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It would be wise to approach this topic with some detachment, as if debating whether red or black ants have longer lifespans. There is a risk of feeling one's
by asher 16y ago
It would be wise to approach this topic with some detachment, as if debating whether red or black ants have longer lifespans.
There is a risk of feeling one's self-image threatened by this thesis (and its opposite). That perception of threat often ends rational thought.
I think we all suspect that any correlation, positive or negative, between GPA and programmer "value" is merely aggregating several trends which may oppose each other.
Thus, there may be a current of brilliant, rebellious tinkerers who never get good grades but write good code; there may be a current of lazy underachievers who get bad grades and write bad code.
And people change with time. Someone who gets bad grades at 19 but writes great code at 29 may have changed into a "good grades" type.
I'm not sure we'd even agree on what a good programmer is. The truly bad is obvious, but one man's elegant virtuosity is another's unfixable nightmare.
- shadowsun7 16y agoI agree with you on everything except the last bit. I believe the literature on what a good programmer is has been fairly clear - Fred Brooks first wrote about it in the Mythical Man-Month, and since then there has been a large body of empirical evidence supporting his claims on the variance between good and bad programmers. Good programmers are simply more productive. They ship more code, given the same amount of time. That's a simple way of looking at things, for sure (you may argue about readability and maintainability and so on so forth), but when the difference is 20 times the average programmer, people begin to sit up and take notice.