Tell us your programming experience level

[noitcelfeR]

I am curious about the level of experience among the members here. I see a lot of "how does xxx work in xxx" posts and I just want to calibrate my responses based on the experience level of the members here.

 

[Bombastinator]

I’d need a level below beginner.  My brain deals with programming badly.  I tend to get lost in loops and drop variables.  Back in high school they had a programming unit in some science class or other, and it took me multiple times as long to finish the sample program as everyone else. There’s talented, there’s talentless, and then there’s me. 

[trag1c]

I am in weird position. I have over 10 years of experience as a self taught hobbyist who was fairly active with programming. But I never went into it as a career because I never had the magic slip of paper and never wanted to do the schooling. But due to the pandemic throwing a monkey wrench in my other career I am about to finish my software development diploma in April. (Debating about getting bachelor's degree afterwards)

 

I am primarily a C++ programmer with experience in graphics API's, CUDA, computer vision and embedded development as my self taught portion. During school they focused on full stack web development with SQL, Java, JS and CSS/HTML additionally since it was a school of IT it also included networking/Cisco courses, hardware courses, general tech education, as well as a group of IT business related courses.

 

So technically I am going to be a recent graduate but I am also way more experienced then someone fresh out of school so I honestly have no idea which category I fall into lol.

[Sauron]

I have no idea what the number rankings mean, I'm a full time software engineer but not a manager in any capacity.

[noitcelfeR]

24 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I have no idea what the number rankings mean, I'm a full time software engineer but not a manager in any capacity.

SWE III is experienced. SWE IV is promo, but not senior. Senior is above SWE IV. I'd doubt many would be above these levels.

[noitcelfeR]

5 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

I’d need a level below beginner.  My brain deals with programming badly.  I tend to get lost in loops and drop variables.  Back in high school they had a programming unit in some science class or other, and it took me multiple times as long to finish the sample program as everyone else. There’s talented, there’s talentless, and then there’s me. 

What programming language are you starting out in? Sometimes it helps to write down the operation on paper and go through it step by step if you're starting out. That's what really helped me with some of the more complex concepts. Don't give up. Programming concepts can be unintuitive.

[noitcelfeR]

5 hours ago, trag1c said:

I am in weird position. I have over 10 years of experience as a self taught hobbyist who was fairly active with programming. But I never went into it as a career because I never had the magic slip of paper and never wanted to do the schooling. But due to the pandemic throwing a monkey wrench in my other career I am about to finish my software development diploma in April. (Debating about getting bachelor's degree afterwards)

 

I am primarily a C++ programmer with experience in graphics API's, CUDA, computer vision and embedded development as my self taught portion. During school they focused on full stack web development with SQL, Java, JS and CSS/HTML additionally since it was a school of IT it also included networking/Cisco courses, hardware courses, general tech education, as well as a group of IT business related courses.

 

So technically I am going to be a recent graduate but I am also way more experienced then someone fresh out of school so I honestly have no idea which category I fall into lol.

Cool! You must be a big fan of math! With some companies, they'll help pay for your degree, but you'll be just fine without one. A couple books I'd recommend to read would be Peopleware and Mythical Man Month to get familiar with the industry.

[Bombastinator]

6 hours ago, noitcelfeR said:

What programming language are you starting out in? Sometimes it helps to write down the operation on paper and go through it step by step if you're starting out. That's what really helped me with some of the more complex concepts. Don't give up. Programming concepts can be unintuitive.

The one I crashed and burned in was basic.  Hoping it might be a fluke I tried forth.  Wasn’t.

[maplepants]

I think sticking to the SWE levels in your poll will leave a lot of legitimately good programmers here with no option to pick. Same with engineers who work at smaller companies where the multi layer managerial structure these levels rely on makes no sense. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey provides a good counterpoint here. 

 

The best programmer I know is a data scientist who's PhD is technically in mathematics, but you can't do any high level math involving matrices without being a good programmer. The excellent ZFS snapshot manager Sanoid was written by an SRE/IT consultant. 

 

Because of the audience for LTT (mostly gamers), I'd imagine that the results will skew towards juniors/hobbyists. But the more interesting question of what do the experience developers here actually do professionally will be missed by the focus on a single scale that only really works within the formal corporate structures of very large companies.

[noitcelfeR]

1 hour ago, maplepants said:

I think sticking to the SWE levels in your poll will leave a lot of legitimately good programmers here with no option to pick. Same with engineers who work at smaller companies where the multi layer managerial structure these levels rely on makes no sense. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey provides a good counterpoint here. 

 

The best programmer I know is a data scientist who's PhD is technically in mathematics, but you can't do any high level math involving matrices without being a good programmer. The excellent ZFS snapshot manager Sanoid was written by an SRE/IT consultant. 

 

Because of the audience for LTT (mostly gamers), I'd imagine that the results will skew towards juniors/hobbyists. But the more interesting question of what do the experience developers here actually do professionally will be missed by the focus on a single scale that only really works within the formal corporate structures of very large companies.

Good point. I'll update if possible.

[Gimmick21]

Coding in school: BASIC - classic "roll dice" - programs

Coding in university: C, Java, Python (and Matlab) - numerical analysis most of the time and a bit of playing mit micro controllers

Coding at work: C#, C++ - trying to build data structures, workflows and explain to people why organizing a lot of data by hand is a bad idea :< And I don't even remember that this was in the job description ;D

[Bombastinator]

On 12/9/2021 at 2:38 AM, noitcelfeR said:

What programming language are you starting out in? Sometimes it helps to write down the operation on paper and go through it step by step if you're starting out. That's what really helped me with some of the more complex concepts. Don't give up. Programming concepts can be unintuitive.

It’s possible.  The objective languages might also work. I’m an old man now though.  It was long ago. 

[duncannah]

I've been a hobbyist for about 10 years starting from my early teen years, and I'm currently pursuing a bachelor's degree

[Franck]

8 yo, got into DOS and PS/2 (if your born after 1990 it's not what you think)

10 yo got into Basica and Quick Basic

11 yo (summer between 5th and 6th grade) got my first actual projet that i got paid for which was a Quick Basic + Lotus 1,2,3 phone database for my mom lawyer cabinet.

12 yo (6th grade) started C and C++

14 yo (high school) Got class into Visual Basic 1.0

15 yo started assembly and robot automatisation in a tech class which was an option in school

17 yo got actual class of C++, Pascal and Perl

18 yo got a class for learned PHP, ASP and web design using Corel, Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro

19 yo went to 1 years boot camp as i found other method too slow and learned IT work, C#, VB.NET, Java

20 yo started to work professionally full time VB 5.0 (or 6.0) dev for a tiny high class clothing company

21 yo started a officially C# job at a large business part of the nasdaq 500 ended up doing much more language than i would think : Java, Python, Perl, Pascal, Lua, Fortran, FoxPro, VB5.0, VBA, PHP, ASP.NET, C#, SAP, LISP, Ruby, MathLab, Haskel, AS400

 

now 19 years later i have worked for couple companies and done pretty much bits of everything from financial, law document, ERP, Thermodynamics, factory management, truck fleet, 3D CAD, Animation (Disney style and stop motion), robotics, science lab and i am doing pretty much whatever we need. Luckily languages cover so much these days that you can pretty much do everything with 2-3 languages. C#, C++ and Java covers pretty much anything there is and it's much less on the shoulder of junior devs to learn under heavy pressure environment.

 

I love to learn new things but i know not everyone does. I recently revisited Python after 18-19 years not using it.

 

 

[delph]

Hobbyist programming in spurts since 2008 (a month or two of really learning, then hitting one problem and stopping for months on end). During the pandemic, I took the CS50 course and have been coding as a hobby ever since. Beginner, first year, more or less, and very lost in terminology.

[RockSolid1106]

Reviving a fairly old thread.

 

I'm a hobbyist.

 

I'm a high school student who loves to make stuff, with the power of programming. I like making websites(my personal website).

 

In school we're supposed to take up an optional subject, so Computer Programming(Java) was it. I neither like it nor hate it(though I lean more towards hate lol).

 

I got into Python because I thought it was cool. I took up a shitty course which didn't help, but I worked on some personal projects and I've learned a lot from doing those.

[Dat Guy]

Hobbyist since 1996, paid hobbyist for a few years less.