This is a great core description of computing as a career. If I may riff on a few things and add a few different perspectives for the benefit of anyone reading…

For any of you Monta Vista folks… I’m a Homestead graduate, the same year as Jimmy, and we went to Caltech together. I ended up getting a masters degree and I’m now a co-founder and chief software architect at a Seattle startup, a much smaller company than Google.

My typical workday is fairly similar to Jimmy’s, with the primary difference that I’m also involved in a lot of decision making related to our products– what the product will do, not just how it will be written. I’m probably involved in more meetings, which is unfortunate but necessary at an early stage company.

Another aspect of my job is that I’m constantly evaluating outside pieces of code (called “libraries” or “services”) that we may want to incorporate into our software. When you’re writing software, you often have the choice between building something yourself, and using someone else’s system (which may or may not involve paying them for it). As a simple example, for our product, we have to send email to many of our users fairly regularly to update them on the status of their accounts. For that, we chose to use Amazon Web Services, which can handle all the nitty gritty details of sending lots of email (which is actually more complicated than we might think). We have to pay Amazon for the service, but it frees our time up to work on other things. So a major component of my job is to learn about these external pieces of code, understand what they do and how they do it, so that I can make decisions about what we should use.

On the question of what to do before college to prepare for a computing career, I agree that you probably should learn Java, but that’s only out of grudging necessity if the AP Computer Science test uses it. My opinion is that Java is a poor language for learning to program, for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here. If you really want to get ahead, the language you should consider learning is Lisp, or a closely related language such as Scheme or Logo. There’s a lot of fun material available for these languages (one of my favorites is a book called Land Of Lisp by Conrad Barski). Do Lisp for six months before jumping into Java, C, or Python, and it will give you a much better foundation to be a good programmer.

Another tip: if you’re learning any kind of music (or if, more likely, your parents have forced you to take lessons), don’t stop. Your music will probably help your programming. There’s a somewhat mysterious but well-known connection between music and programming, something to do with the fusion of the mathematical and creative elements. Most of the best programmers I know are also musicians.

Finally, on the question of how much schooling you should do, there are a lot of opinions. Jimmy went all the way through his PhD, and if you want to do research or teaching, that’s pretty much a requirement. But if you just want an exciting career as a software engineer, I actually recommend against a PhD. I think it’s overkill. It takes forever, and it often sends the wrong message to potential employers about your expectations. And, in my experience, most PhDs I’ve worked with have actually developed some very bad coding habits that are difficult to break because they’ve spent too much time coding by themselves rather than working within the structured environment of a software company. My advice is, unless you’re certain from the outset that you want to go into teaching or research, go work for a company for three or four years before deciding whether to start a PhD.

I think a master’s degree is a good sweet spot if you just want to beef up your education before going to work. A master’s will generally broaden your opportunities without closing any doors, whereas a PhD will generally open some doors and close others.

Don’t be tempted to drop out of college, though. Yes, you hear stories about the Bill Gateses of the world who dropped out of college, started companies and became billionaires. But those days are over. Computing systems today are much more complicated, and change much more quickly. In order to succeed now, you will need the background you will get in your college computer science program.

Finally, as a programmer, you should expect to be a lifelong learner. We’re in an age where technology changes extremely rapidly, with industry-shaking advances happening pretty much every single year. Learning to learn, practicing your learning skills, is a must in order to keep up.

WABC Eyewitness News Opening from 1988 on YouTube

As a corollary, I too won’t be getting the first generation iPad. It’s a product for the early adopters with the disposable income, or the developers looking to be first into a new market. I might look at the third generation product when it comes out in mid 2011 or so. My macbook pro remains my workhorse machine for now.