I’m working my way to a CS degree and am currently slogging my way through an 8-week Trig course. I barely passed College Algebra and have another Algebra and two Calculus classes ahead of me.
How much of this will I need in a programming job? And, more importantly, if I suck at Math, should I just find another career path?
Depend on what programming you do. Graphics will be math out of the wazoo, whereas generic web or desktop app programming has very little math involved
Very much depends what kind of programming you’re doing. Graphics uses shittons of maths. Data analysis/data science is maths/stats heavy. Other types less so!
I’m a front-end developer. I sometimes need to solve algebra problems. I’m pretty bad at it because I , but my knowledge that a problem is solvable by math comes in handy maybe once or twice a month. It’s just that on the few occasions that there’s algebra that I can’t figure out how to solve (maybe once a year), I may ask for help from a colleague.
Examples of cases where math comes in handy:
- Pythagoras when I need to figure out the x/y components of a diagonal distance
- Width/height calculations from a variety of parameters
In summary, as long as you know what math is capable of, you probably won’t have major issues. There will pretty much always be someone around to help with the math part if necessary.
As for calculus… I forgot all about the one calculus class I’ve taken and I’ve never suffered for it.
Programming and math are both heavily rule-based and logic-based, which is why people say if you’re good at math you may be good at programming.
Being comfortable with basic back-of-the-envelope math can be a huge benefit. (Full disclosure: i am a math major who is now a programmer)
Over my career I have several examples of projects that have saved weeks worth of dev time because someone could predict the result with some basic calculations. I also have several examples where I have shown people some basic math showing that their idea is never gonna work, they don’t listen and do it anyway, and I see them 1 month later and the project failed in the way i predicted.
A popular (and wise) saying is that “Weeks of work can save you hours of meetings”. I think the same is true for basic math. “Weeks of coding can save you minutes of calculation”.
You can definitely be a successful programmer career without great math skills. Math is a tool that can help you be more effective.
Can you share the full story of the projects that you could predict could fail using maths?
Can’t divulge too many details, but one example was when we had 2 options for solving a problem: 1. The “easy” way, storing a bunch small blobs to s3 as a job was running on an embedded device, or 2. The slightly tricky, implement streaming of said data on the device (not as easy as it sounds).
We went with option 1, the easy one, because it was deemed faster bang for the buck. I did some basic math showing that the bandwidth required upload the high number of blobs to s3 within our time budget was not possible on our uplink.
After we spend a month failing on 1., it was clear that we hit the predicted problem. Eventuelly we implement option 2.
