this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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It’s interesting to me how often “math skills” are conflated with “the ability to understand technology.” Like I’m passionate about HCI/social computing research, comfortable navigating the Fediverse, jailbroke my iPod as a teen, modded Civilization (DOS) as a kid — I’m also “just okay” at math lol, didn’t even take Calculus in HS. I wonder how many people (like the journalists you describe) feel discouraged from exploring technologies because of the false “math skill = tech skill” narrative, even if plenty of people who suck at math excel at understanding technologies!
(I also wonder how many people who “suck at math” don’t actually suck at math but weren’t given a good math education during school — but that’s a rant for another thread 😂)
One of those computer people that family/friends bug to do all their computer stuff here. Been the designated technology fixer person since the 90s. I'm absolutely atrocious at maths (funnily enough, given a terrible education for it in school).
I'm a software engineer of 10 years. I've had a few roles during that time. Sr Engineer. Architect. Director of Engineering. Not only have I almost never used any math every time I did I copy pasted the algo to use from stack overflow or similar tech blogs. I did terrible at math in HS, never took calc struggled with trig and graduated HS with a 2.7 gpa and never went to college. Who the fuck started this meme of programming === math. The only thing close to math in programming I've done is when I learned the basics of lambda calculus when I was flirting with learning functional programming
it's because computer science is essentially a branch of math. it's just that you don't actually need to understand computer science to use a computer