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Few months back I was working together with a group of framework programmers from a large consulting company. They seem to spend solid third of their time goog

Few months back I was working together with a group of framework programmers from a large consulting company. They seem to spend solid third of their time googling for how to write a code. Write code, hit a jam, google, find something in stackoverflow, ruminate between what is found, copy paste and try if it works. They don't know their framework well enough to just write a code. I'm a more of a embedded software/hardware guy and manager, but I can sit down and write pivot pivot query in plain sql without consulting any references. I'm not saying these guys are doing something wrong. It may be that in the typical consultant work where you have existing old frameworks, new frameworks and new stuff coming in constantly, there is less value to master the tools that you are using. You write some glue, then move on.

bodas 8y ago
That's a good thing, I think. Programmers should have a good understanding of general algorithms but it's up to the frameworks themselves to reduce the need to be "mastered". I don't want to spend time mastering a particular framework because that knowledge is not portable across languages.
- Nokinside 8y ago
  I suspect it's good thing also. It may also be the only way to scale programming into larger groups. You can differentiate the workforce. Programming by copy pasting example code withing frameworks may allow skipping the requirement to understand general algorithms. Less required expertise means less pay and cheaper products. You hire 10 low-paid easily replaceable code monkeys who slap together pieces of software from ready components. It's like like assembly work. Then you hire one guy who knows things to supervise them and solve the problems when they can't figure them out. It's like blue collar assembly workers and engineers.
  - cleong 8y ago
    I think part of this is the industry and part of it is the technology. Entire languages in the web are basically meant to be glue. Embedded usually has different requirements from Web, memory and performance are real problems you run into fast if you don't know what your doing. Where in web, memory and performance are a problem of economics, everyone is being served from a cluster that can be scaled if the software is shoddy.

bodas 8y ago

That's a good thing, I think. Programmers should have a good understanding of general algorithms but it's up to the frameworks themselves to reduce the need to be "mastered". I don't want to spend time mastering a particular framework because that knowledge is not portable across languages.

Nokinside 8y ago
I suspect it's good thing also. It may also be the only way to scale programming into larger groups. You can differentiate the workforce. Programming by copy pasting example code withing frameworks may allow skipping the requirement to understand general algorithms. Less required expertise means less pay and cheaper products. You hire 10 low-paid easily replaceable code monkeys who slap together pieces of software from ready components. It's like like assembly work. Then you hire one guy who knows things to supervise them and solve the problems when they can't figure them out. It's like blue collar assembly workers and engineers.
- cleong 8y ago
  I think part of this is the industry and part of it is the technology. Entire languages in the web are basically meant to be glue. Embedded usually has different requirements from Web, memory and performance are real problems you run into fast if you don't know what your doing. Where in web, memory and performance are a problem of economics, everyone is being served from a cluster that can be scaled if the software is shoddy.