Open thread, 11-17 March 2014

David_Gerard

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Are you expected to be passionate enough about programming to have a bunch of code that you wrote for fun and practice lying around?

Yes, and more than that. You are expected to have written code for fun and personal use and maybe for profit and maybe just to help friends. Your code isn't supposed to be lying around but rather be in a place like GitHub. It is good if you have contributed to an open-source project, preferably a high-profile one. It is even better if you have your own open-source project, especially if it looks cool and attracted other developers.

Employers want to look at your code because of two angles. One is that good programmers enjoy what they are doing. They like to program. People who like to program do program and not just on the job because they are paid for it.

Two is the ability to code. College degrees are not necessarily indicative of the actual ability to write good code. But being able to show directly that yes, you have written good code, is.

Fair warning: the next two pieces of advice contradict each other :-)

Piece one says that you don't seem to enjoy coding. If you don't you are not going to enjoy a job as a programmer. This means you will not be a good programmer and might end up being miserable in a job which consists entirely of doing what you don't like. Find something that you enjoy doing.

Piece two says that you need to find something besides your future art degree. Something that is called a marketable skill (BFA isn't it) which will allow you to become employed after graduation.

I know a girl who graduated from an Ivy League school with an art degree last summer. Guess what she is doing now? She is a waitress in a local pizza joint.

Employers want to look at your code because of two angles. One is that good programmers enjoy what they are doing. They like to program. People who like to program do program and not just on the job because they are paid for it.

Depends on the employer. There's a lot of demand for programmers who aren't Google-quality. Granted, you'll likely be a corporate code monkey maintaining an accounting system somewhere, but it's a living.

0gothgirl42066612y

I don't know if this is really true about me. Sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it, to be honest. I've pretty much hated it in college, but this might just be because of the way the courses are taught. [...] What are other examples of marketable skills to you? As an aside, while I know and accept the fact that statistically BFA pays pretty poorly and has relatively high unemployment, I don't understand it. Every company in the world needs a designer in some form or another. Who needs an anthropologist, a philosopher, a historian, a sociologist, a psychologist, etc.? And yet we are told that getting a college degree is definitely a good idea. Maybe there are a whole pool of white-collar jobs that have nothing to do with any particular major, but are only available to people who can signal their intelligence in a way that art majors can't?