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IT People. How often do you program?

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Generally speaking, scripting is the limit to what I've done/been asked to do. ANything requirng actual programming will allow for a budget for developers or similar. Fortunately any IT job I've had doesn't require more than that.

That being said - I've discovered that it takes a certain kind of person to be an effective, productive programmer. Anybody can do code, anybody can learn enough to write programs, and to actually do it. But in order to be really good at it, you have to be a programmer at-heart. Sort of the same thing exists in the art world. Anybody can draw, anyone can be taught to paint, and get reasonable results. But it takes a certain kind of person (an artist) to master the craft and to pump out ridiculous amounts of amazing work.
 
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There is a difference between a mechanical engineer designing the components to build a race car, and the driver.

You can be the driver operating the systems the engineers build for you. This is basically what MIS programs do, teach people to drive the system, not build it.


The situation you are presenting is very well known in the engineering community. Engineers typically do not have the aptitude or interest in communicating with customers. Typically, customers are not savvy enough to understand how to communicate their business requirements with technical professionals. Someone is needed in the middle to translate and sell between the customer and the engineer. This is the whole purpose for the MIS program. Thereby explaining why you are learning both business and programming skills.

You will be the driver of the system, living in two worlds for translating between them.


DrPizza, that was a nice story about the mathematically challenged student skilled at programming. With computer science typically being focused on math, your story opens doors and gives hope for those having mathematical difficulty.
 
I graduated as Comp Sci and have been in developer positions mostly since I've graduated. Developer positions I typically write software on a daily basis, except for some days where I'm stuck at requirements meetings or such all day long.

For non-developer positions I've had in the past that were IT based, I didn't do any programming.


As for what was said about most professional developers not knowing how to write software all that well, I can certainly agree with that statement. You don't know how much of a pain in the ass it is when I am having to write software that extends the object model of something else that was poorly written and has no documentation. That still seems to be the norm and not the exception after decades of process improvement into software development.

It's one thing to write a shitty program that you use internally or for yourself. It is another thing to write a shitty program that is designed to be used programmically by others.
 
Fairly often, although I'm not employed as a developer.

On the job I write a lot of server/client scripts to make my life easier.

Off the job I have a website that I write code for.
 
I've been in various IT jobs for 15 years now, and I've never written anything more complicated than a shell script or few dozen lines of SQL. That's what developers are for.
 
Been in ITfor about 7 years. I have written a PowerShell script here and there and a .bat here and there but its VERY rare.
 
chusteczka said:
DrPizza, that was a nice story about the mathematically challenged student skilled at programming. With computer science typically being focused on math, your story opens doors and gives hope for those having mathematical difficulty.
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Oh, he/she isn't mathematically challenged. He/she is incredibly lazy. The students were learning how to approximate the area under a curve using 4 different methods. After they wrote programs to do this (I chose programming to reinforce half a dozen concepts that students need to know well for calculus, and which naturally lend themselves to computer programming, such as sequences and series.

When I gave a quiz/test on the material, he/she was the first one done (beating the other students - the top students in the school - by at least five minutes) and aced the test.
 
As a rule, if I have to do a task more than once, I write a tool to automate it. I don't tend to skimp on my tools, so they tend to be very verbose, powerful, and support a lot more than just that one task I originally set out to solve.

I have a library of about 15-20 "applications" that do everything from powering off large numbers of vm's at once to cloning and generating new types of web servers and applying puppet templates. I wrote a 'control panel' for quickly adding/modifying/deleting new reverse proxy entries in nginx recently because I was sick of editing the config files for all the new servers we keep moving and creating.

I would probably go back to programming if I was forced to not script and program as a system admin.
 
I'm in hardware support. I never ever program anything. I do need to be proficient at Windows/Linux, especially when walking an unskilled admin through his procedures after a hardware replacement 🙂
 
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