Programmer

To what extent do the head honchos of your company involve you, their CTO, in the big strategic decisions? Are you there to offer guidance, or are you expected to just follow their strategic direction?

Asked by Yohimbe Bro over 10 years ago

I'm the voice of reason, or, to put it another way, the wet blanket. I'm Scotty down in the engine room yelling "Ye canna change the laws of physics!" at the head-in-the-clouds bridge officers (*). I mostly don't set the agenda but I do veto parts of it that are impossible or ill-advised. (*) That's my Star Trek reference for the year taken care of.

If a good programmer is someone who writes good code, what would you say makes for a good MANAGER of programmers?

Asked by roooofus almost 11 years ago

That's an excellent question, and if you ever find a recipe for one let me know...actually, don't, you could figure out a way to make a ton of money off of it. The one thing I can think of that all good engineering managers I've known had in common is that all of them were current or former programmers themselves. But that's not sufficient by itself.

Do programmers need a college degree? Or more to the point, do EMPLOYERS require programmers to have a degree?

Asked by PAH over 10 years ago

As a rule, larger employers are more likely to care about a degree than smaller ones. But even larger employers often leave themselves an out by saying "Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience". I know plenty of skilled and successful programmers who are college or even high school dropouts.

I think it's great that there's still at least one form of skilled white-collar work you can do without a degree. But there are advantages to studying CS in college. It'll get you a foot in the door early in your career. You'll learn a few useful things about computational complexity, algorithms, and data structures that you might not otherwise. You'll be exposed to a lot of different sub-fields (e.g. AI, graphics, databases, operating systems) and might fall in love with one you never suspected existed.

I designed an app for a computer and now want it to be compatible with mobiles how do I go about doing that ? whats the code?

Asked by smile over 9 years ago

Take out everything that's specific to desktop machines, replace it with a corresponding version for mobiles.

Seriously. Read the answer I posted to your question the other day. That's how you do it.

I have a website with a CMS (1UpSoftware). Most of the pages on the site are behind a paid wall. One of the menu items redirect to another website. Is there a way to keep the redirect behind the paid wall? Is there a script that I could redirect

Asked by Marsha over 10 years ago

Hard to say for sure without details but almost certainly not. From the browser's point of view there's little difference between a redirect and the user entering the site in their address field directly. Probably your best bet is to figure out how to remove the menu item in question entirely.

I forgot my phone's password any suggestions ? ( I have an android phone)

Asked by The clumsy one over 10 years ago

Yes--try googling "Android phone forgot password." Programming is not the same as IT.

I have a programmer/analyst aptitude examination to do, do you know anything about what kinda of topics would be on the exam itself? worried because i am pretty sucky at math.

Asked by Aaron about 10 years ago

The kinds of math that keep coming up in programming are mostly what they call "discrete math," which is logic and set theory more than the algebra and geometry you'd probably learn in high school. (That assumes high school still works like I remember.) So you can expect to see a fair number of logic problems. A typical one might be like:

 

1. John is taller than Mary
2. Mary is shorter than Steve