls for reams of requirements, verification tests, compliance to process, internal quality reviews, external audits, and sign-off by FAA representatives.

A one-line code change can take days to implement, and might not be released to "users" for months or years.

But the software is extremely robust.

If we wanted to engage in the same level of software engineering for all software, we could. But we don't want to. Developers don't want to, and users don't demand it. If an iPhone game crashes, who cares? If a productivity application crashes, you might have lost an hour's work, but it's probably not so annoying so as to warrant a couple orders of magnitude more cost associated with the software.

But if a software failure could kill people, well, that's different. It's worth spending a huge amount of time to make it perfect.

Avionics software can be so thoroughly tested because it is thoroughly designed up front. You know exactly what it's supposed to do. Much less-critical software is designed in a more ad hoc fashion; or there might not even be a design at all! How much software has been organically grown, starting with an idea and hacking on it until it seemed to work?

If you want to thoroughly test that, you have to go back and thoroughly state what it's supposed to do.

It's quite possible, but by and large it's not desired enough to make it worth actually doing. I'm not sure how this could change, or even if it should change. Instant bug fixes on web applications are cool, even though they come with the risk of having broken something else...

[cbd1984]

> But the software is extremely robust.

Does the specification specify the input as well, or is it actually robust against real input?

By real input I mean stuff like HTML tag soup: There's no single standards document which describes it fully, or even mostly, and it isn't going to be fixed. Ever. It simply has to be processed, to the limits of your ability to process it.

Avionics software is robust, sure, but it's almost a toy problem, its domain is so well-specified. You can ignore so much about reality because you've got a contract which says "We only care about what's listed, everything else can go hang" and in the real world (or, well, in the rest of the real world) you can't usually do that.

[tjr]

A fair observation. In the example of handling HTML input, I would suppose that's not a problem with individual developers, but a problem with the industry. Such a relaxed format should not have been allowed to exist, if the industry cared about its software products being as robust as possible.

I'm failing to think of any avionics application that might handle HTML, but avionics systems do have their own formats to deal with. ARINC 661, for example, is an XML file format for transmitting graphical display elements:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARINC_661

Of course, all uses of ARINC 661 data are thoroughly tested. I'm not sure I would go so far as to describe it as a "toy problem", but it certainly does intentionally limit the problem domain to exactly what needs to be dealt with. Malformed ARINC 661 data received would just be discarded, not tried to be displayed in the best possible way even if it wasn't quite right, because that would be unacceptable; the problem would be with whoever was sending the malformed data.

Anyway, you're quite right though; without a precise and unambiguous format definition, you can only go so far down the path of robustness.

[jasonm23]

> Such a relaxed format should not have been allowed to exist.

Amen

[graycat]

Yes, long ago it was observed that the first step in proving software correct was a clear specification of what the software was supposed to do and that for a lot of realistic software writing that spec was unreasonably difficult.

[bstpierre]

> If we wanted to engage in the same level of software engineering for all software, we could. But we don't want to.

Of course. Like building structures, there are different kinds of software. I can build a garden shed by myself as long as I have the skills to get the thing to stand up. If it blows down in a storm I'm the only person with a loss. But just because I can get a garden shed (or even a larger structure like a barn or a house) to survive windstorms without incident doesn't make me a structural engineer.

[jng]

In my understanding, those projects are the modern pyramids of software. Built by sheer brute force at an unsustainable cost, only affordable by a select few.

Large amounts of reliable, performant and scalable software will be built on time and on budget at some point in the future, with a cost and effort similar to today's run-of-the-mill software development. This will happen when, thanks to better understanding of the principles, we can create better tools and techniques to do so.

[tjr]

I think sheer brute force would be far less organized. How do you suppose designing and constructing a building according to designs and building codes is a more advanced, less brute-forced activity than building software according to requirements and industry standards?

But avionics-style software engineering need not be an all-or-nothing approach. Elements of it could be introduced into other programming applications for increased robustness. Greenspun wrote up an excellent article on adding external design review to web application development:

http://philip.greenspun.com/software/design-review

Such would not be a heavy burden on a project, and would likely help catch at least the most glaring errors that went unnoticed by the developers.

In any event, I agree that better tools and techniques offer the tantalizing possibility to help all software be more robust, even if it is never more "engineered". Modern languages have, for example, done away with whole categories of bugs that used to plague C programmers (and still do, unfortunately).

[jng]

"Sheer brute force" is probably a bit of an exaggeration. But just a bit. As you describe yourself, the kind of advance from C to more modern languages is a step away from "sheer brute force" and towards reasonable approaches. And only a small step compared to where we have to get before this is engineering.

I'd say a much larger part of all software projects is dysfunctional compared to the same in architectural or civil engineering projects, and I think this situation will greatly improve in the future, thanks to a handful of qualitatively innovative insights providing enormous improvements that we are yet to see.

[sedachv]

> That is engineering, software projects with today's tools and techniques are not. This will happen some day in software. We are not there yet, by far.

This statement is based on exactly the same fallacy as the featured blog post: ignorance. You are ignoring all the tools and techniques available for software engineering today: garbage collection, lexical closures, Hindley–Milner type systems, purely functional programming, MISRA-C, unit testing code coverage tools, bug tracking systems, distributed version control systems and code review practices around them, etc.

People developing widely used tools are still making idiotic mistakes that had widely known solutions 50 years ago: https://twitter.com/vsedach/status/527904732145537025

Engineering is about learning from previous designs. When you shrug your shoulders and say "software engineering isn't engineering yet" and "the field is too young" you are just discouraging people from learning from past mistakes.

Just because some idiot can pick up an oxy-acetylene torch and cut and weld some metal together doesn't make them an aerospace engineer. What's the difference with PHP developers?

Stop making abstract excuses and start treating software and software practices as tools and techniques. Tools and techniques have a history, a learning curve, and areas for improvement.

[jng]

No, this statement is based on years of learning, practice and reflection, all around the creation and release of many successful software products of many kinds on the cutting edge of software development. I don't know why you assume I ignore all those things when I make my statement.

The list of techniques you provide is a hodgepodge of valuable but limited techniques, inapplicable theoretical results, and voodoo-like superstitions and rituals. They are all insightful and beautiful, but they do nothing to turn the discipline into software engineering. The day software development has turned into an engineering, you can bet the contractors who get awarded big contracts like the Obamacare web site would make sure they spend the $$$ to apply the practices which have been proven to ensure software projects become successful, they are still going to make a ton of money off the top of the contract, and that's what they do for large engineering projects for the most part. Nowadays, they are just at a loss, and try to get by, like everyone else in the industry.

GC: Apple keeps not applying it in iOS but switched to it for a lot of core OS X apps, notably Xcode 5, and switched back to assisted-referece-counting in Xcode 6 and others, since the performance degradation was noticeable. GC is great for many things but not for all. It's a trade-off.

Lexical closures: I am not sure this really makes software work better. I've seen many more well-engineered solid projects in C++ and Java, which lack them, than in javascript.

Hindley-Milner and purely functional programming: beautiful beautiful beautiful Haskell is probably the closest to practical purely functional programming system, and we have yet to see any proof that Haskell makes real software system implementation any better. Don't get me wrong, I love purely functional approaches, I designed and implemented a full custom regular expression engine with a purely functional design and implementation (even if I used C++ to write it), and it's the type of thing where the approach results in much better code in all regards. It's just still not practical for most things. I like to think about Haskell as computation poetry. It's just not practical.

MISRA-C: one entry which is just not compatible with the others. So if you are doing a project using C because it's the only practical option (controllers in vehicle engines being a paradigmatic case), it's good that there is a set of practices that, even if they make software 10x as costly, are quite good at preventing resulting deaths. I don't think this

Unit testing code coverage: another shaman practice, valuable but without providing guarantees. The space of program state is so combinatorially non-linear with regards to the space of its source code (read: entscheidungsproblem) that ensuring 100% line-wise code coverage is just a sad excuse in getting the whole building not to crumble. Better than nothing, still guaranteeing nothing.

Bug tracking systems: more good practices, guaranteeing nothing. Every single released software project I have worked on has been released with a ton of open entries in the bug tracking system. There is about as much team politics as engineering going on in a bug tracking system.

DVCS: yes, git is good and convenient, flexible collaboration, and flexible push/pull-based authority policies allow much more functional team dynamics, including fully auditable "sign-off" as part of the process. Defending this as if it provided any engineering guarantee with regards to the developed software sounds funny. Enforceable, auditable process is helpful and necessary, it ensures nothing with regards to the produced code.

Code review: frankly, this is the pinnacle of shamanism in your list. Four eyes see more than two. Eight eyes totaling 80 years of software creation experience are sure going to benefit the quality of the code. I find it indefensible this as "engineering", no matter if you include it in the commit/merge flow. It's just useful but totally fallible common sense elevated to policy.

Look, I don't shrug my shoulders, and I am not discouraging anybody from learning from past mistakes. I am saying that all the above are a nice but tiny start in the way to this field being an engineering. The difference between you and me is that I am convinced there is a set of tools and techniques which is so much qualitatively better that, once they're available, it will obvious that the current stage is more or less the stone age of software. They will provide a clear, concrete, enumerable set of guarantees about software and its production, allowing us to operate as engineers. Something which none of the entries in the above list do.

[sedachv]

> another shaman practice, valuable but without providing guarantees

This is the same fallacious argument you keep making over and over. You dismiss tools that provide guarantees as "not practical," while calling techniques derived from experience "voodoo."

You obviously have no experience in construction or civil engineering, have never looked at a building code book, and generally have no idea what engineering is:

> The day software development has turned into an engineering, you can bet the contractors who get awarded big contracts like the Obamacare web site would make sure they spend the $$$ to apply the practices which have been proven to ensure software projects become successful

Just like Boston's Big Dig.

> MISRA-C: one entry which is just not compatible with the others. So if you are doing a project using C because it's the only practical option

No one in the real world ever has to retrofit or maintain old buildings and infrastructure projects.

> The space of program state is so combinatorially non-linear with regards to the space of its source code (read: entscheidungsproblem) that ensuring 100% line-wise code coverage is just a sad excuse in getting the whole building not to crumble. Better than nothing, still guaranteeing nothing.

Yeah, and finite element models are a perfect representation of the real world.

> Enforceable, auditable process is helpful and necessary, it ensures nothing with regards to the produced code.

I guess all those CAD data management systems don't help engineers design good buildings either.

> Code review: frankly, this is the pinnacle of shamanism in your list. Four eyes see more than two. Eight eyes totaling 80 years of software creation experience are sure going to benefit the quality of the code. I find it indefensible this as "engineering", no matter if you include it in the commit/merge flow. It's just useful but totally fallible common sense elevated to policy.

Just like structural engineering reviews of architectural plans are obviously useless. No way would a structural review by experienced engineers have helped prevent the Kansas City Regency Hotel disaster.

[jng]

> You obviously have no experience in construction or civil engineering, have never looked at a building code book, and generally have no idea what engineering is:

I have very little experience in a architecture project decades ago, I just described my experience a couple comments above - I haven't claimed any more than that. I don't know what reasonable claim you could have to affirming I have never looked at a building code book - I more than looked at one, implemented in software the rules in there following the direction of an architect, and was generally amazed when I saw how real engineering works. I also spent five years attending an engineering school before working in large "software engineering" projects for 20 years, which I don't think are an instance of engineering at all, but hey.

Enjoy your faith in software engineering, your ad-hominems, your cynicism, and your real engineering career. Good bye.

[thomyorkie]

Software engineering is a relatively young field. However, to say we don't properly understand the fundamentals is absurd.

[jng]

Of course that's your take, definitely not mine. Not easy to discuss though: the obtuseness in today's software building won't be obvious until we discover the principles that turn it into engineering.

In ancient Egypt, pyramid-building must have seemed the unbelievable pinnacle of human achievement, only surpassable by ever higher and larger pyramids. Only now we see the primitiveness of those works (notwithstanding their merit and value).

It is my take that our current level of understanding of software building is similar to the that of architecture when pyramids were built.

Fortunately, advance is now much faster thanks to the many tools that help experimentation and communication, and we should be approaching somewhere reasonable in just a few decades.

[jimmaswell]

In what way does the work of Alan Turing etc. long ago not constitute a firm fundamental understanding of the field?

[jng]

In my view, Turing's results are equivalent in computer science (an important part of software creation) to Pythagoras' theorem in geometry (an important part of architecture): incredibly insightful, fundamental, everlasting and useful. Used directly or indirectly in all early works, respectively, in software and architecture. And only a tiny part of the foundational understanding necessary for really mastering the discipline, a level I think we still haven't reached in software.

[ibebrett]

They are more of an understanding of what theoretically can be computed, rather than anything to do with how to do it or how to efficiently do it. I study lots of theoretical computer science, but it doesn't intersect with software engineering much. Software engineering tends to more relate to project management, operations research etc.

[AnimalMuppet]

Define "understand the fundamentals".

If you mean "the theoretical underpinnings", then, yes, we think we do. Turing machines and Church calculus provide solid theoretical underpinnings, that (as far as we know now) are complete. (Of course, the future could show us that they are incomplete. That's the problem with knowing whether your current understanding is proper - you don't know what gaps the future will reveal.)

However, if you mean "we know how to build programs so they work", there's massive empirical evidence that says that we don't. (That is, we can do it... sometimes. And sometimes we can do it after it takes five times as much money as we expected. And sometimes we can't make it work, ever. And we can't tell up front which will happen.) So in terms of this being engineering - as opposed to computer science - saying that we don't properly understand the fundamentals seems like an entirely reasonable statement.

[jng]

I quite agree with you, but not completely. It's true that Turing & Cburch fundamentals are complete, in that anything we describe in computation can be expressed in terms of those. But I think we are using a very small subset of all Turing-Church based computing, and refinements of this understanding will provide a qualitatively better algebra for the types of software we really create. This will make it easier both for engineers to create software, and for end-users to do things that nowadays only programmers can do.

Both ends you describe (computer science and software engineering) are to me part of the same continuum. We still have articulate most of it with a coherent theory.

[graycat]

A mechanical engineer knows about the properties of the metals, plastics, etc. he uses. A civil engineer knows about strengths of steel I-beams, etc. An electrical engineer knows about capacities of cables, switches, etc. So, these engineers can do real engineering and have transmissions run, electric power networks provide the power, and tall buildings and long bridges stand.

A software engineer knows about the capacity of a server? With what I/O rate, TCP/IP data rate, memory locality of reference, independent threads, memory that can be effectively cached, the memory usage, errors and their consequences?

E.g., one of the problems of doing optimization of assigning programs to servers in a server farm is knowing what (1) the servers can do, also considering other programs the server is running, and (2) what resources the software needs, and it's too tough to know either and, then, in a significantly large and complex server farm, fully to exploit this data for full optimization.

Software engineers are working with at best rubber specs on both the resources they have and the resources they will be using. So, can't really do engineering on the work, e.g., really can guarantee next to nothing. Or, would you want to bet the life of your wife or daughter on some software doing its work without errors and on time? Neither would I!

[seabee]

I agree. Sometimes we do take the reductionist approach, take the Apollo guidance software or seL4 as examples. However, when winging it gets you results that are almost as good in a fraction of the time, you can't be surprised at the prevailing method of software 'engineering'.

[Retric]

Architecture, engineering, and the law are all well over 6,000 years old.

People have changed less (ed: more slowly) than you might think. Consider, people where applying makeup 6,000 years ago and there is some evidence the practice is ~100,000 years old.

[jng]

I just threw an approximate guess of 2-3k years. If it's 6k, more to my reasoning: there's been so much time and effort to learn those that proper principles are now well known and can be taught and applied repeatedly, reliably, affordably.

I don't think people have changed at all, and I didn't say it anywhere above, so I don't understand why you assume I think people have changed significantly.

Our knowledge in a few areas has grown significantly though (read: crafts, science and technology). I don't think anyone reasonable would disagree, but who knows.

[Retric]

No offence intended, I just noticed a lot of those numbers where fairly low. Like where you say dentistry is century's old which is clearly true, but "Remains from the early Harappan periods of the Indus Valley Civilization (c. 3300 BCE) show evidence of teeth having been drilled dating back 9,000 years." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentistry

So it's 90+ century's old. Which is one of those, wait what? moments for me that I like to share.

[jng]

That's fine. I don't know the exact details of all those disciplines, I like history, but my knowledge of it is limited. I was within reasonable orders of magnitude of the real dates, or lower, which helps my argument that software engineering is incredibly young, which is the whole point :)

[sedachv]

The earliest known megalithic construction site is 11 thousand years old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

The problem is that there has been no continuous architectural tradition. Most of the advanced Roman building methods were completely lost around the 5th century (concrete was not rediscovered until the 18th century). The Egyptians around the time of Cleopatra had no idea about the construction techniques used to build the Great Pyramid of Giza (this is why the Greeks assumed the pyramids were built by slave laborers). This is not surprising considering that Cleopatra lived closer to the first moon landing than she did to the construction of that pyramid.

[austenallred]

It's tough when you're reading HackerNews or spend a lot of time around technical people.

Technical people are, necessarily, very adamant about the technologies they use. When you're first starting out, you just want the "best."

Among the most common misunderstandings for non-technical people is what a programming "language" is. You don't realize that almost all programming languages are made up of very similar constructs. For example, knowing what I can do with a string in JavaScript and transferring that knowledge over to Ruby is a thirty second, syntactical exercise. Non-technical might imagine that you have to learn everything over from scratch. That's probably a result of etymology; when you hear the word "language" you think Russian vs. Spanish - completely different alphabets, concepts, grammar structures, etc. It would make more sense for those who can't program to think of it in terms of "dialects" or something like that, instead of "languages."

It doesn't actually mater what language you learn first, even if it's (god forbid) PHP. But we don't tell that to would-be programmers enough.

I probably wasted a month of my time because I started using zshell and oh-my-zsh on the recommendation of some guy I talked to at a meetup. He loved a tiny aspect of the flexibility of the prompt's highlighting. I barely knew how to use the command line. So heaven knows I didn't understand what happens to my $PATH when I'm dropping whatever the github repo is telling me to into ~/.bashrc instead of ~/.zshrc.

The time I really started to learn was when my company got into an accelerator, and all of the sudden I was the de-facto front-end guy. The only CSS I had ever written was tweaking colors on my blog, and I really had no idea what I was doing. But that didn't matter - I had to build, and it was a real project -- one that was seen by 10s of thousands of people on day one. It doesn't have to be that stressful to learn, but you have to build something and solve challenges learning along the way. There's really no other path that works.

So, my advice to budding programmers or those who may learn to code: Pick a language/framework and don't move on until you are fairly adept with that stack. Your tech buddies may mock your technology choices, someone will say you're an idiot because "this would be so much cooler in Lisp," but you don't have to be writing functional Haskell when you're learning to program. Take things form beginning to end, start to finish, and start changing technologies once you are well versed enough to understand the shortcomings of what you're currently using.

I really wish someone had sat me down and told me that when I started. I'd probably have saved six months of after-hours and early morning struggling.

[cbd1984]

> It doesn't actually mater what language you learn first

OK, start with Prolog. Now move to Ruby. Then Haskell, and include some SQL in that as well, somehow.

Now write me a program in APL.

Languages within the same paradigm are mostly similar. But there are a lot of paradigms, and some concepts don't transfer well at all. (Quick, what's the equivalent of an anonymous inner class in Prolog?)

[berdario]

This!

...and moving from javascript strings to Ruby strings is far from a "30 seconds syntactical exercise", unless you don't take into account the fact that:

* Ruby strings don't necessarily have all the same encoding

* Javascript strings don't implement all of Ruby Strings' methods

* Ruby Strings are mutable, while JS's are immutable

* R̶u̶b̶y̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶a̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶J̶a̶v̶a̶s̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶ (edit: brain fart... I probably wrote too much Clojure[script], even if char literals in cljs just yield strings again)

(Or you use Opal, which doesn't abstract Javascript Strings much)

[film42]

Totally agree! You'll often hear my talk about how terrible of a language PHP is, but at the same time, I'm forever grateful for PHP. It was my first language! It was simple, but most important, I made things work! I gained more experience with each little script I wrote until I finally felt comfortable enough to branch out.

Now I spend most of my time in Clojure, Ruby and C++, but, if it wasn't for PHP, I might not have ever felt that itch that led me to pursue a career in software development.

[drcomputer]

I think it's possible to have preferences without resorting to ad hominem. Sometimes it seems that just having a preference is enough to associate you with the assholes. The truth is, every group of every thing has assholes, or groups of people that perceive assholes. Every group has people that have preference, and people that don't. Every group has people that have opinions, and may voice those opinions with certainty when they actually have no certainty, and are aware of this, but don't know how to communicate it without creating logical paradoxes.

The people elements of communication are not easy to parse correctly. You can never truly know how other people think, you can only assume based on experience collected a priori, which may be all together constructed on a false premise that intialized the pattern of thought construction.

I wish I had known the things I know now, 15 years ago. But I don't. That's part of living. We learn and grow because of our experiences. It can't be learned in any other way.

Personally, I just ignore assholes, or if I choose to engage, I learn to play their own game. Then I typically stop judging them.

[copperheart]

Great advice, thank you for this.

[worklogin]

This analogy is as absurd and oversimplified as comparing grand theft auto to a download of Taylor Swift albums.

There is no such thing as "freelance amateur dentistry". You can't start tinkering with teeth and get a job the way you can tinker with programs as a hobby before getting a junior position at a programming gig. To compare the two professions and suggest the path to engagement and skill are the same is obtuse.

This article resonated with me more than most HN pieces, because it describes my path as well. I've not had professional guidance, and with the absolute flood of options, of data, of debates and educational material, it's REALLY difficult to know where to start. I don't understand how you find it acceptable to mock someone's interest and lack of guidance.

[ta19191823]

I don't think he's mocking a lack of guidance, as much as the implicit indignation at not understanding a sprawling and complex field in an afternoon.

[Mvandenbergh]

The moment that a student dentist starts to drill into a tooth to place a filling (under close expert supervision and after a lot of training) for the first time they are doing two things: 1) Removing enamel that will never grow back - if they do it wrong, there is no option to fix a semi-colon and recompile 2) Doing it on a human mouth for the very first time in their lives.

The difference isn't just that most programmers don't directly have others physical health in their hands, although that is true. Some programmers do, but all dentists do.

The difference is that you don't get do-overs. Have you ever written code that didn't even compile the first time? Or code that failed a test, or code that did something wrong in a test environment, or code that did something buggy in production?

If you'd made a mistake like that as a dentist, a patient might well have lost a tooth that they're never getting back. Much worse could happen, you could cause someone to lose feeling to their face, even kill someone.

There isn't any low-stakes dentistry but there is low-stakes programming. That makes it easier to start as an entry-level programmer because even at a low level of skill and experience you can potentially do useful work for someone.

[dmix]

He did focus in on python for 7 months which is good. I think what's missing is proper apprenticeship in software.

He shouldn't be taking random advice to learn emacs/VIM from people, or use a new keyboard, or (a lesser extent) a new operating system. He needed a guiding instructor to tell him to learn how to code first and focus on building projects instead of trying to turn a 3-5 year education into a 1 year accelerated course so he can be like the cool kids.

I'm self-taught as well, so I'll never say university or professional accreditation is the right answer. But that doesn't mean we should be without effective mentors.

Speaking of which, I've been meaning to look into mentoring...

[yongparkk]

You should check out codementor.io. A buddy had a really successful time with it. Paired with 2 mentors and went from having 0 knowledge to an app on the App Store in 5 months.

[dmix]

Thanks for the link. Applied to be a mentor :)

[pnathan]

+1 I strongly believe that we're a profession and should have professional standards.

On the other hand, I do suggest you look at hobbyist/quasi-professional magazines. It's.... not terribly dissimilar.

Example cover: http://popularwoodworking.woodworkingplansplans.com/images/w...

Conceptually, that's the same exact approach taken..

[cbd1984]

> +1 I strongly believe that we're a profession and should have professional standards.

As long as we don't kill the goose which laid a lot of us golden eggs.

If we destroy the ability of newbie programmers to come up outside the university-professional path, we've just irreparably damaged the whole field.

This is also why I don't like the idea of unionizing programmers: Even if we come up with a union which isn't based on the wage-and-hour, put-in-your-time model, unions are still based on seniority and coming up the "right" way as opposed to being able to strike out on your own in your own little company, without needing to pay dues, literal or metaphorical.

[bashinator]

I look at it the opposite way. There needs to be a way to allow software developers to say, "My profession's ethics will not allow me to develop this (credit card, medical record, banking, etc) software in the way you've specified. You can either change X, Y, and Z, or give up on having the accredited software engineer label on it." It certainly wouldn't be required for many or even most applications, but it seems desperately needed right now (c.f. healthcare.gov).

Done right, this allows for both non-accredited software developers, and professional engineers to live and work side-by-side.

[pnathan]

> If we destroy the ability of newbie programmers to come up outside the university-professional path, we've just irreparably damaged the whole field.

I don't believe that, to be honest. There's a profound difference between a highly qualified professional and a hobbyist, and I am perfectly happy demanding that the first have a credential.

[twic]

This could work as long as the award of the credential actually signified a capability to do the job. Most of our current university education about software ("computer science") is only distantly related to doing the job.

By analogy to another professional field, computer science is to the working software-maker as physiology is to the working doctor. It's the foundation of the field, and so it's something one has to study at the start of one's training, but it's of little relevance to the actual day-to-day work, and it certainly doesn't form the basis of qualification.

[pnathan]

> award of the credential actually signified a capability to do the job.

without a doubt.

[shakethemonkey]

Fortunately this is self-selecting. The highly qualified people (quite often these are the very best people) who don't have credentials would never, ever want to work for you.

[arenaninja]

My guess is that it's because most of us don't have someone's life in the balance? Whatever damage you do to a computer when learning, it probably isn't permanent (screwed up sshd? changed file permissions and you don't know how to fix it? either rollback the VM or create a new one!).

Most new webdevs do really basic things which are more akin to them being receptionists anyway (I've seen tickets as ridiculous as "change this while loop to a for loop", "add this css class to this button", etc.). And let's face it, most people who learn programming in 6 months are probably not doing anything more complicated than web dev, with near-zero knowledge of devops (disclaimer: I too know very little of devops)

[thekingofspain]

Perhaps because you can learn to code without several years of intense schooling. The bar to entry is significantly lower.

[ChuckMcM]

You can learn to clean teeth without several years of intense schooling, you cannot learn peridontal surgery in that time, nor by "practice", in a reasonable amount of time or without losing a few patients.

What is interesting to me is that we have gone from having computers go from giant obscure machines in room, leased by large corporations, to having them all over the place in your house. There is a gradation of expertise and capability as there are with cars or other complex systems. From 'tinkerer' (usually a hobbyist) to 'mechanic' (who earns money adjusting and fixing) to 'engineer' (who earns money designing from scratch). They also come with different financial liabilities.

And that last bit is something that computers have largely avoided by consistently disclaiming all warranties. When that changes, and programmers (or their employers) are held liable for the incidental or consequential damage caused by their bugs, you will see a much stricter code for hiring and employing people who write code that runs on other people computers.

[kruczek]

> When that changes, and programmers (or their employers) are held liable for the incidental or consequential damage caused by their bugs

In a way, employers already are - when selling a product, the contract will define SLA and if that product doesn't "live up to expectations", then fines or other penalties will be used against the seller.

Also I don't think creating a good bug-free product is a matter of good programmers, as it is a matter of good testers. While both are obviously important, bugs will always happen and it is up to the test process (i.e. it's up to the management to design proper process) to catch as many of them as possible.

[pnathan]

> And that last bit is something that computers have largely avoided by consistently disclaiming all warranties. When that changes, and programmers (or their employers) are held liable for the incidental or consequential damage caused by their bugs, you will see a much stricter code for hiring and employing people who write code that runs on other people computers.

My understanding is that life-critical systems have a pretty high bar today.

(Also, since we're on the topic - what do you think of having some level of Professional Association ala the Bar or the Professional Engineering association)

[cbd1984]

> (Also, since we're on the topic - what do you think of having some level of Professional Association ala the Bar or the Professional Engineering association)

I'll be interested in comparing defect rates between Professional Association members and non-members, and in how long such comparisons remain legal and not covered by NDAs and professional codes of silence.

If every programmer has to join, we've just killed the field.

[ChuckMcM]

   > what do you think of having some level of Professional 
   > Association ala the Bar or the Professional Engineering
   >association)

I think that at the point where warranties are required, such a certification will come into existence because companies will demand it.

[Filthy_casual]

Hypothetically speaking, if there was a way to conjure patients to practice for years the same way there's a way to download and tamper with software then yes, you could become as skillful as someone with years of practice because that's what you'd have.

Your example from hobbyist to professional has real physical constraints that are huge to overcome for an autodidact like "where do I get a constant influx of patients to practice on" and that's solved with university. Building software only has "own a computer and have internet access".

As a self-taught my reasons for not attending university are purely financial. It's basically a subtle form to gatekeep lower-class "peasants" from following their own "brain craves" for knowledge and ascend the societal ladder under the guise of a higher moral cause, specifically the appeal to the professional worth. Tough luck for you and for anyone else from your social stratum that's going away sooner than you think, regardless of how loud your barking can be.

But what is more sad is the fact that there are at this time thousands of people trying to disrupt education and yet the highest rated comment in a place that should be focused in disrupting things actually tries to grip even tighter. That's what's sad.

[thisGuysAccount]

This comment might not float to the top of the thread, but I'll post it anyways.

When dentistry started out, there likely were more than a few dentists who learned this way. There are still, on occasion, unlicensed dentists found practicing dentistry with decently successful businesses.

Software development doesn't have the Software Development Association protecting the practice like dentistry and medicine do, for their respective associations.

[debacle]

There is a line between "professional programmers" and "dangerous script kiddies."

You need a lot of clout to draw that line, you are going to upset a lot of people on the bottom half of the stratification, and you really need to work hard to convince a lot of programmers that creating a professional organization is a good idea, for some unknown reason.

[barking]

Very funny!

Yes, there is a professional pathway to follow to be allowed to meddle with someone's teeth.

Once you've got that far, however, you're free to carry on much as you want.

Dentistry has its own religious wars, the acronym TMJ springs to mind.

[altcognito]

Because software development isn't a small fixed set of problems on a single platform?

[bmm6o]

So why don't posts like OP's seem as absurd as mine?

I think the Fine Article does seem absurd. And while he doesn't come right out and say it, I think he would agree that in hindsight his approach was absurd. The whole second half of the post is about how actual programmers get actual work done, and it's nothing like the first half.

The interesting question is why did he think his original approach was reasonable? Did he not talk to an actual software engineer before embarking on his journey? Sure something like his original path can be successful for some people, but it that a reasonable expectation?

[jimbokun]

1. Because many people can easily afford the tools you need to learn programming (like the author said, a used MacBook, or any computer that can run Ubuntu). I'm pretty sure getting a hold of all the gear you need to be a practicing dentist will be much more expensive.

2. Because you can probably learn enough software development to do something useful in several months, maybe even enough to succeed in an entry level job. I think learning enough dentistry to actually practice it will take longer.

3. Because programming is much more lax about credentials. Sure, many employers require a CS degree for anyone they hire, but many do not.

[bswen]

Because there aren't a million online tutorials for learning dentistry and you need more than a computer and an internet connection to start learning.

[crpatino]

Basically, the problem is that no sane person will let you mess with their teeth unless you lack the proper credentials, and experimenting on oneself can be painful enough that almost everyone will quit after their first equivalent of an off-by-one-array-access segmentation fault.

[gcv]

Because the learning process for medicine is completely different. 8-year olds armed with QBasic can make a computer do cool things. No 8-year old can study or even try out doing anything interesting in medicine by any meaningful approximation. Hell, even chemistry sets are pretty much off-limits.

[bobloblaw02]

> "I dunno, I think what we do is every bit as professional as dentistry."

Except that you're not dealing directly with a human being's health and anatomy? You must be trolling right?