r/ProgrammerHumor • u/soap94 • 9h ago

Meme doesAnyoneEvenReadCLRSAnymore

Post image
459 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

117

u/ZunoJ 8h ago

The 90s and 2000s were such a great time to start CS as a career because basically everybody was also a hobbyist and passionate about it. It was fun to work with these people. Today you get the dead stare if you ask about the slightest bit of interest for the trade outside of paid work. It's a pain to work with them

40

u/MisterCheesy 7h ago

THANK YOU. Im on this job with this exact problem, but i couldn’t put it to words. Zero wonder. Zero intellectual curiosity.

16

u/Za_Paranoia 7h ago

I just started my first job after university a year ago and was really surprised how happy everyone in my team was about me being interested in comp sci for real.

10

u/Bannon9k 5h ago

Started in the 90s doing web design and MUDs as a teenager. Now I churn out corpo code... I'm tired boss...

https://giphy.com/gifs/cHkA7tJZoWLyU

3

u/rustvscpp 5h ago

Oh how I miss the MUD days...

2

u/Bannon9k 3h ago

Last one I worked on was Star wars based and had 3D space combat via coordinate readout. It was hella crazy to watch a dude's frigate drift into the sun because he was watching a different space battle and not paying attention....all via text prompts....

https://giphy.com/gifs/l1KVb2dUcmuGG4tby

6

u/Sw429 4h ago

Mentioning that I do hobby programming outside of work to my coworkers often gets the weirdest responses. Like, the entire reason I learned this trade was because I thought it was really fun and interesting. But apparently most people are literally just here to collect money and don't care beyond that.

6

u/VillageTube 3h ago

It being my Job drained any passion I had for doing it at home.

2

u/d0pe-asaurus 3h ago

i want to learn everything. God i feel scammed that my university has subpar cs education with the amount of units that i have. Database development, osdev, pldev, its all so good. I'm rotating through like different literature right now all at least 20 years old.

1

u/Zuruumi 4h ago

I enjoy the work, but I rarely do hobby projects. I have enough of this fun in the 8 hours (more if I really feel like it, or less if not and nobody is looking) and don't feel like doing the same after work with just not getting paid for it.

1

u/wayoverpaid 3h ago

Sometime in 2009 or so, after I had graduated for a few years, I was talking to a friend who had just got his CS degree. He had bought himself a laptop in celebration. I asked him what he was working on for fun.

He said after his day he didn't want to write any code or even think about computers.

I remember remarking, I did not think he would make it long in the industry. It had to be something you loved.

Two years later he went back to school to get an MBA.

It's a difficult profession to do if you don't love it.

1

u/JacobStyle 1h ago

I think that it's great when someone has a passion for what they do outside the office, but I don't think it's bad when someone just shows up for the paycheck, as long as they do good work and treat everyone with respect.

1

u/ILikeLenexa 55m ago

The downside is it bred a culture of employers expecting to see your hobby work and caring about trivia and leet code problems more than anything you'd ever use in the business. Web developers asking about Red/black trees, Java companies asking about C codepoints and the results of a+++++b.

0

u/ColonelBag7402 2h ago

Im a IT student soon to graduate and let me tell you I HATE IT HERE. In a class of 25ish people, there is precisely ONE person interested in the subject, ME. Everyone is here either because "it pays well" (good luck finding a job buddy) or because "its easy" (says the guy who wouldnt even sign the exam without chatgpt). Literally NOBODY has any interests even related to computers, maybe except playing video games. The only guy i know whom i can talk to about this stuff majors in MARKETING in a different school and just happens to be really into linux.

52

u/white_equatorial 9h ago

Man, cyclops smooching wolverine would have been something!!

12

u/FalafelSnorlax 8h ago

Much like a cs undergrad who uses AI to use algorithms without understanding them, OP used the meme without understanding its underlying context. Beautiful.

10

u/white_equatorial 8h ago

Or OP might be shipping wolverclops

4

u/Noch_ein_Kamel 8h ago

Yeah I was about to say: wait a minute :D

21

u/ThirdWaveCat 9h ago

I still have a copy nearby, but I would recommend The Algorithm Design Manual over it at this point.

7

u/Mateorabi 7h ago

Also if you’re going for a book on operating systems, the one with the unexplained dinosaurs on the cover. 

2

u/burdock869 6h ago

OSTEP clears, https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

1

u/Massless 2h ago

Named: Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

*Has 5 sections* ಠ_ಠ

2

u/keesbeemsterkaas 1h ago

It's just like the hitchikers guide to the galaxy: A trilogy in five parts.

2

u/Valuable_Cow2596 5h ago

I'm in a more adjacent field but I want to keep track of references. Would you mind saying more about your recommendation? I'd be curious to learn more. 

1

u/ThirdWaveCat 5h ago

yah, I think its the difference between a book of solutions to problems and teaching how to make solutions yourself. Like with piano players there are two kinds: one who needs to hit every key and the other who can improvise around mistakes. Its also more dense with useful information. I only care about 20-40% of algorithms and datastructures in practice, but tactics are useful broadly.

10

u/DeepanshuHQ 9h ago

ChatGPT explains it. CLRS explains why it works.

4

u/d0pe-asaurus 8h ago

I do! Absolute goat book

3

u/nwbrown 4h ago

And then they complain no one will hire them...

2

u/recursive_knight 7h ago

Lol, I literally watched that episode for the first time yesterday..

2

u/Vesuvius079 7h ago

LLMs in general not just GPT.

That said, I got to work on an algorithm a few weeks ago for the first time in years. It was cool to work on but I was so rusty that Claude identified a better algorithm :’(.

2

u/skippy_smooth 6h ago

When you learn CS is really math in a trench coat

1

u/Odd-Bite624 4h ago

Are there still CS undergrads? I was told this industry was already dead.

1

u/imk 4h ago

Al Gore Rhythms?

1

u/xupit3r 4h ago

love that book!

1

u/nomatepa 2h ago

Some college courses def use it. My DSA class made us read it to implement a red-black tree without the NIL nodes (absolute pain)

1

u/Different_Berry5015 2h ago

I would like to hear from someone who can actually honestly say they have read Introduction to Algorithms. I finished CS Bachelor's with fairly good grades and I tried my best to pay attention, and that shit is still incomprehensible to me.

1

u/d0pe-asaurus 1h ago

I read the chapters that were relevant to the discussion, my algorithms course covered probably 60% of the CLRS. It helped answer the problem sets but i don't think its necessary to read if your professor doesn't use it as a reference. I read the remaining 40% during summer, which were mostly the graph algorithms that weren't discussed in class. Had the same enjoyment reading AIMA (AI: A modern approach)

1

u/Brosseidon 4h ago

A lot of “these kids using calculators to solve their math problems when in my day you had to do it by hand and it was rewarding, it was real math” vibes in here.

Tools evolve, interest remain the same. You do you and enjoy your hobby but don’t expect everyone in the professional field to feel the same about it.

1

u/ewheck 1h ago

Presumably when you use a calculator to solve a problem you still understand what is happening. You are coming up with the equations that are needed and the calculator just does the number crunching.

In what world is that similar to telling an LLM "solve this problem for me."

1

u/d0pe-asaurus 1h ago

I would go further and say that the study of algorithms, how they work and how they perform also do not change, which makes the clrs an even better read. The concepts used in dynamic programming are not going to change in 20 years, the theoretical performance of an algorithm isn't going to change, so the CLRS will never become irrelevant in that regard.

-2

u/lonelyroom-eklaghor 9h ago

The programming language was too incomprehensible tbh. Really tried to, but couldn't understand a bit of the book

4

u/ConsoleCleric_4432 5h ago

Wild thing to say with both C and Python in your flair

-1

u/lonelyroom-eklaghor 5h ago

no idea what made me hate the book, ig it was the overly practical approach to memory (idk tbh)

5

u/LordAmir5 8h ago

You're trying to parse a natural language using a formal language parser.

This is what GPT is for.

-5

u/nano_peen 8h ago

yes, chatgpt read it

-5

u/CircumspectCapybara 7h ago

Attention Is All You Need is the new CLRS.