Working on scheduling and tracking for construction workers. We are a team of 4 currently, 2 engineers, a product designer, and founder. We have a few pilot customers that have used our app.
What we are looking for is a senior engineer who can both scope out and takes control of a project end to end.
Or, a sales/operations person that can help sell, market, and grow the business.
If you are interested feel free to email me at deon@dockpad.io
I agree the education system is completly broken more so for comp sci than anywhere. There is no need for 4 years of school. Why do you need bio and comunication. Before anyone say that grammer and english help you in a career look back at your college career did you honestly take those classes seriously. I have comp sci course I've past and haven't retain one word.
I don't know how to say this without being offensive, but your entire comment is evidence that people should be taking those courses seriously. You may be an extremely competent programmer, but when I see the spelling mistakes and inability to communicate effectively, I would be hard-pressed to take you seriously in any way.
I know it is not your intent and I have tried my best to not take offense to your comment but their are a lot of issues that can affects ones ability to communicate in a particular medium. In this particular one (written) dyslexia can be almost debilitating, if a person has dyslexia, the are no more or less incompetent than any given person they just strive to overcome a disability in the way they their mind works. If the parent poster happens to have dyslexia then your post is the equivalent of walking up to a person on the street with a speech impediment and telling them it is hard to take them serious because of how they talk. I know that was not you intent, which is why I do not take it personal, but I did want to draw the parallel. That being said, I do disagree with the contents of the original post. I think their is a lot of value in a good CS program.
From the grandparent post: but when I see the spelling mistakes . I don't disagree with the conclusion that the original poster did not present a compelling argument, even if it where spelled correctly, but spelling has very little to do with ones ability to reason. All too often people use it as an indicator of intellect in other areas of reasoning, when doing the same thing in public to a person with speaking difficulties would be out of the question. It is roughly the same offense, but for some reason it is far more acceptable in written communication, this causes a lot of long harbored issues for those that suffer from the affliction.
I think it really comes down to two things:
1. It is (generally) obvious if someone has a speech/language disability when you interact with them face to face.
2. Sheer probability dictates that it would be ridiculous to ignore a metric (written communication skills) that I find useful in evaluating people for fear of offending a VAST minority of cases. What percent of the time do you think that someone exhibiting incorrect spelling or grammar online is doing so because of dyslexia or another disability, as opposed to simply being lazy or unprofessional?
I would never knowingly ridicule someone who suffered from dyslexia or a similar disability, but I think we have to be careful of becoming so politically correct that we are afraid to criticize or hold anyone accountable for anything.
It's pretty prevalent 1 in 10 people (at the top end) that you interact with has dyslexia of some form. Among people in the arts it is much much higher, I am making an assumption here, but I would assume it is significantly higher on HN given that their is a population of designers that frequent the site. It is far more prevalent that speech related disabilities, but less recognized because people are embarrasses about having it, some of that embarrassment comes from the fact that unlike a speech condition it is acceptable to highlight their disability, many times to discredit their argument.
as opposed to simply being lazy or unprofessional?
I can't begin to help you understand how many times I have been called lazy for not being able to spell, and how frustrating that is. That is the problem, you assume the majority are lazy people that cannot spell and don't want to learn, so you immediately assume someone is in the majority, because well you set up the odds that they are. But if 1 in 10 suffer from it, and the prevalence of people on HN exhibit spelling mistakes at close to the same rate would in not be just as valid to assume that maybe those that do exhibit them, may be in that 1 in 10 population.
If you are 40 today, its reasonable to expect that you graduated college in 1994. That's 32 years after Purdue University opened the first computer science program in 1962.
That's true, but software development is special because not everybody can do it.
Don't get me wrong here, I actually think that mostly anyone (lets say over average) can learn to code, including very young children or over 40 adults ... the difference between normal people and people that make a carrier out of it is that building actual applications is a lot harder than printing hello-world or sorting an array or scripting your home appliances.
I think that if you don't start doing software development early in life (at most in your early twenties), then chances to make it as a software developer are rather poor.
A couple of reasons come to my mind:
- like with every hard skill out there, it takes a phenomenal amount of time until you're able to be effective at it
- we constantly have to learn, just like doctors and while doable, it gets tiring. You can learn new stuff based on what you already know, so you never restart from scratch, but many people simply stop giving a shit
- getting a hello-world working feels like magic at first, but repeat that 10,000 times and pretty soon it starts feeling like drudgery. That's the story of most things you end up working on. And it is impossible to work only on new stuff, in fact most of the work in software development is drudgery
- related to the above, the motivation of senior software developers has to pivot from working on cool stuff to seeing happy users, or to money earned, or to other tangible byproducts or your work, because "cool" is relative and the initial magic starts fading away (which is why I believe many developers move into management)
- the demand for "good" software developers is high. But it's actually pretty hard to find a job as a software developer if you're not at least decent or come from a good university. This makes it a hostile environment for rookies, being a bitch to get your foot in the door
- software development is not only hard, but must be complemented with people skills ... being able to communicate effectively with others is of extreme importance, knowing how to do efficient marketing is also essential if you want to build your own products or if you want a good carrier path
Yeah I agree that programming, for whatever reason, seems to be something that a lot of people just can't do well.
But we're talking about the people that have been doing real work in the field for ~20 years getting booted out to god knows where. Is this true? If so, where do they go? It's not really so easy to start a completely new professional track at 40. Are they stocking shelves?
I really think those people just gave up for one reason or another.
But do note here that 20 years ago there weren't many jobs related to software development. This industry started taking off in the early nineties and got popular in the late nineties. And as I said, it's not an easy job.
So if you want to make statistics based on that, the sample is really small. We should wait another 20 years for any meaningful conclusions, and my guess is that in 20 years from now there will be many software developers over 40.
Sure, computers were around back then. But I don't think there was much of an industry around them outside of academia. There are quantum computers now, but not many "quantum programmers" :P. (It's not a perfect parallel; I'm just being a little glib.)
Edit: My point was that there won't be very many programmers with 40 years' experience. Turns out the OP meant 40 year old programmers, which is a different story.
Sure, computers were around back then. But I don't think there was much of an industry around them outside of academia
And the banks. And defence. And aerospace. And factories. And.... well... lots of other places. IBM started selling the 1400 series in 1960 for Pete's sake!
The industry was obviously a lot smaller then - but it was well past the pure academic/military phase by that point.
It's not the youngster who are jobless is the older software engineers who never learned to learn new concepts. The older programmer to so much time to learn everything from algorithms , to cryptography, and things that are analytical they forget about learning new technologies. Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs. It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young programmer who understand technologies should be able to pick up any technology and understand it in a few weeks.
The parent was commenting on a broken framework, something that should be an anathema in any shipping product, and around spending (wasting) time determining that the API itself was faulty. Replacing the faulty API call took two hours.
But to follow onto to your point, it's also the case that the younger programmers can need a decade or more to make enough mistakes; to variously learn what the older programmers already know about various fundamentals of the programming and product-creation business.
And to extend your point, it's been my experience that having a team of younger programmers is just as big a headache and as big a mistake as having a team comprised entirely of older programmers. A mix works better, as the younger folks teach the older folks and they bring knowledge of new technologies and volumes of enthusiasm, and the older folks can teach the younger programmers about temperance, testing, productization and business in general.
Not so much, mostly people keep reinventing the wheel over and over again.
Consider, there is vary little that separates handheld Apps from desktop applications. Sure, if you come from the Web side of things it seems new and nifty but they are just stand alone applications. Capacitive sensing touch screens where where new in 1965, but wait it's 2012. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
People worry about what happens when desktop CPU's have hundreds of cores, but the super computer world is already dealing with hundreds of thousands of cores etc.
PS: I think this relates to the hacker mentality. If you find a problem you look for a solution rater than see how other people solved the same problem 30 years ago.
Since the 70s, most apps have comprised "forms" (screens for a user to enter something, that will be stored in a database) and "reports" (screen that nicely format the contents of a database). This is all Facebook et al really are...
A loop is a loop. Math doesn't change much either. Nor does the concept of space and time, etc. It seems new and different to young people, but underneath, it's mostly the same as it was 40 years ago.
> Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs.
You make several assumptions about him that don't seem supported, but worse why make this personal?
> It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young programmer who understand technologies should be able to pick up any technology and understand it in a few weeks.
So, older people don't get jobs because it takes them a day to pick up what a young programmer can understand in a "few weeks"? Really?
I think he meant it only takes them a "few weeks" to understand a whole technology (e.g the entire Android API rather than the listview).
I think part of the reason you can feel like you are learning faster when you are younger is because you look at everything enthusiastically and hammer through your education seeking out the juicy good bits of a technology and kind of glossing over everything else.
As I get older I find myself evaluating things much more slowly and cynically, checking under every rock for things that can bite me in the ass.
This seems like a very bad assessment of software engineering forgetting the cursial reason why older programmer have trouble finding job. The fact is that computer science is only really been a legitament profession for maybe 40-30 years. When it first was taught no one could of predicted the speed at which software engineering would become a dominate force in the world's economy nor seen how fast technology changes. So in the begginning computer science was viewed like math, physics, or any science it was taught so that you learned the basic first then you learned the newer and more innovative things. This is no longer the case. Yes most programmer will experience c/c++, some may even lean x86 and MIPS, but we now know that computer science require a constant change. It is no longer acceptable to just know c/c++ you must learn new languages all the time. Whether you decide to learn node,js, ruby, scala, or what ever cutting edge languages we are not groom to pick up languages in 2 weeks if needed to. Most great programmer are taught to teach themselves the newer technologies to stay relevant. Something I see my professor in college never really learned.
Nice graphics and the game was surprisingly fun. Reminds me of older game from kids website. The only problem I had was speeding up when I went to one tab then returned.
I think the beauty of kickstart is that you lose you money, but in most cases you lose very little. Professional VC and backers know not every project ends up where you want. Not everyone succeeds. This way you lose a little money if it doesn't instead of a professional VC taking thousands on a flawed ide see groupon or pets.com. I doubt you would ever lose your shirt over a failed kickstart investment matter a fact backing for more than some extra money you have laying around complete defeats the purpose.
You lose very little, sure, but you never gain any money.
Using this logic, one should just play the lottery because hey its only a buck and the EV, while a sucker's bet, is still better than any Kickstarter project.
If your not a young person in this generation you know nothing about it. 70% of young people work jobs during college now and if your not rich is even worst. We are expected to just lay down and accept either a less education, less wealth, or to simply fail. 70k a year is nothing when you just racked up 50k a year in debit for 4 years. We built thing your generation most likely could think of. Is it not fair to want to go to school without working 40 hour weeks, graduate to job any job that you can use your degree, then be able to get house without having to look over your should because the previous generation started caring more about the rest of the world than it's own people.
You've just summed up every generation that reached working age during a recession.
Life isn't fair, and never has been. Some of the greatest success stories are born from times like these, because the sheer difficulty and pain tempers and refines a person who is tenacious enough to keep going and clever enough to recognize opportunities.
I don't agree with him either but your first sentence is wrong. That you would feel this way is normal but I promise you, we've been in your shoes. And when I was a 'young person' I thought our circumstances were unique too.
Programming skill is a diffcult thing to quantify. I personally don't think school is a good way of deciding who will be great at programming. I hired people who have had less experience who were way better programmer than my most experience guys. Personally I never had the problem of a hiring crunch because I have been willing to work with programmers with less experience on paper who turned out to just motivate themselves into success.
Working on scheduling and tracking for construction workers. We are a team of 4 currently, 2 engineers, a product designer, and founder. We have a few pilot customers that have used our app.
What we are looking for is a senior engineer who can both scope out and takes control of a project end to end.
Or, a sales/operations person that can help sell, market, and grow the business.
If you are interested feel free to email me at deon@dockpad.io