Serious title: I’m scared of math but I want nothing more than to teach my dropout ass to code so I can stop stocking Shelves and become marketable/desirable to a country that isn’t literally a decade or so away from gassing me.
If it helps, i vibed with python real hard in a 101 course, but all that hexadecimal shit kicked my ass when I signed up for a 103 being cocky and all.
I've been a software engineer for about a decade and don't do much math beyond basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division or exponents - and most of the math I do only needs to be accurate within a factor of ten. And the computer crunches the numbers for me.
You won't need to know much hexadecimal or octal or even binary, just know it exists and know how to google "convert binary to base 10".
I wouldn't sweat it, you'll be fine.
Good luck comrade! :stalin-heart:
Edit: also, with all this pressure removed from needing to be good at math, you may find you like it more if you revisit it! Programming is pretty applicable to math if you ever want to try your hand at algebra or calculus for fun on the side. Calculus is actually super cool, there's a lot of really neat patterns and stuff and it's super satisfying when it clicks for you. Plus no one is grading you on it :)
It looks like OP was pursuing a traditional degree and if that is the case, they're going to face a shitload more math. OP could probably be a fine developer but they need a path from shelf stocker to dev career.
Ah yeah, degree program will be an assload of complicated math that no one needs — i'd interpreted their post about thinking about doing a bootcamp or something
The only real advice at that point is to just get through it. You wont have to do it once youre done.
And pray for a curve. I think I got a 43% B+ in one of those classes
One of the classes at my uni last session was a 30% A- and a 43?% A+
I believe you. Do you happen to have any self-taught/boot camp coworkers? I’m kinda asking out of seeking to emulate reasons.
Yeah, I've worked with some brilliant engineers that came out of bootcamps and I think everywhere I've worked had had at least one bootcamp or self taught engineer.
Actually come to think of it, the senior engineer I'm trying to poach from a former company came from a non traditional path like that too — a lot of my favorite coworkers have.
One bootcamp coworker from my very first full time job who started it of bootcamp around when I did started out of college (+ internships) — we compared salary once and she started 20% below me but caught up in about 3 years.
Like others said, just do web dev. If you build normal sites and not like PWAs or whatever, you don't need any real math
I disagree with people saying to do web dev to avoid math. Web dev isn't any lower on math then any other kind of coding (unless you're doing data science or something).
Yeah, I've done a substantial amount of backend, systems, and infrastructure and really haven't needed much math for any of it. When I worked at a math-heavy company once there were ML engineers and actual math people to do the math for me
Do webdev, you don't need ancillary matrices or sprectral graph theory or topological signal processing, and if you really did, it's just one easy
npm install ankletexas-jsaway.I actually liked building web pages but my undiagnosed ADHD or maybe anxiety disorder makes applying for jobs a non starter. I just tell myself that society is going to collapse in a couple decades anyways.
Get a personal ArcGIS license and learn arcpy. The GIS community needs more python programmers.
If you don't have $100/year to spend on Arc, use QGIS which is foss and has some similar tools.
You can easily get $70k for GIS work
Hexadecimal is a dumb format but it's usually confusing because you don't have an actual use case. And it's not actually used for anything. If you're learning programming, you don't need any serious math unless it's for a field that requires math. If math isn't your thing, don't become a game engine developer or do computer graphics, don't go into scientific computing (coincidentally Python is used a lot for that since it's easier than other languages for non-developers to use).
I just spent a long time learning how to use one language (Java, which is currently mainly used in enterprise servers and company-internal GUIs). That allows you to get in deep enough to give you a starting point to learn both the closer-to-hardware things (bits n' bytes, virtual memory and other CPU features, memory addressing, etc.) and more-abstract things (algorithms, designing larger software systems) and stuff like Internet Protocol and so on. There's a lot more to computers than textual programming languages, but programming is how you get practice using computers so you have a reason to understand how they work.
I can't really speak to your situation, but I'd guess to actually fill out your knowledge of computers you'll need some kind of course that will tell you which things you need to learn. The following is pure speculation, and is probably unhelpful, I am not a teacher (!!!). You could look at a university's degree requirements for CS, and look at the listed courses' syllabi and basically Google those topics. https://www.cs.washington.edu/academics/ugrad/current-students/degree. For example, I looked up CS 351 from that page, here's the syllabus https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse351/22sp/syllabus/#syllabus
It lists:
Memory and data representation
Number representation for integers and floats
Machine code and the C programming language
x86-64 assembly language
Procedures and stacks
Arrays and other data structures
Memory and caches
Operating system process model
Virtual memory
Memory allocation
Implementation of high-level languages (e.g., Java)
And on the course webpage for it, you can just look at the presentations:
https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse351/22sp/
https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse351/22sp/lectures/02/CSE351-L02-memory-I_22sp.pdf
Now instead of just reading this, you can find terms in it and Google them and find YouTube videos about them. But this is probably a painful way to learn lol, not sure if anyone actually does this. Just learn a programming language and try to make things in it.
That’s actually really good advice. I checked out some professors websites from my local school and some even have links to old lectures next to the syllabus.
SMH professors just putting out free learning for anyone who does a name search.
what’s the best career path for somebody who wants to quit retail and get a tech job without a 4 year degree avoiding math? I’m basically in the same boat, starting from scratch don’t know where to start. I gotta make the leap from retail.
A front end dev job (it might not immediately lead to that though, it can take a few months to find a job) where you're basically going to be working on websites.
I've never needed any math beyond basic algebra on anything I've tried to work on (but I'm not a programmer by trade). My attempt at an Information Systems degree only had a pre-calculus requirement, which was interesting (though it kicked my ass so hard I had to take it twice) but absolutely had zero use in any of the actual computer/programming classes that the degree required.
Also, it turns out that the Information Systems was more geared to IT management than actual coding. So I definitely didn't get as much out of that attempt at a degree as I wanted (and wasted about eight years to boot.)
Most programming doesn't require a lot of math. Programming I personally find interesting sorta does, but even then hex isn't that scary if you immerse yourself in it for a little while. You basically just need to learn some conversion units for bits->bytes. 32 bit = 4 bytes.
I started coding specifically because I am bad at math. You'll do great!
