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He mentions that the fallacies don't stand up to analysis (which is what you'd expect) but I'd encourage you to resist the head-nod temptation when looking thro
by m0nty 19y ago
He mentions that the fallacies don't stand up to analysis (which is what you'd expect) but I'd encourage you to resist the head-nod temptation when looking through the list of contents, which we're encouraged to accept as "zen koan-like". For example:
"The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers."
I'm immediately suspicious of the spurious accuracy presented and wondering why it's not 30 or 25. And it means not much in practice: the best person in any profession will be orders of magnitude better than the worst, if only because the worst can be very, very bad indeed.
- pchristensen 19y agoI always find those numbers odd, since it implies that all programmers create some value. Bad programmers not only don't produce much, they introduce bugs that others need to fix and they need lots of help, hand-holding, and management effort, which draws down the productivity of others. 28 times better than a negative number isn't good at all!
- pchristensen 19y agoSteve McConnell just wrote something about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147916 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147916