!rant

Let's take a moment to appreciate interested and enthousiastic non-developers who really want to learn a programming language.

I am studying Medical IT at my college and most of my classmates aren't coming from an IT background.
We're currently working with Java, PHP, JavaScript and some require Node for their semester projects.

Some of my classmates approach me when they're stuck while coding and I try to teach them as much as possible so they understand what they are doing wrong and how to fix it.
I also show them how they can optimise their code step by step and they love it!

As a classmate told me yesterday:
"It's always so much fun working with you. I come up with a small problem, but I end up learning so much more about programming when solving a problem with you. I appreciate that."

It's a mindset I've learned when I was doing my developer apprenticeship back in the day. One of my colleagues told me: "if they want your help because they need a quick fix, tell them to kiss your ass. If you know they've already tried everything they could and ask you specifically because they want to understand what they are doing wrong, they are future developers with great potential, so go teach them."

May the force be with you, my enthousiastic little non-devs ❤️

It was at the beginning of my IT apprenticeship, I had no idea about coding in C and our teacher told us to write a "hello world" in C.

.. I wrote:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10

Honestly so fucking excited, been going through the application process to start a (UK) level 4 apprenticeship and I am through to the last round! Got my last interview with the programming team in January when I'll know if I got it or not.

Hello all,

I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.

The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.

The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.

The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.

In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.

With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?

Trying to decide between two places, one was full of cliquey staff who would talk to someone they didn't like through someone else in a child-like "Tell X I'm not talking to them" despite X being next to you, and management who wouldn't always pay you on time or the right amount.
The other was also run very poorly, management looked down on staff who wouldn't work for free after their shift finished, they'd also throw you under the bus for clients and wouldn't take staff speaking up. I once went to my direct manager noting that I was burning out as the only member in a department when every other was staffed by multiple groups of multiple staff. Told them that I needed someone else with me, next thing you know I'm out on my ear and replaced by a young lad just starting his apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship instead of higher education might be a better mode of 1) learning practical skills rather than academic theory, 2) keeping those learned skills modern rather than stale and outdated, 3) skipping all the hippy-dippy college requirements that don’t actually add value to your career.

Heyo, I got a last-minute interview tomorrow as a Windows Admin for the datacenter and pc-pools of a university in my state.
This will be my first interview for a real job, after my apprenticeship, and my second interview overall.
You got any tips for what I should prepare or what questions I should ask?

What do you think about Powershell on Linux?

I personally like PS quite a lot, on windows. It quickly became one of my favorite languages, during my apprenticeship.
I also have an everburning hatred for python, so PS is kinda enticing to me.

Hey people, I could use your help on deciding which of 2 job offers to take.

Offer 1:
- same city as me right now
- around 30 minutes commute total per day
- average salary (for my experience)
- tasks: infrastructure, windows, Linux
- 30 days vacation
- financial sector

Offer 2:
- one city over
- around 2 hour commute per day (but home office is possible after the introduction period)
- pays 600 euros more than offer 1 (greatly above average entry salary, for me)
- tasks: infrastructure, mostly linux
- 27 days vacation
- e-learning industry

Both jobs are in the German state of Saxony.
This will be my first full-time job, since I finished my apprenticeship last year.