What I do.

[bunn]

That meme got me thinking about the differences between what I do, and perceptions of what I do.

This quiz asks you fairly bluntly if you like Sums. I said 'no' (as I hate sums and have a go-slow on that part of my brain that deals with numbers) so I didn't get any of the computery type jobs suggested, (apart from designer, which is really Drawing, and doesn't count).

Website development and programming type stuff is percieved as a fairly sum-based discipline, which I don't think it is necessarily, or not the kind I do, anyway.

I think of it more as working out what people want, and how it might be easiest for them to get / do it, then explaining how to do it to computers using their language. Well, not their language, exactly, but a language that they have learnt and so have I*. Or perhaps as a sort of training: finding the triggers for the behaviours you want the machines to perform, and doing them in the right order...

Very rarely do I need to use my rather sad -2 to Sums Skill, and when I do, it's usually on marketing analysis type stuff rather than on 'making stuff work' type stuff. Not that I am a programmer really, but I do seem to write or adapt quite a lot of stuff that certainly has that sort of programming smell about it.

* possibly this explains the odd miscommunication...

Comments

[purplecat]

Teaching both programming and mathematics for computer science it often struck me that there wasn't an obvious correlation between good programmers and good mathematicians and ability to be careful, think through chains of cause and effect and recognise abstract patterns helped with both but programming requires a lot more careful attention to detail than pen-and-paper mathematics (I rarely do maths with pen-and-paper if I can help it these days since I'm aware the computer forces me to be much more precise about what I'm doing) and the sorts of imagination required to write interesting programs seems rather different than the sorts of imagination needed to do interesting maths.