5 ms·

The list of qualities here would indicate a good person in any profession, not just programming. I think these challenges only exist because we (as a society)

The list of qualities here would indicate a good person in any profession, not just programming. I think these challenges only exist because we (as a society) have learned to accept schooling as the indicator of qualification.

DaniFong 18y ago
Schooling might not work so well as qualification, but take care not to trivialize the problem. You can't really figure out how good someone is until you've worked with them, unless they have a long string of accomplishments. Schooling might be a little above noise, but at least it functions as a fairly reliable minimum bar.
- swombat 18y ago
  I disagree. I work with a brilliant coder who dropped out of high school.
  - DaniFong 18y ago
    I dropped out of highschool too; my point is that a degree in a technical discipline, from a tough school, will filter out many people who are incapable. It's the low bar to jump over. But by no means will all of the brilliant people have degrees, nor even decent looking credentials, on paper.
  - Rexxar 18y ago
    (A ⇒ B) ⇏ (¬A ⇒ ¬B)
- jcromartie 18y ago
  Based on the deluge of resumes I've seen coming into tech shops lately, the bar set by college degrees is so low that you need to dig to find it.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - gaius 18y ago
    That is why there is the notion of league tables for colleges. My friends with MBAs say quite plainly that unless an MBA is from a "top 25" school, it simply isn't worth doing or having.
    - aswanson 18y ago
      That leads me to believe it is a bullshit field of study altogether, if the only metric of worth is the school name.
      - gaius 18y ago
        CS graduate from MIT or Podunk U?
        jcromartie 18y ago
        Well, can they code or not?
        gaius 18y ago
        You've got a pile of a hundred CVs to sort through.
        mamama 18y ago
        Then you've got other problems.
maxwell 18y ago
Anyone with these traits probably is good, but a programmer that doesn't have them is almost certainly not good. I imagine there are plenty of plumbers and accountants who don't work on personal projects, have hidden experience, or play with bleeding-edge technologies and are still good. In those fields, schooling is still probably the best indicator of qualification. The more artistic the profession, the less telling someone's formal education seems to be. Since programs can do anything that our minds can think, programming tasks range from the hardest of hard sciences (say, compiler optimization) to pure art (videogames, for example). I suspect the best compiler optimizers went to (and perhaps now work for) the best schools, while I doubt there's much correlation between schooling and great game developers.
- gaius 18y ago
  a programmer that doesn't have them is almost certainly not good Maybe that is true if your bag is Web 2.0 AJAX Rails etc etc. But I'll bet the people writing "serious" software (for example, safety-critical embedded systems) are treating it exactly the same as say Civil Engineers treat their jobs. I'd be very reluctant to call them "not good", how reliable is their work compared to the average website?

DaniFong 18y ago

Schooling might not work so well as qualification, but take care not to trivialize the problem. You can't really figure out how good someone is until you've worked with them, unless they have a long string of accomplishments. Schooling might be a little above noise, but at least it functions as a fairly reliable minimum bar.

swombat 18y ago
I disagree. I work with a brilliant coder who dropped out of high school.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  I dropped out of highschool too; my point is that a degree in a technical discipline, from a tough school, will filter out many people who are incapable. It's the low bar to jump over. But by no means will all of the brilliant people have degrees, nor even decent looking credentials, on paper.
- Rexxar 18y ago
  (A ⇒ B) ⇏ (¬A ⇒ ¬B)
jcromartie 18y ago
Based on the deluge of resumes I've seen coming into tech shops lately, the bar set by college degrees is so low that you need to dig to find it.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- gaius 18y ago
  That is why there is the notion of league tables for colleges. My friends with MBAs say quite plainly that unless an MBA is from a "top 25" school, it simply isn't worth doing or having.
  - aswanson 18y ago
    That leads me to believe it is a bullshit field of study altogether, if the only metric of worth is the school name.
    - gaius 18y ago
      CS graduate from MIT or Podunk U?
      - jcromartie 18y ago
        Well, can they code or not?
        gaius 18y ago
        You've got a pile of a hundred CVs to sort through.
        mamama 18y ago
        Then you've got other problems.

maxwell 18y ago

Anyone with these traits probably is good, but a programmer that doesn't have them is almost certainly not good. I imagine there are plenty of plumbers and accountants who don't work on personal projects, have hidden experience, or play with bleeding-edge technologies and are still good. In those fields, schooling is still probably the best indicator of qualification. The more artistic the profession, the less telling someone's formal education seems to be. Since programs can do anything that our minds can think, programming tasks range from the hardest of hard sciences (say, compiler optimization) to pure art (videogames, for example). I suspect the best compiler optimizers went to (and perhaps now work for) the best schools, while I doubt there's much correlation between schooling and great game developers.

gaius 18y ago
a programmer that doesn't have them is almost certainly not good Maybe that is true if your bag is Web 2.0 AJAX Rails etc etc. But I'll bet the people writing "serious" software (for example, safety-critical embedded systems) are treating it exactly the same as say Civil Engineers treat their jobs. I'd be very reluctant to call them "not good", how reliable is their work compared to the average website?