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guess and check is a surprisingly good skill to learn and one that many people cannot master without years of doing it. employees with guess and check skills wi
by sosuke 18y ago
guess and check is a surprisingly good skill to learn and one that many people cannot master without years of doing it. employees with guess and check skills will help in fringe cases of development where one or more of the senior developers does not have any experience, instead of reading docs the tend to take a sledgehammer to the problem and can tend to bang a working version out very quickly in any given environment. guess and check hackers that are truly good will be the fastest to adapt to any changing situation in a faster paced development schedule and you might see them flounder in boredom in larger well outlined projects where they can't find problems to try and fix
this isn't to say that you, mdasen, doesn't find good guess and check hack artists, but just to put a positive spin on what otherwise looks like a negative comment to developers that don't have their language of choice memorized.
- jrockway 18y agoLet me provide a counterexample. Recently, I needed to do a rather complicated SQL query (via an ORM, so not as painful as it sounds). Anyway, I didn't know how to solve the problem, so I wrote a test case and tested various versions of the query. I had no idea what I was doing, really, and it took me a day to get the query to work. Then I realized that the test case was wrong (!) and I was back to square one. I read up on some more relational theory, thought about my problem a bit more, and then had the answer in an hour. To make a long story short, writing code that you don't understand is a bad idea. It may appear to work, but it's probably broken and you just don't have the understanding to know why. If you don't understand code when you write it, what's the chance that you'll ever be able to maintain it?