Nowadays (and increasingly, going forward) it's possible to be a very productive programmer without knowing much low-level stuff. This may seem unfair to those who spent years wrestling assembly and then C pointers but that's just today's reality.
It's not possible to be a "productive" musician on a traditional instrument (i.e. excluding iPads) without knowing how to play scales, chords, etc.
Hard disagree. Those “productive” programmers are a nightmare, their code is a barely decipherable jumble of randomly gluing function calls together until they kinda sorta do something that approximates working some of the time. They cause an unfathomable amount of damage, lost productivity due to bugs and data nightmares, lost data, and headaches.
They do make idiot managers happy though, because look at all those features and scrum points they “finished!” That’s why armies of them will always be there in the software ecosystem, blithely and ignorantly a net drain on whatever unlucky company is currently employing them, busily making a mess for more diligent programmers to clean up for the rest of eternity. It’s called “job security.”
According to what evidence? I have worked with developers who later ended up working for Google and they were OK but not great. They didn’t stand out in any way.
> That’s demands for faster delivery of software and ridiculous demands on user experience.
Absolutely not. It's about bloat. Many times people "just want to code" or eschew optimizing repeating the mantra that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" that you often end up with bloated software.
They can't read music, but they can still make their hands move in repeatable patterns without thinking about each finger position, which I think is roughly the equivalent of implementing quicksort.
As someone who has played guitar on and off for years as a hobby, I'm shocked by how much harder it is than programming.
I can pick up almost any random codebase on GitHub, and as long as they use libraries and don't touch low level stuff, I can probably start working with it in 10 minutes to a day at most.
Then, I could leave that project for a year and be almost as productive as when I left. So much of the action is on the screen, not in the head, and there's no muscle memory required.
If any instrument was as easy as coding... I think a lot of coders might have music careers instead....
It's not possible to be a "productive" musician on a traditional instrument (i.e. excluding iPads) without knowing how to play scales, chords, etc.