Street coder part 1.2

Original: https://livebook.manning.com/book/street-coder/chapter-1/19
Translation: Zhu Kunrong

Photo by Castorly Stock from Pexels

1.2 Who is a reckless programmer?
Microsoft sees two categories of candidates when hiring: fresh graduates in computer science and experts with considerable industrial experience in software development.

Be a self-taught programmer or someone studying computer science who is missing something at the start of their career: street knowledge, aka knowing what's most important. A self-taught programmer has a lot of practical development experience but they lack formal theory that can be used in everyday programming, while another type of person knows a lot of theory but lacks practice.
See Figure 1.1.

You don't prioritize these things at school. You learn by learning path, not by degree of importance. You don't know which specific subjects are useful in the brutal competition on the street. The timeline is unreal. Coffee is cold. A bug in the world's best framework makes your week's work useless. Your perfect design abstraction shatters in the face of the pressure of clients who are constantly changing their needs. You'd quickly refactor your code by copy-pasting, but now you're editing 15 separate places to change a config value.

Over the years, you develop new skills to tackle ambiguity and complexity. Self-taught coders learn algorithms that help them, and college graduates eventually learn that the best theory is not necessarily the best practice.

A reckless programmer is someone with considerable industry experience in software development but beliefs and theories are honed by an unreasonable boss who wants a week's work to be done in one morning. They learned to back up everything to multiple stores after losing thousands of lines of code and having to write it from scratch. They've seen flashes of burning hard drives in the computer room, and they've fought with sysadmins to get access to the door outside the computer room because someone has just deployed untested code online. They test software compression code on their source code, just to see that everything can be compressed into one byte and the value of that byte is 255. The decompression algorithm was just invented.

You just graduated and you're looking for a job, or you're obsessed with writing code and don't know what's waiting for you. You've just come out of a training class looking for a job offer, but you don't know what's lacking in knowledge. You've taught yourself a programming language, but you're not sure what else is missing in your skill set. Welcome to the streets.

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This article is from Zhu Kunrong's WeChat public account "Malt Bread", the public account id "darkjune_think"

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