One of the schools she teaches at is Bay Farm School. It's the school that both of our children attended. As such, we have a past and current affection for the school. So when 6th grade teacher, Lori Oducayen, asked me to come talk to her coding class about what it's like to have a job as a computer programmer, I was happy to oblige. Ms. Oducayen sent me the students' questions in advance. Basically I answered their questions by telling the class:
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The amount of money you earn as a programmer depends on your grades. Employers have to offer people who make good grades more money because students with good grades get more job offers, and Autodesk has to make its job offer the most attractive to get the students who work the hardest to come to work for Autodesk.
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Not everyone at Autodesk is a coder. There are architects and engineers who define what our programs should do, quality assurance engineers who test the programs, marketing and sales who sell the programs, and human resources/legal employees who help the programmers.
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Programmers have to learn existing code, write documents that describe how they will change the code, write their code, test their code, and review others' code.
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Good code is correct, readable, efficient, and reusable.
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To be a good programmer, you need to know:
- Teamwork
- Math and/or music
- Programming languages
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In the future, many jobs will involve some coding. So don't ask yourself "Do I want to be a programmer when I grow up?" Instead, ask yourself: "What problem do I want to solve?"
I have been on vacation for the last two weeks. This week when I got back to the office, I had an envelope in my in-box that contained thank you cards from the Ms. Oducayen and her students. Here are the cards by the Mercedes-Benz Biome Car exhibit in the Autodesk Gallery.