Post by @blogdiva@mastodon.social

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117325637081258433

for DECADES, i’ve suffered from imposter syndrome because i have never taken a computer science course. i have walked out of coding workshops bored out of my fucking mind. i just found a way to learn what i needed.

i’ve had a homelab with my own repositories for over 20 years; because “am not really a coder” and felt ASHAMED of the thought of showing my silly BASH prompt files and other hackery.

#techbros and their sycophantic #ai BASH prompts need to burn in hell

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social 2 days ago

oh for heaven's sake the entire thing is quite literally cron tasks and bash scripts

#techbros #ai

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Matt Hall

@401matthall@mastodon.xyz 2 days ago

@blogdiva

Is it condescending if I say,

"Baby gurl... Noooooo. Fuck those guys and fuck those feelings. The entire fucking world is held together with scripts. Shell scripts, Python scripts, whole applications of PHP scripts and shell scripts calling user defined SQL functions... ... That is _literally_ the job."

Hopefully you know I'm not _being_ condescending. I would have loved to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with you any day and pair program the shit outta something. <3

Matt Hall

@401matthall@mastodon.xyz 2 days ago

@blogdiva

Apparently I'm not done yet...

I cannot tell you how often I've worked with Computer Science graduates and it's just been fucking _awful_. The _degree_ doesn't make you understand the principles of programming or _business_, which is usually _far_ more important than the technical knowledge.

Matt Hall

@401matthall@mastodon.xyz 2 days ago

@blogdiva

There was an effects supervisor who worked at Industrial Light and Magic during the Prequel era and he said he didn't need _computer nerds_ to learn art he needed _artists_ who could learn to use computers.

My day-to-day experience is very similar to this. I don't need Computer Scientists, most places _don't_. What we need are people who understand the constraints of time and money and _problem solving_. *Learning to _codify_ that is trivial in comparison.*

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

@blogdiva@mastodon.social 2 days ago

ugh, don't know why that got posted as quiet public.

anyways…

knowing what i know about software development, still won’t call myself a sotware developer. don't have the patience to develop a whole application from scratch.

my love for coding started with the web. am a web developer, that will hack a FLOSS backend so i can have fun styling the frontend. i do have SysAdmin skills, hacking unwanted computers into servers.

i may not dress like it, but with computers, am punk as fuck.

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social 1 hr. ago

@blogdiva
Hell yeah. If nothing else, let your imposter syndrome be cured by seeing the absolute mess that the highest-paid people in the biz put out. Hacking together shit for yourself is what computers should be for!!!

Clifton Royston

@CliftonR@wandering.shop yesterday

@blogdiva

I second what Paul said. I am An Old, and I started in computers in my teens (when few people did that.)

In the '70s? Hardly anybody working in the field had a CS degree. In one early job, I worked with a Ph.D. in CS (who thought it useless), a black grandmother who had made the jump from card punch operator, and a young woman with a B.A.(non-CS.)

Good programmers came out of history programs, English lit, anything.

You can teach yourself anything in CS – and you did.

Clifton Royston

@CliftonR@wandering.shop yesterday

@blogdiva

I saw over the course of the '80s the steadily increasing demands requiring an M.A. in Computer Science to get hired.

I was skeptical of the value at the time, but eventually realized it was a sneaky way to drive women out of the profession, with the side "benefit" of also driving out BIPOC and many neurodiverse types.

That went along with a lot of social pressure within companies to shove women into QA, testing, and documentation - all the devalued important roles.

Clifton Royston

@CliftonR@wandering.shop yesterday

@blogdiva

Anyway, what i was trying to get at is that your feeling that you're not a valid software developer comes in part from the matrix of social pressures which are *supposed* to make you feel that, as a black woman without formal CS education. They get those messages into your head.

The other important bit:

As a software developer, you don't *need* to develop a whole application yourself, and design out how all the pieces will fit together. Very few do. Most make small working pieces.

Paul Cantrell

@inthehands@hachyderm.io 2 days ago

@blogdiva

Some gentle Online Friend advice, wearing my Very Fancy Computer Science Professor with Decades of Industry Experience hat, to you and everyone on Fedi:

Get the fuck over your coding imposter syndrome. You rock.

I've met sooooo many awesome developers who think they're not Real Developers because they never studied CS. I've met sooooo many awesome CS profs who think they're not Real Developers because they don't have enough practical experience. It goes on and on and fucking on: Not Real because they only write Javascript and not C. Not Real because they only write C and don't know web dev. Not Real because they only know web dev and not game dev. Because they've never written an operating system from scratch, because their software never made a billion dollars, because they only know how to write and not deploy, deploy but not write, code but not design…“my skill doesn't count, my expertise doesn't count, my experience doesn't count, the specific things I did don't count….”

What the hell, people?? Why do we do this to ourselves?! It takes a village to raise a software! If you are doing anything, anything at all, that has you wrangling code* enough to get angry at it, then you are a real developer, period. All the things you don't already know are just beautiful things you might choose to learn one day. Or not.

Sorry for ranting in your replies, Liza! This one just really gets my hackles up. Fuck the gatekeeping. Coding is for humans.

––––––
* (where “code” means any unambiguous machine-readable language, not just those other languages you think are Real Programming)

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

@blogdiva@mastodon.social 2 days ago

@inthehands i love you for writing this. it’s exactly what i needed to hear. thank you 🥲

Seiðr

@Illuminatus@mstdn.social 2 days ago

@blogdiva @inthehands Look, my experience with programming is limited to R and some Python and SQL (yes, statistics, or how some years ago it was called "big data"), and not a lot, at that, but I got this clear: your code is good if 1) you get it to do what you need it to, even if you had to debug it n times; 2) it's as parsimonious* as possible; and 3) you read it 5** years later and understand wtf you were doing.

*Use as few steps as <you> can
**Or next year or the following…

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