Being comfortable with basic back-of-the-envelope math can be a huge benefit. (Full disclosure: i am a math major who is now a programmer)

Over my career I have several examples of projects that have saved weeks worth of dev time because someone could predict the result with some basic calculations. I also have several examples where I have shown people some basic math showing that their idea is never gonna work, they don’t listen and do it anyway, and I see them 1 month later and the project failed in the way i predicted.

A popular (and wise) saying is that “Weeks of work can save you hours of meetings”. I think the same is true for basic math. “Weeks of coding can save you minutes of calculation”.

You can definitely be a successful programmer career without great math skills. Math is a tool that can help you be more effective.

I think folks saying you don’t need math are right. But if you are having trouble with college algebra you might have trouble with CS. Or the teacher is bad.

Math really builds on itself at the stage where you are. Without good algebra calculus isn’t going to work well.

I’d try a different teacher. Online courses or repeating the course with another professor or something.

Anywhere from very important to not important at all, depending on your specific job.

There is some good news though, you’ve been lied to about sucking at math. Whether by yourself or other people I do not know, but the education research I have seen has been pretty clear that the main difference between people of normal intelligence who are ‘good at math’ and those ‘bad at math’ is how long they’re willing to work on a problem to ensure the correct answer before moving on.

I know ‘try harder’ sucks as an answer but it’s the best one I know of and at least in this case will actually make a difference.

Programming and math are both heavily rule-based and logic-based, which is why people say if you’re good at math you may be good at programming.

Depends on the programming job.

In my amateur experience, the most difficult math I had to do was use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate a point that was spinning around an other point.

But I can see needing to be able to use matrices in some instances.

Being good at math allows programmers to code more efficient systems. Instead of doing multiple complicated lines, it could all be incorporated into a single efficient equation.

Most of programming is just logic based. Although math is also logic based. So take from it what you will.

As many have already said, the math needed will depend on what type of work you’re looking to do. Writing business software, for example, rarely requires more than basic arithmetic.

However, I think that the logical thinking skills that are needed for math are also necessary to be a good software engineer.

I’ve been a full stack dev for about 11 years. I do some basic algebra but that’s about it.

Math underlies programming in a similar fashion to how physics underlies automobile driving. You don’t ever need to know about newton’s laws of motion to pass your driver’s license and never get a ticket until you die. At the same time, I will readily claim that any driver that doesn’t improve after learning about newton’s laws of motion had already internalized those laws through experience.

Math will help your intuition with how to tackle problems in programming. From finding a solution to anticipating how different constraints (notably time and memory) will affect which solutions are available to you, experience working on math problems - especially across different domains in math - will grease the wheels of your programmer mind.

Math on its own will probably not be enough (many great mathematicians are quite unskilled at programming). Just as driving a car is about much more than just the physics involved, there is a lot more to programming than just the math.

Totally depends what you end up working on as a programmer. If it’s web apps, you’ll be totally fine. All you need is basic arithmetic. Writing a game engine? You’ll need to know some basic to moderate matrix maths…

If you’re doing formal verification using unbounded model checking… good fucking luck.

On average I would say most programming tasks need very little maths. If you can add and multiply you’ll be fine. Definitely sounds like you’ll be ok.

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.

More than math courses - logic courses in general helped me rethink and structure things in a variety of ways in how to approach problems. If nothing else it improves your “if-then-else”-fu to understand when you are not(not(not something))). My math degree required logic courses though at the same time so it made sense. For higher level math logic plays a heavy role and so leveraging that aspect helps in a lot of ways.

It really depends on the role you are looking for. If working with data and doing analysis, you need some knowledge in stats and probability. If you are working on simulations, you will need basic calculus and algebra. If you are looking at game development, you will need basic trigonometry and vector arithmetic. The one thing you don’t need is mental arithmetic because you have a computer.

That being said, you can get by without these skills, it just becomes harder to see what you need to do, even if you would know how to implement it. This is alleviated if you are working in a team however.

Don’t need a degree, but computer programming is fundamentally logic and algorithms. You need to have internalise reasoning logically. In some ways critical thinking is closer to programming than trig is.

unless programming something math intensive like 3d graphics, then basic arithmetic and just a general intuition of numbers is more than enough.

I failed calc2 and am gainfully employed as a mid/upper level software engineer.

One guy at work really saved the day because he’s good at math, and made a very slow process much faster because he knows … uh… vector math? He did magic with numpy