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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

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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?

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[–] Eiri@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks 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.