this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
116 points (100.0% liked)

Programming

17392 readers
144 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] kamstrup@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] icermiga@lemmy.today 4 points 2 days ago

Can you share the full story of the projects that you could predict could fail using maths?