I started a conversation with a visiting EU PhD and asked about programming languages. In a very good smelling way, he avoided the question. Apparently it is "blue collar" work to do actual programming? This one PhD did zero actual programming, apparently.
> Apparently it is "blue collar" work to do actual programming?
Let’s not build up cultural myths from a passing conversation. Of course there are PhDs in Europe who code and code very well. There are also ones who don’t. Was the PhD even in a Computer Science related field?
And not to offend you, but many people have better things to do than talk about programing languages. Maybe the visiting PhD had more interesting topics on their mind?
A surprising amount of math/science/engineering types still seem to consider actually programming their models and and such to be the grunt work, sometimes even handed off to someone else. Seems like a terribly inefficient way to work.
Yes and no. Learning the intricacies of your particular domain as well as high performance computing is massive task. I used to work as that "someone else", and on the whole I think it was a good way to split the work. They gave me slow python/matlab code that solved a hard problem in a very clever way, and I made run in reasonable amount of time using a reasonable amount of memory etc. I will never know as much about thermodynamics as the scientist, and they don't have the time to learn the best way to make software run really fast.
No joke. I lived in the US for a while, but I am from Eastern Europe, and so are my parents. Back in high school about a decade ago, I decided that I want to do either an engineering degree or a CS degree. I got a reaction from my parents that was the opposite of what most of my US peers would have expected to get. For context, we have already been living in the US for quite a bit at that point.
Even my parents, who are neither doctors or lawyers themselves, considered engineering/CS to be a grunt and pretty much blue-collar work (not that there is anything wrong with blue collar work at all, but I was not going to pick that fight with my parents at the time when I lived with them). And even now, once they know how much software devs can actually get paid in the US, the only thing that's changed is that they stopped pestering me about it. But I definitely took a note of how when the conversations with their friends or other relatives go, my parents still try to avoid mentioning what I studied or what I do as my career (aside from namedropping the company names, because apparently big US corps carry some weight with those people). All while also letting me know every single time how awesome their friends' son or daughter is, because they are a doctor or a lawyer. /rantover
I cannot understate how good it feels to me in the US in this aspect, because it feels like most people here on average absolutely don't care which path you took and don't even question it. Sure, some are still judgemental, and some of them still assign weight to the outcomes you got. But I would rather get some weight assigned to the outcomes I got, as opposed to the same weight being assigned to some stupid bs like "oh, your degree isn't of the right class of respect, so no matter what you do, you ain't going to be as much of a respected person as a doctor/lawyer". Just the entire concept of "respectable" degrees makes me feel a certain kind of way that I absolutely hate. If you want to talk about degrees based on any measurable metric, you are welcome to. But "respectability" of a degree is not measurable, and is the most snotty bs that is way too commonplace outside of the US. I had some friends from SK (so not even the same continent as EU), and they echoed fairly similar sentiments in regards to the cultural sentiment about engineers/tech workers in their country.
And the thing is, I cannot even really blame my parents, because it isn't just them, it is pretty much what the majority there believes.
I've spent the last few years in Oxford with a bunch of PhDs and they all programmed. Those who didn't program were interested in programming & I taught a couple at a community organised code bootcamp. I'm now living next to Stanford and the same thing happened again. This isn't just traditional STEM either but economics and history students. Definitely anecdotal but I expect this is more common than those who don't program, especially as the social sciences and research-based humanities move towards programming. Hell, History degrees at Oxford now have the option of learning how to use databases to store and query information with SQL.
> Hell, History degrees at Oxford now have the option of learning how to use databases to store and query information with SQL.
We should for real start teaching basics of query languages in high school. Just enough to demystify the subject for when "tech-averse" folks pragmatically need it for their profession
I've suffered emotionally observing people from non-tech areas toiling with what, to us, are rocks and sticks. Folks that would undoubtedly benefit majorly from learning a tool do not do it because they just have never had any exposure to the principles behind them
We can't fix people's interest in tech being low - we can introduce them to simple helpful concepts early on so they are more accepting of proper tools for complex jobs
Did this sound too exclusivist or tech-centric arrogant? I didn't mean to. I'm really interested in why some things like version control aren't used across all industries and I suspect it has to do with fear of command lines and inspection tools
I don't know much about this, but apparently Oxford and Cambridge have a history of taking graduates with humanities degrees (i.e, not anything STEM) and training them in computer science and programming. Other students who end up working for tech companies in the UK come from Imperial College or a school where they were in a STEM discipline.
