As someone who has started studying programming and CS recently, avoiding becoming a guy who "glues APIs together" has been one of my goals. I want to learn the underlying principles, not just the surface-level implementations that change every few years.
Absolutely do learn the fundamentals. Be able to look off into space and imagine the flow of a system at many different levels of abstraction. Understand how compilers, interpreters, and operating systems wrangle your hardware into submitting to your will. Learn and design algorithms. Spend time thinking about how your computer gets from point A to point B for every program you use. Do all those things and more, but then be willing to embrace being somebody who "glues APIs together" when appropriate, or somebody who creates new APIs when appropriate, or somebody who creates new APIs using others that you have glued together, and then make something with all that abstract, algorithmic thinking and all that glue.
And the kind of education that offers real financial benefit is often technical or mathematical in nature.
So there is something I wonder about: is there an IQ "floor" below which very few people will be able to benefit from or even complete this sort of education? What percentage of the population falls under this floor? And what will they be doing in the future as both the "service" and manual labor sectors, the traditional absorbers of people with no degrees or impractical "soft" degrees, dwindle in the number of people employed?
We already have examples of this. What happens to people with Down syndrome? Where do chronically brain-damaged folks work? Where can senior citizens who have fallen prey to dementia get jobs?
One of the local Carl's Jr fast food restaurants has several employees with Down Syndrome. They bring trays to tables and mop the floor. I think it's great that the management gives them the opportunity to do some productive work.
Indeed. Note that there is a huge chunk of population in the gap between special programs for the severely brain-disabled and those who are just barely low-IQ enough to not finish high school. These people are being squeezed to death between the minimum wage and the export of manual labor to other countries.
And who is doing the political squeezing? A cognitive elite that are being efficiently skimmed off and segregated by IQ in late childhood. This bodes poorly for the stability of the nation.
Of course, this all depends on how much you trust the entire concept of nations... Maybe that era is starting it's final days, and the next force is going to be global companies that hire the elite across the old national boundaries and the the lower classes are stuck for a long time until the world catches up.
I am retraining myself, too. By inclination I am a liberal artsy guy with only a slight interest in technical stuff, but I've seen the writing on the wall and am learning to program. Turns out that it can be quite fun anyway. :-)
But don't discount how much people who can do graphical design are needed too -- the projects advertised in the Weekend Hacker newsletter -- need a graphically skilled person over a programmer at a 3 to 1 ratio.
Good question. I'm not sure what the recent momentum is about, but I remember two widely-linked stories about "hipsters" and "hipsterdom" back in 2007 and 2008:
I do this, too, even sometimes writing out code in a notebook. For example, I gained a clearer understanding of recursive algorithms after I "expanded" a few examples by hand.
Most very poor people are not young, athletic, with good physical and mental health, no dependents, and the background security of being able to leave their circumstances immediately any time they want.
The book is "Scratch Beginnings" by Adam Shepard, btw.
I agree. The book is a poor analogy of actually being poor. Let's put aside the money reserve for a moment. From wiki, it looks as if he put aside anything that would help him, such as his college education. Ok. But poor people also have things that weigh them down, things that hurt them, for example, dependents (children, family), addictions, debt, and what you mentioned.
Most very poor people are not young, athletic, with good physical and mental health, no dependents, and the background security of being able to leave their circumstances immediately any time they want.
I think that if you are really passionate about something specific that makes you a geek, although I might add a qualifier that it generally has to be an intellectual pursuit.
Most importantly, being a "geek" is not about an image, it's a way of looking at the world.
True geeks don't go around telling everyone they're a geek. That's all posers do. Geeks, it's just who they are. It's not a fad, or cool thing used get noticed. Geek is a personality type, you are born with it. It's not something you can buy at the store.
