David Parnas explained in an interview: Q: What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering? A: Incompetent programmers. There are estimates tha

David Parnas explained in an interview: Q: What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering? A: Incompetent programmers. There are estimates that the number of programmers needed in the U.S. exceeds 200,000. This is entirely misleading. It is not a quantity problem; we have a quality problem. One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more. ... most software developers will have direct exposure to/experience with one or more such incompetent programmers.