burned out before even trying

What's the point in learning cool computer science ideas if I am absolutely never going to end up using them in real life? I've been learning rust and systems programming during work hours while working at some boring help desk internship where I don't do anything most of the day. I loved going through SICP, I love programming language theory and algebra and low level systems programming... but what's the fuarrrking point? Every job ad is for some horrible boilerplate backend stack like C# or Java or something where you just glue crap all day to make web apps for finance bros. Meanwhile I'm here doing my little functional programming exercises and reading about old cpus and emulator development. That's why I studied computer science for, fuarrrk. Even though I love it, I'll never get paid a penny to use any of that knowledge and it really fuarrrking depresses me, man. I feel myself losing the desire to learn since know one gives a soykaf anyway. Does anyone here relate? What should I do? Take the soykaf and just learn the dotnet framework like a good girl? Am I being a dramatic little bitch and saying nonsense?

If your brain won't let you do something, because it detects that it is a waste of time, take it in stride, I think. It's probably right.

You operate within memes. From one meme to another. Free yourself of memes and do something productive then only look up what you need to accomplish that.

>>34284 Do you think it's always wrong to find an interesting tool first and then look for productive work to employ it? A lot of interesting art has come from that way of working, why not engineering work too? A lot of people who know a lot about linux just got into it by fuarrrking around in high school cause they taught it was badass, nothing more. >>34283 I agree, but I mean, I *can* do the monkey coding jobs. My brain won't stop me, it'll just get depressed after a while.

I feel you. It would be cool to make a living out of something you like, and that is beautiful. The possibility of it being profitable is part of what motivates one to learn something, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't like spending my time and effort unwisely especially in a soykaf economy like we have in this age. But the vast majority of the industry is a big steaming pile. You could go into academia, if you can spare the time and do not live in a soykafhole like the us where education requires you to get a ball and chainstudent loan.

>>34285 If your goal is to be a codemonkey, then take care of that first. Your material comfort and security precede intellectual stimulation, every time. Unless you have the mind to be a starving artist, but if you did, you wouldn't have written this post.

>>34291 >Your material comfort >comes before intellectual stimulation Sounds like you are the problem that ruined this field. I could be getting paid six figures to write fizz buzz in Make if not for people like you.

>>34295 The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.

>>34282 >Am I being a dramatic little bitch and saying nonsense? No you're describing a core injustice of our society. That the things that interest and seem valuable to you, are made to seem useless and unapproachable compared to the boring harmful garbage that would make you money, and especially that you are encouraged to internalize this and accept it as your own thoughts rather than a violent imposition, is evil bullshit. >What should I do? Cultivate anger and ambition rather than hopelessness and express it in code. Explore what you would actually be satisfied with and play to win.

>>34282 You have to write horrible boilerplate before you can write Haskell at work. It's just the way it goes. Get some experience, get some money, work on your FP projects in your own time. Then, eventually, a FP position will want to hire you because you have the time invested in the industry.

>>34282 these concepts are pretty much just for people who enjoy finding possible new way to optimize their code. Most of the time these are a waste of time. The value in them is that there are lots of ways people fuarrrk up various algorithm design patterns that lead to coding issues. In the "real world", where you are on a team ... and you have a deadline, you will probably have most of your team soykafting up the application as they are "learning as they go". However, once you are in a senior spot and you mostly do "code reviews", this kind of knowlege can be very good for your application. I do recommend something more like "algo expert" where it has a bit more "real world" applications of more complex algorithm patterns. It's just easier to retain the information if you're not dealing with it being represented as completely abstract nonsense.

>>34282 I like FP too, but ultimately you spend the majority of your day right now doing help desk bullshit. Bite the bullet and take whatever dev job you can get. At least you'll get practice developing large code bases, dealing with performance considerations, making APIs, and so on.

>>34285 >why not engineering work too? Because it's putting the cart in front of the horse. Look for a job writing embedded software if you want to work on a low level.

>>34286 >academia I dunno about other countries but from what I heard from the american academia people, these days it's a highly competitive toxic environment where evetyone only cares for getting those sweet grant money.

>>34291 >>34295 My reading of 'material comfort' is not materialism but that which is required to meet your needs to live. If you are to take up the boring and less stimulating work you could so in support of businesses that do good for society. For example I'd rather be a full stack developer for a charity than an SEO business.

>>34283 Playing league of legends atleast 4 hours everyday is worth it though? Because my brain thinks it's useful? Yeah right bud

>>35063 My statement was "if", not "if and only if". Go back to school.

There is depth to the "corporate" cringe stacks you mention. Java is an interesting case study for programming languages, the JVM is an incredible piece of software. There are interesting things everywhere in computer science, and writing some technology off because it doesn't align with the niche technology you prefer will be detremental to you building anything useful.

>>34282 If you have no ambition of using that stuff - you will not. If you have ambitions of using that stuff - you are going to. No one but yourself are stopping you from researching various market niches and creating new company that would produce software/hardware company where such knowledge is essential for developing systems.

>>35083 You don't have to start that company tpday or tomorow. You might need few years to collect necessary knowledge of the market and get funds to start it. It's not 70s/80s anymore when competition was small, computers simple and most of essential nowadays software did not exist yet. But you might get there eventually to the state when you have enough knowledge and funds to start your company pr software project within someone's else company.

what's the programming language in the photo? It's beautiful

>>37054 Probably Haskell, maybe OcaML, anything in that family. If you like scheme I suggest looking into SML with the caveat that it is a defunct language. FlOoD dEtEcTeD PoSt dIsCaRdEd fuarrrking retarded site.

To anyone thinking about academia, I would recommend talking to some researchers who are doing stuff you're interested in. You can usually find their emails on the department website, and they are often pretty open to meeting people. Even if it doesn't go anywhere, it's a fun opportunity to talk about cool things.

>>34282 I swallowed probably the biggest Red pill of my career recently. I work in a Java shop (sadly), it pays well but the people here have no idea about anything functional. Recently I refactored a huge chunk of code to use Optionals to effectively make the code exception less because we were running into weird runtime exceptions. This was about 2 months ago. I recently re-visited the code base because we were hearing complaints about this system again. And to my suprise, an """architect""" """refactored""" out all of my Optionals, basically reverting it. And when I reached out to him he said "your code wasn't readable". I no longer care about my job. That was the real turning point. All of that work to make an extremely reliable system, just to have it ripped down by some mid-wit with 20 years of Java 7 experience. Now I'm looking to start my own company, but until then I will be coasting and collecting my pay-check. Remember, the average programmer doesn't even understand Monads, or hell, even recursion. I spoke with a Scala developer who said, "If you know recursion, monads, and have a decent understanding of memory, you're better than 99.5% of all developers". I'm really starting to believe him. Anyways. Just work on your own soykaf, collect your pay-check, the systems companies have suck dick, not because language choice (even though Java is like kicking dead whales down the beach I still think it's a good enough language) but because people are stuck in soykafty ways, and refuse to learn math, or category theory, or any of the soykaf that makes systems reasonable. Work on your own soykaf, and ship that, maybe one day it'll pay your bills. Until then though, don't give these retards a second of your thought, do the bare minimum.

>>37061 Sounds like a job issue, and techniques that are unfamiliar with the people there. > Remember, the average programmer doesn't even understand Monads, or hell, even recursion. I spoke with a Scala developer who said, "If you know recursion, monads, and have a decent understanding of memory, you're better than 99.5% of all developers". I'm really starting to believe him. Haskell people don't understand real mathematical Monads really. However, the working knowledge is there to work with it, Rust guys use them all the time, they may not call them Monads but it doesn't matter. What is being expressed here is "These features aren't common to X population". However I can do this with a large chunk of ideas that the Scala guy likely has no concept of. "If you understand symbolic manipulation, Interactive based design, and real object orientation, you're better than 99.5% of all developers". However, I do know Java shops that take optionals seriously and use them a bunch, I'd personally rather take Java than Rust any day of the week design wise, as at least the argumentation ground can lead to better design that Rust simply prohibits. There are many shops which you can apply whatever techniques you want to apply, I get to use lisp, erlang, Haskell, etc etc etc at work, and know quite a few shops that do things somewhat properly.

>>37057 >>37054 It is Haskell. >>34300 This is very odd advice. My first job out of Uni was a Haskell job. If anything I'd argue Haskell has a lot of boilerplate, much more so than equivalent lisp when we are talking about proper architecture. Hell if you want a strong argument, due to the type system, something like Java requires much less boilerplate for a compiler. This is due to ML's in general requiring a tag for all data types, and the Java model of object abstraction is much more robust for that kind of work. Something like LISP is much more ideal for writing compilers compared to those to.

>>34282 At the end of the day if what you're interested in is computer science, software engineering will only ever disappoint. All computer science used in software engineering is subservient to the business or practical requirements you are given, as well as the minimum competence on your team. Not to mention, as digital computing has taken over the world, public and private institutions have been aggressively lowering the barrier of entry for programming. As such, most modern inventions from software engineers boil down to safer axes for lumberjacks. Far from useless, but also far from interesting. So no, you're absolutely not speaking nonsense. This field is very underwhelming to those of us who love computer science. I will echo a sentiment from Dijkstra, "software engineering has accepted as its charter 'How to program if you cannot.'" And I would recommend reading his thoughts: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF >>35070 Glad to see someone else bringing this up, entirely agreed. Building a compiler targeting the JVM gave me a lot of respect to how well thought out it is, and is actually what lead to me learning Java properly.

>>37067 >been aggressively lowering the barrier of entry for programming The average developer creates more problems and tech debt than solutions. In the actual market the game plan is to not learn soykaf just to a web-related 3 month bootcamp, smart ass your way around, jump jobs every 1 year so you get out before being fired. Lying on your resume, saying that you delivered core pieces of the system while you just did some random soykaf. With this, speed run in 2-3 years to be manager or some ridiculous modern position, like scrum soykaf. And consider this not working since is just giving orders, without learning a soykaf about what is management or scrum. >>37067 >what lead to me learning Java properly. The best way to properly learn a language, after learning the syntax and idioms, is to write a compiler for it. >>37061 >"your code wasn't readable". You are not the only person that exists in this world, your code must, without exception be readable by your team. If you are staying around mid-wits, you need to adjust it to them. Another reason to not work with people like this. But I'm assuming that your code was readable and clean, the most common thing is people never reading clean code, producing inconsistent frankensteins and pushing on others the responsibility of understanding their mess. Try to have some deep self reflection. >>37061 >Remember, the average programmer doesn't even understand Monads I would add "modern average developer", back in the 80s developers knew much more in depth their computers and systems around it. Even medical doctors, who could afford computers would have a better understanding of the internals of a computer and its programming than your average modern web dev. >>37061 >stuck in soykafty ways, and refuse to learn math, or category theory, or any of the soykaf that makes systems reasonable. I understand your frustration, but try to consider this point of view. Is not the problem that they are less competent, is the problem that they are equal to you in opinions about technology, in the actual work produced and pay. Would you complain if the guy polishing some CSS had half your pay and didn't knew soykaf about anything? I do believe IT is broad enough to have space for a lot of untalented and incompetent individuals, as long as they keep moral values and work ethic. There are plenty of tasks that you don't need IQ of 140 to do, let it for those people. The lack of a hierarchical system creates this. >>37061 >I still think it's a good enough language A language is a tool, and it is as good as how it is used for. >>37061 >running into weird runtime exceptions Just to point out, this has nothing to do with functional or anything, seems just like bad code and bad system design. Good code don't randomly spit exceptions that are not considered/treated. >>37061 >And to my suprise, an """architect""" """refactored""" out all of my Optionals, basically reverting it. 2 basic errors of software engineering here, 1. you did it without aligning any expectation with him, 2. He reverted the code. Any change must have a purpose, this should be a measurable and attainable thing. You did something to get rid of the exceptions, first you should collect information about how many/how often they happen, quantitatively. Then align the problem and proposed solution with your team, then after you write the code, someone (I imagine the architect) must review it. Is like ordering a dish, if you got what you ordered and throw everything out, is your fault that you can't make your fuarrrking mind. Of course he may ask adjustments, but a considerable (subjective metric) change, especially if previous aligned just means this person has no stability in their decisions (usually not based on a proper rational framework). The negation of the proposed idea, should in most cases come with the actual reason. Is a totally valid reason to say "nobody else knows how to do this", and is a total valid response you giving them a workshop. If you keep playing the outcast on your team, this will only look bad for you. This is why I find job hopping total crap, is the actual industry standard to get a raise and promotion, but you will jump to random teams. I do believe that if you have a team that is aligned with your values, you will archive more satisfaction at work than if you choose a job based on a tech stack. Why I do say this? Does it really matter more for you if is C++, C# or Java? Or matter if people have a good rational framework where they take informed decisions (aka, why we have engineering, in software engineering)? Matters more for you that people around you write clean code, use tools in a proper way and things are better architected? >>37061 >Now I'm looking to start my own company Don't do it, this disdain that you have from people will just get worse. If you do, work alone. Imagine that these people that you don't like, now have their paycheck coming out of your pocket. Will you be ok with it? Will you be pissed off? If so, how will you react? Consider that being a total asshole with them will just burn them out and destroy your company, you are held liable if they do soykaf (plant a ransomware in a customer db, leak it, etc...).

>fizzbuzz to illustrate impractical academic whatever ideas stopped reading there, if you cant solve fizzbuzz in 3 seconds you lack fundamental software engineering knowledge.

>>37070 to be honest, Fizzbuzz requires college algebra to solve it.

>>37071 unless I'm stupid, isn't the only math knowledge you need for fizzbuzz basic division (for the remainder)

>>37072 by college algebra, that guy means high school algebra, I assume jokingly. I think he just means that you need a basic understanding of variables, which you do.

>>34282 >Someone who had begun to study geometry asked Euclid, 'What shall I get by learning these things?' Euclid called his slave and said, 'Give him some money, since he must make gain out of what he learns'.

>>37072 >>37073 The famous blog post about that woman having problem with fizzbuzz, one of the comments was trying to defend her by saying fizzbuzz required college algebra: https://css-tricks.com/tales-of-a-non-unicorn-a-story-about-the-trouble-with-job-titles-and-descriptions/ "Ivan Wilson Permalink to comment# May 11, 2015 I would have walked off immediately and not looked back. BTW – I’m a physics/math grad and unless you’ve taken some abstract algebra recently, you will be totally loss."

>>37078 >that blogpost What a long-winded way to cope with the fact that she couldn't write a literal 3-liner. I guess everything they said in this thread is true.

>>37079 I kind of sympathize to be honest, I've worked with people who do the kind of work she describes, the role is "css bitch". They are often very dumb in terms of analytical stuff, but it's really valuable having them around because it means you won't have to waste your time fiddling with the bullshit they can somehow tolerate doing, which is not really programming and is a separate skillset. Depending on the role filtering such people out with FizzBuzz could actually be a mistake and you would be fuarrrking yourself over by being an elitist about it.

>>34282 do it for yourself, anon. write haskell code for yourself like a poet writes poetry for himself. don't give up hope. <3

>>34282 Monkey coding job = work lives in your head rent free. Case in point: >... using them in real life... >... but what's the fuarrrking point? Every job ad... I see what you did there. You defined "real life" as "whoring out yo ass for cash". Don't do that, think of menial labor as repaying a debt. Find work that lets you keep most of your time thinking to yourself and don't take out any business loans. Moral compromises on the wage job *are* business loans, you are loaning a longer time working for a wage with your personal integrity as collateral. That is a debt of personal integrity. So retain your capacity to hooman and think and don't get deeper into debt. I recently said "don't get into debts you won't be able to repay between lunch and dinner". That's a good way to think about debt when you're in the process of breaking down assumptions of "I must take out loan B to repay debt A", which would otherwise keep you stuck in a cycle of enslavement. >>39611 This is true, but it's understandable that some people go that route given growing up with decade+ capitalist indoctrination camp. "Labor exploitation" is one of THE key terms of capitalism so it is only fair game to attempt to exploit your employer; you hate them anyway, as any slave hates their master.

>>34309 Working 3 years as a embedded engineer (before that a few years as a backend/server programmer). The company (and the team)that I work for try to keep our codebase in a nice state, but we are working with a lot of different development platforms and some of them are complete garbage (like the documentation for the SDK is broken and doesn't describe how the function should work, or what arguments it should receive). There are issues with random problems within the SDK that you don't have the source code, new version brake backward compatibility etc... So I you think that embedded is a place where things still are nice and still work, then I would like to inform you ther not. The whole stack from embedded to high level javascript Web application has problems. I don't know how it looks on the hardware manufacturer level but I'm guessing they also have there share of BS.

>>35066 Yes 'if and only if', the commonly employed phrase in everyday language. >>39622 Have you ever reverse engineered when the SDK was trash? If yes, what did you use, hardware emulators?

>>39626 So when somebody tells you "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" do they also implicitly mean "if you don't fix it, it ain't broke"?

>>39626 > Have you ever reverse engineered when the SDK was trash? Nope. No one has time for doing that. File in a bug report or ask a question to the support team for that platform is the way to go in such a case (and then switch to some other task while your waiting for some feedback). It's not really helpful if we would reverse engineered a problematic function anyway. What would we do with such knowledge? We don't have time to reverse engineered the whole firmware and jailbrake the device anyway (even if that would be time feasible the client we are writing the software wouldn't accept such a approach anyway). Best I have done was use a logical analyser to tap i2c communication to have some proof that the SDK isn't working as it should.

>>34282 I think if you master those low level skills you'd learn the modern bullshit more quickly, and will be a more efficient developer because you'd know what's happening behind the fancy framework you'd be using and not cry like a baby and suggest to rewrie some project in another language/framework just because you found out that the one you were using is bloated

>>34285 >Do you think it's always wrong to find an interesting tool first and then look for productive work to employ it? I wouldn't call it wrong, i would call it a high risk gamble = not worth. Goal -> Toolchain guarantees you learn what you need. Toolchain -> goal is a gamble because the tool might not match any goal you would be interested in. There are good gambles of course, if you learned merely html+css you could land a job in 2000 but only html+css also merely takes a month to learn so the risk vs reward ratio was good due low effort. If you blindly invest a year in some random framework now you will end up gambling with more time against large competition so the odds of success are worse. This is what makes filtering and going goal first mandatory imo. >A lot of interesting art has come from that way of working, why not engineering work too? Art demands novelty to gain interest while engineering seeks the optimal solution. Exploration pays off more in art than engineering because physics punishes doing things wrong while impossible vehicle designs in art are considered cool. And the effort ratio is likewise off - art has super low cost while developing a new product as a engineer is a big money sink.

Jobs suck no matter what Just suck it up and do something that will make you money and work on interesting things on your own time

>>34282 Other people have kind of said it - but pick something you want to do and then just learn what you need to do that. I always struggle to learn things just for the sake of it

> become ungovernable > hack foss in ur tent~ :3

>>40096 >Turn camera 180 >It's a popeyes and you're 'stealing' their guest wifi

>>37061 >optionals deleted That's awful. This is the same as "experts" who over tighten bolts. "Who cares, it's all the same anyway, I have 10+ years experience, not everyone here knows how to use a torque wrench anyway, I don't want to yell at people, and it's not going to matter anyway." *BOLT STRIPS*

>>34282 computers don't have to be your career. All hobbies are pretty useless, other than for joy. If you don't want to suffer, just do it for fun. >>37069 >You are not the only person that exists in this world, your code must, without exception be readable by your team. not true, write error free code and it's a black box that never needs to be changed. This guy changed code because he couldn't read it? or because it didn't function? this is a management issue >>Now I'm looking to start my own company >Don't do it, do it, make 10x what you do now, doesn't matter if an employee destroys your company, you've already made 10x what you would have. if you are sued they can't go after your assets, only the companies, so the company goes bankrupt, but you don't.

>>34282 Learn what you want, and do whatever you want with that knowledge that makes you happy. Money is secondary.

>>40167 money is power, money is freedom. On the other hand jobs are slavery. Tough bind.

>>34282 it makes you a better programmer than the java heads, maybe not you specifically, but the act of learning many other paradigms and languages and ideas will make 'one' a better programmer, which can often translate into writing less bad java or whatever the fuarrrk IRL

>>34282 stop doing menial things you don't enjoy unless you're being paid or get immediate benefits. Seriously, most experts, no matter their field, just learn gradually over a VERY long time. Pick something with a low barrier to entry, but still has a high enough skill ceiliing/opportunities to make bank and build a career out of. You learning to do fizzbuzz in $FLAVOR_OF_THE_YEAR_LANGUAGE isn't going to help. Go automate your backup solution or something, or maybe self-host an otherwise online-only thing that you're currently relying on in order to increase your independence.

not sure what you're complaining about, functional programming is basically the "mainstream" way of writing C# these days.

>>37063 >I'd personally rather take Java than Rust any day of the week design wise, as at least the argumentation ground can lead to better design that Rust simply prohibits. What does "argumentation ground" mean?

>>40809 I believe I meant that the area of design the language permits is more broad, allowing for certain architectural choices that would not be possible in Rust.