Programming

17489 readers

220 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

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

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

118

How Good at Math Does a Programmer Need to Be? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 weeks ago by anonymouse2@sh.itjust.works to c/programming@programming.dev

74 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

[–] Eiri@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

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.