From: Phillip Gawlowski Date: 2008-05-21T03:41:19+09:00 Subject: Re: Is Necessary for all rails employee know computer knowledge? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Eleanor McHugh wrote: | | You're not alone. I've ranted several times on my livejournal about the | frustrations of job hunting and I'm effectively unemployable right now | thanks to my left-field outlook. Mind you business here in the UK has | always had an ambivalent attitude to creative thinking: they all claim | to want it, but they none of them like dealing with it in the raw lol Worst thing: I'm utterly self-taught, too. Everything I learned, I wanted to learn. ~From Ruby, to Rails, to CSS, to GTK, to good practices in UI design. Though, this shows me how little I actually know, and how much more I have to learn. Another difficulty is, to find worthwhile sources of information and knowledge. I've come to abhor search engines, as they are filled with cruft. Especially Google. But in the hunt fro bragging rights over the biggest index of websites, the usefulness of indexing knowledge gets handed to machines, and not editors. Wikipedia is plagued by the opposite: Too many people, creating content that is mediocre to down right bad, in addition to power games, rather than collecting actual knowledge (delete for something no being notable? WTF? Disk space is cheap nowadays!). Any way, the uphill battle I am facing is that I can't make my resume pass the buzzword bingo by machines. But I'm working on that. | | Even Aristotelian logic would be a step forward on some of the code I've | read over the years! | I've probably posted this link before | (http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf) which is a | paper demonstrating one of the unspoken problems of the development | world - that a noticeable minority of graduates with CS degrees are | fundamentally incapable of programming. I could speculate that these | will mostly go into the management side of the industry, but I'll leave | that to Dilbert strips. Considering that I, at best an amateur, at worst a clueless newbie, have already read more technical books than the industry average.. (And I'm living off of the goodwill of those who find my Amazon Wishlist and me books from there, too. Otherwise it'd be more!) | Even when I was coding for the bare metal I always preferred to solve | problems in my head first and then worry about assembly language and | bit-strings later. I never came up with a solution that couldn't be | coded, but I often came up with code that I would never have devised if | I'd put implementation concerns foremost. Yes, it is similar for me. While I am (for the moment) stuck in rather high-level languages like Java, .NET, or Ruby, I think through a problem, and come up with solutions. The emphasis being on 'solutions'. I weigh pro and cons of what I come up with, after some investigation and/or prototyping in the problem space, and after that, I can actually make decisions as to which solution to use *in this situation*. | Alas it's the main thing that formal education tries to knock out of us | at an early age, but I don't know any hacker worth their salt who | doesn't possess it. Full agreement on both counts. | Curiosity is what teaches us new tricks without there being an immediate | pay-off, and its from exploring problem spaces in that lurching | haphazard manner that we learn general principles which can be applied | to cast a new light on otherwise intractable or ignored problems. It's | the essence of hacking in all senses of the term (both good and bad) and | the quickest path to grokking stuff. It's also a brilliant justification | for procrastination. Well, curiosity brought me back to coding. It drives me to read up on networking (the social as well as the computer way :P), algorithms (Understanding what Big O notation was quite the 'Eureka!' moment for me), or GUI toolkits. Though, I am a practical learner, so for best effects I need to tinker with something for best effect. That allows me to build a tolerance towards frustration, too. ;) | I couldn't agree more. When I meet a new team I want them to be as | deeply shallow as possible: not experts in what I'm doing, but clearly | willing and able to become experts as the project progresses without any | pressure from me. Hopefully they'll even end up know more than I do, | then I can steal knowledge from them ;) Indeed. I try to learn something new with everything I do, and I'm not shy of sharing that knowledge (for example, a short series on RubyCAS and Ruby-OpenID on my blog). - -- Phillip Gawlowski Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan Blog: http://justarubyist.blogspot.com ~ - You know you've been hacking too long when... ...you think "grep keys /dev/pockets" or "grep homework /dev/backpack" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkgzG1YACgkQbtAgaoJTgL8FvACgphH908d6BSbOJmlU4QgBJh71 BbkAn26GDkPrvHsUsOt6y61CgQlzXtsu =mkBm -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----