The Programming Profession

The skills & qualities you need to make it

If you’re reading this then I assume it is because you are or indeed aspire to being a professional programmer. I wanted in this paper to write about the sort of skills and qualities you have or indeed need to succeed. But before I begin I should confess that I know enough about the subject to know I am right, but not so much to know I may be wrong; a great quote I just wanted to include as a disclaimer, please read on.

Let’s start with the basics, really basics.

Math

You need to like it. No really, anybody who tells you otherwise isn’t a programmer. You don’t need a degree in it, but you need to understand things like base theory, logic, percentages, matrices and geometry. Of course the amount of math in your role will vary enormously depending in the job you have, but it’ll be there.

Pedantic

You need to be good with detail. Coding is and isn’t like math in that respect because there are no abstract numbers, rounding errors, no off-roading here. Although there is almost always more than one way to do something, whatever way you do it; you need to stay on the road. Computers and compilers have a very limited vocabulary for the most part. The management science students at University used to joke about it, they would say you can spot a computer science student a mile off. You can spot them because they’ll be the only one’s able to spot a missing semi-colon at…