Are we breeding falsely skilled developers?

Comments

# William said on January 3, 2005 3:45 PM:

That post was from Feb 26th 2004. Having trouble keeping up Bill? :-) Unfortunately it is still true.

# William said on January 3, 2005 3:47 PM:

Actually, someone just sent it to me today - perhaps a bit dated in the strict sense but still pretty relevant unfortunately.

# William said on January 3, 2005 4:14 PM:

i actually am going to write about this very same topic...as soon as i finish up my current post i'm working on (which turning into something way, way, too long)

# William said on January 3, 2005 4:14 PM:

You're BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What a great way to start off the new year!

# William said on January 3, 2005 9:07 PM:

This has always been a concern of mine.

The developer, who'd rather "reinvent the wheel" in order to (1) have a better wheel and (2) maintain his skills, has been unfortunately caricatured and demonized by management.

When I was young, they said "it can't be done". But after Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, a new and dispiriting meme appeared: it's been done.

A false novelty and a false originality is so prized in our culture that there is no percentage in let us say, going to a book, not of "code snippets", but of ALGORITHMS, and coding, in a couple of hours, a reliable implementation of an ALGORITHM.

"False" reusability is where the developer mindlessly copies stolen code...and then can evade responsibility for its unknown behaviors by blaming the vicitim (a common gesture in the broader political culture).

It feeds on the prestige of standing on the shoulders of giants, where you must at a minimum understand the big fella.

TRUE reusability is constituted in the inheritance of technical culture by "reinventing the wheel"...by coding and debugging, for example, algorithms from Sedgewick or Knuth.

To learn to write, Chinese urchins write the same characters over and over again on "coding pads" they buy at the stationers.

To learn to paint, gourgeos French gals and skinny French guys sit on their duff for hours in the Greek and Roman sculpture galleries of the louvre and make precise copies of the bric a brac using Conte crayon and a prespecified paper in order to qualified for a state-subsidized education (that doesn't beggar them with student loans).

But in America, we conclude it's been done and there is somehow no point in Building Your Own.

A high-school culture is preserved into adulthood by people who don't grow up, which mocks aspiration as mere geekiness.

My supervisor at Motorola in 1979 told me that my compiler development interests and skills were of no interest to her because all possible compilers had been written...two years before Phillipe Kahn founded Borland, a company based on new compilers.

And today, dishonest managements, through rigid and unfreelin g schedules, egg programmers into positive theft in fear that they might actually write some goddamn code.

# William said on January 3, 2005 10:22 PM:

Yes there are many falsely skilled developers out there...to many to count!! I have worked with a lot of them and it's sad when they try to pass off code as their own. This happened to me when someone tried to pass off some code from OpenNETCF that I submitted but the person did not bother looking at the changeLog. The reaction on their face when I showed them the change log was priceless :)

For me coding is like writing an essay...everyone has a writing style...and when that style changes in every method in a class, it's a little bit obvious! I think having projects like OpenNETCF benefits everyone, but if you just cut and paste and don't try to understand what is going on within the code then your not a developer. I have worked with so many people who don't ask "why" or "how" something works, they just want to paste in the code and get their jobs done.

Someone once told me early in my career..."Anyone can write code especially this day and age, but it takes a certain mindset to be a true developer."

# William said on January 3, 2005 10:37 PM:

Mark:

Someone tried sending you code from OpennetCF.org that you yourself wrote? WOW! They should f****cking hang for shit like that -

# William said on January 3, 2005 10:46 PM:

LOL...the look on their face when they saw the changelog.txt file and my name on the OpenNETCF.org website was good enough for me. :) They actually asked "are you really that guy?" I was ready to send him packing but i didn't have the power to do that :(

# William said on January 4, 2005 8:33 AM:

go over to webmasterworld.com, they all think they're programmers because they are 'html coders'.