wannabe7

Obviously everyone on this board likes to program or would like to learn how to program. I would like to take a general survey to see if people actually do what they love to do. If you are a programmer of some sort, please answer the following questions. (note: I'm seriously considering entering this type of field so the more honest you are, the better you're helping me. And these are about how YOU see it.)

Would you have a fair ammount of time to focus on other things or would you have to concentrate all/most of the time on programming? (things meaning like exercising, social activities, other interest?)

Even though this is what you love to do, can it be extremely tedious, at times? (Certain programmers says it can be.)

What type of courses/majors/minors did YOU pick in school to better prepare you?
And what would you advise? (Since I want to ultimately end up in game design, I was thinking of taking liberal arts courses, to have a well-rounded education.)

What program(s) are you familiar with and use?

Anything big you've done in your career so far? (Very curious xD)

Your salary? If you don't mind.

Thanks for all the inputs.

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Aspiring Game Designer

mrynit

learning for hobby and career (at least the spice and vhdl)

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i dont know much about programming but i try to help

Benoit

Occupation: College student (software engineering technologist)
Salary: -$5000 and growing (in magnitude)

Big thing I've done in my career.... Today I made a musical instrument out of a joystick and the internal speaker on a windows 98 machine.

Given I'm only a student, I have plenty of time to work on other things I enjoy, such as reading and mathematics.

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Johnny was a chemist's son but Johnny is no more, for what Johnny thought was H2O was H2SO4

Jimbo

I'm a "professional programmer" so I'll answer your survey, but like you said, these are my answers and will vary according to person.

My employer puts a lot of emphasis on "work/life balance" and keeping people happy. We get a free club membership, and very flexible hours, plus other stuff I won't mention. There's a company picnic in the summer, and each team has a morale budget for team lunches or events or whatnot. I'm quite happy.

This will vary a lot by your specific job. As a tester, I enjoy the challenge of trying to think of how to break our product, and I don't have as much fun proving that it works correctly when it should. Also, I am responsible for a lot of setup and installation scenarios, which are boring as all get out when you have to wait for the stupid thing to install. So, yes, there are periods where you need to take a little break but overall, again, I really enjoy my job.

I have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. Some liberal arts classes were required, as almost any 4-year degree will. It prepared me in some ways, but industry and actual practice are quite different from school. I'm not spending most of my time developing new algorithms, but instead I'm learning to deal with issues like writing a small program to automatically build and deploy a set of tools (including itself) every day. Also, as one of my friends commented yesterday, if you have one ugly but likely rendering bug in your school project but it otherwise works, you might get 90% and an A-. If you have the same bug in your commercial product, you might get fired. Also, code maintainability (which includes readability) is much more important than coming up with a clever hack to save lines of code, since you can't just turn in your code after several weeks and then scrap it; and you'll not necessarily be the developer coming back to fix that "clever hack" which has some obscure bug in it.

Now that I've started my job, I'm becoming quite familiar with Visual Studio and related software. Our team is moving towards using Team Foundation Server, a tracking system that integrates into VS Team System. We have various other softwares we use, for aiding in our test automation, code quality gates, etc... The languages I use are VB.NET and C#, though developers on our team use C# and C++ (I'm a tester).

A bit of testing on Silverlight Tools 2 for Visual Studio 2008, which released a beta at the beginning of last month. I'd count VS2008 itself, but I joined towards the end of the cycle.

Over $75,000 per year.

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<insert disclaimer here>
<insert shameless plug for Visual Studio here>

BstrucT

Well, learning as a hobby primarily, while working in whole different field. But have got a little computer sales / repairs / networking bussiness on the sideline so that keeps me busy and sometimes I don't have time to program.

Still learning C, C# and Visual C# at the moment so that keeps me busy.

The only project I have worked on is for the Logistical company I work for, although it is still far from finished. hehe.

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"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

Grich

I am a student in my final year of programming. Yippee! Yay! (I'm dancing in the background by the way). Looking currently for a job after I graduate.

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SYNTAX ERROR ...

Grich

I am a student in my final year of programming. Yippee! Yay! (I'm dancing in the background by the way). Looking currently for a job after I graduate.
(Dang, I posted twice!)

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SYNTAX ERROR ...

kruptof

I am also a student. I am in penultimate year and can't wait to get it out of the way.

Yeah this is what I really dislike about uni right now. Too much emphasis put on essays. For example in my final year project we have to pick a project which we have to develop, the documentation itself has to around 60 pages and at the end it says something along the lines of: Don't worry if your program has bugs or doesn't work properly, make sure you document it to get more marks.

Why don't they put more emphasis on getting the damn thing to work as it was intended in the requirements doc and maintainability? Now instead of picking a challenging and interesting project to develop and show to future employers, I am forced to pick something dull which I can write a lot about.

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Narue

>Would you have a fair ammount of time to focus on other things or
>would you have to concentrate all/most of the time on programming?
It depends heavily on what kind of programming you do. For projects that where the deadlines are under estimated, you'll probably end up pulling a lot of overtime. I try to make sure that projects are estimated realistically, so I have plenty of free time in terms of paid work.

Another factor is keeping up to date with new advances in technology, methodology, and languages. Most of the time that's done in your off hours, which would cut into time spent on other pursuits.

Yet another factor is how much you enjoy programming. Programming is my job as well as my hobby, so "focus on other things" tends to mean my own personal programming projects and interests.

>Even though this is what you love to do, can it be extremely tedious, at times?
Absolutely. As a career, whether you enjoy it or not, programming is still a job. You can't ignore or refuse to do the tedious stuff.

>What type of courses/majors/minors did YOU pick in school to better prepare you?
I'm largely self-taught and never went to college proper. I have a degree in "programming" from one of those cheesy vocational schools, but it's pretty much worthless. My certifications and prior experience hold a lot more water.

>And what would you advise?
If you want to be well rounded, take business related courses. It's rare to find a good programmer who also understands the business behind the programs he writes, but that understanding helps turn a good programmer into a great programmer.

>What program(s) are you familiar with and use?
Name it and I've probably worked with it at least a little bit.

>Anything big you've done in your career so far?
"Big" is relative. I've done lots of things that make life easier for clients, I've fixed bugs that would have cost companies millions of dollars, and countless programmers use my software to do the same things with their code every day. I take pride in the fact that while my work has a big impact, I do it well enough that they usually don't realize it.

>Your salary?
Around $100,000.

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Even if the voices aren't real, they have some pretty good ideas.

Ancient Dragon

My occupation? retired three times over. But still working at a part-time job (no more than 20 hours a week) as a cashier at Wal-Mart. Shitty pay compared to programming, but no headaches, no overtime, and no stress. Best thing: I don't have deadlines to worry about any more

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