Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 14/12/2024 12:08, D wrote:

s that really so important in the tech-sector? When I was young I'd meet many people in IT with very diverse backgrounds. But maybe it has become worse the past decade? =(

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I ended work as a programmer because all the new kids on the block wanted someone who spoke the same compSci gobbledygook as they did:
'must have experience of  Blatweiler's functional decomposition techniques' and 'be fluent in  the formal  prototyping language Z'.
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Which was immediately understood that a compSci had got given a project, had tried to use some thing he had learnt at Uni, fucked it up completely and needed someone to get him out of a self inflicted disaster.
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Not tell him to throw that shit down the toilet and learn how to run a software project.

It is interesting how different people solve problems. In school, there were many people who were way smarter than I am when it came to the theoretical bits.
What was interesting though, was that many of those guys sucked at the practical stuff, like actual programming assignments.
So I would help them with the practical bits, and they would help me with the theoretical bits.
So for me, solving problems, was more of an iterative approach or "learning by doing". I might see that something didn't work, try something, it worked better, and slowly but surely I would approach the goal of solving the problem.
The theoretical guys would sit and theorize but were not always the best at then actually putting that into practice.
But in the end, I discovered that I did not have the mentality to become a programmer. My problem was that I could never leave a problem and take a break. It would consume me. So that's all well and fine for small problems, but when I thought about being involved in a huge project, I always thought that with that mentality of never being able to let problems go, it would be a good way to burn out eventually.
So system administration was a nice combination of challenges and smaller projects that usually were not multi-year programing marathons. ;)
And then I discovered technical sales!