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Ask HN: Do you have to read a lot of text as a programmer?

5 points by Onixelen ↗ HN
I have lack of confidence in my ability to read. I think I need to get help from an educational psychologist. In the meantime, I was wondering if I would be fine relying on videos for the most part. I seem to read slow, and I seem to be able to read small amount of text and conversational text fine, like I'm reading here.

4 comments

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bwackwat
As a programmer, I read a ton of documentation, technology articles, tutorials, and news to learn more every day.

Reading code is certainly important as well; this comes naturally for me after working with a code base for some time. (Blocks of code become more and more familiar as I work with them and I need to peruse less and less. This is especially true for well modularized code bases and code bases with good issue tracking.)

As a programmer I read a lot.

gravypod
I feel the same but I think it's important to specify that most of the reading I've had to so to learn a lot about programming, and code much more specifically, is very structured.

You don't need to read every word most of the time because most programming related information, documentation, and tutorials are amazingly categorized. I think this is more so then any other field. Do you need to learn about some obscure topic? There's someone who's written some perfect sample code to do your task.

You only need to read a lot because you need to do a lot of different things in the course of your day.

patio11
You may not find this a complete barrier to being a productive programmer. I've worked in an office full of people who almost certainly had more issues digesting English-language technical material than you do, where that was a major portion of what they had to do every day. Coping strategies exist.

That said: I would explore avenues towards achieving confidence in your literacy, including by improving literacy if that is indeed an underlying issue here. Communication skills gate a lot of your future advancement options. Lack of confidence in ability to read will probably [+] hinder your ability to be at or above market expectations with regards to those skills.

[ + ] Probably. I have a strong suspicion that the best boss I ever had was functionally illiterate in his native language and just covered it well. I don't know whether other people came to the same suspicion regarding literacy but lots of people came to the same impression regarding effectiveness as a manager.

tcamp
From my experience it really depends. I've worked as a programmer and product manager as well as a Manager of hundreds of engineers and product managers.

Reading a lot of text is only one way of getting information to perform your job. For instance, some of the best programmers and engineers I managed knew how to have good discussions and the right questions to ask.

Often times user stories are the foundation of that interaction and they are extremely short and organized. As someone else mentioned here, technical learning is very structured and most engineers I know read a little, try it out and then read more if they need more help.

As long as reading a lot of text is not the main form of how you get information and learn then you can probably be OK as a programmer. If you are looking ahead and wanted to engage in other roles then you should invest time to become confident with that form of information.