I have a physics degree. It turns out a bachelor’s degree doesn’t help much, and I was too burnt out at the time to go to grad school. I took a few introductory programming classes and I’ve been trying to get back into it lately. Try talking to a bartender sometime, you may find out they’re not as dumb as rocks.
-Irrelevant, but I chuckled at your last sentence.
One of the all-time smartest people I’ve ever met worked a bar in Bergen, Norway; autodidact in anything which caught his fancy, he could give you a lecture on what brought down the Scythians, serve a new guest and striking up a conversation on advances in semiconductor fabrication with him, picking up where he left off the lecture on the Scythians before heading out to see if any of the patrons outside wanted anything, having a quick word on the Poincaré conjecture with the math postgrad having a beer in the backyard...
He had studied for a while at the university before figuring out that he’d have more time to study if he didn’t have to concern himself with exams, quit, kept his uni library card and got down to it.
Norway's like that. Last time I was there the taxi driver taking us back to the airport knew more about the CUDA API than I do (not a terribly high bar, but still...).
I met a programmer many years back who had previously been a physicist at CERN. I'd never have guessed but I think he picked up the programming bug there. If you think coding is your thing then go for it and all the best to you!
Hn is very it specific. I wouldn't thought that you find many bartenders here for the soul reason that those two interests or occupations are just different independent to intelligence.
I don't follow politics much. But I think it just underlines to get stuff done in many areas of life you need to be willing/able to compromise and build coalitions.
If you read this forum carefully you'll find it indeed contains constructors, truck drivers, firefighters, pilots, physicians, teachers... just to name a few from memory.
All these "non-developers" are priceless when discussions pop up which require domain expertise (which we developers usually lack)
[edit: they are also priceless generally speaking]
That's an interesting response. It seems to me that the flame level on this site is quite low in response to somewhere like Reddit. People argue here, of course, but usually it's in an informational sort of way and rarely devolves into "yer momma is soooo fat...." kind of discourse.
Discussion on hn is higher quality. I'm an almost original slashdot reader, user id is 4 digits. I haven't browsed there in perhaps years at this point.
It's been at least a decade or more since I have been on /. . It really seemed to have went down hill when the Bush election was going on, they did a lot of political coverage and it just ruined the feel of the site. People started exposing their political bent and the site in general just became more snarky.
Not really, it's just slower moving. For every 1 real geek tech post, there are two or three days of regular news things. I came here based on the slower, more thoughtful discussion. I'm in higher ed, not even close to tech.
I always found it interesting how many people have taught themselves programming.
I was at a customer site a few months ago installing some test hardware and the guy I was working with was their welder, having been an auto mechanic before and we got into a discussion about programming in Python!
The best interaction, however, would be the homeless guy I met who used to be a programmer.
One of the best Microsoft stack Sysadmins (AD/Exchange) I knew back in the day was a former diesel mechanic who got badly injured in an accident and transferred to do help desk work. He dove in and really mastered it. Just a great guy who was great at training new folks.
Not programming but the other wacky transition was a Wall St guy who burnt out, started a subsistence farmstand in the country, married a hippie lady and sold vegetables, drove a school bus and plowed snow to get by. Really nice guy... when he died it turned out he owned a few buildings in NYC and was loaded to the tune of $20-30M, and his family had no clue.
