5 ms·

/watches straw man fall over without putting up a fight. Would you rather work with someone who added a major subsystem to one of your compilers for fun or som

/watches straw man fall over without putting up a fight. Would you rather work with someone who added a major subsystem to one of your compilers for fun or someone who had never coded but could recite the ISO standard by heart? Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”? If measurements tend to become targets over time then the goal of “develop expertise” measured by “pass a test” shifts to a goal of “pass the test”, and the test is limited to what you can ask hundreds of students in a couple of hours, and they’ve seen practise papers and last year’s papers and you can’t talk to them, and you can’t see them work or the results of their work. Is that then a good way, to develop and validate their expertise? Is it the best available way?

WalterBright 5y ago
> Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”? All the people who believe that "teaching the test" is not real knowledge. For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar? How about consult a physician who couldn't pass his medical boards? How about get on an airplane with a pilot who flunked flight school, but "really knows how to fly"? And yes, there are bad tests. But there are also good tests, and they work. Personally, I've never encountered a person who mastered a topic but couldn't get a good grade in it.
- nexuist 5y ago
  Lawyers who lose cases, physicians who couldn't save their patients, and pilots who have been in plane crashes still get to work in their occupation after the fact. Experience rules over all. In your examples all those people never got to practice their craft. Lawyers can't practice law without a bar, physicians can't perform surgery without a medical license, etc. But software development isn't like that. What if there was a surgeon who has completed 10,000 successful surgeries but never went through med school? What if there was a lawyer who won major cases with no law degree? Or a commercial pilot who successfully flew for years on a fraudulent license and only stopped flying because he got caught? (That last one actually happened a few months ago). If you could choose, would't you pick the surgeon with a wildly successful track record over the recently graduated med school student who has never done a surgery outside of residency?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I don't buy for a minute you'd choose a lawyer who didn't pass the bar, etc.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      I would certainly choose a lawyer who didn’t pass the bar provided they have won 10,000 cases in the past. Although I would settle for 1000-2000, etc.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        I don't believe such a lawyer couldn't pass the bar.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > pilots who have been in plane crashes still get to work in their occupation after the fact. Most of them are too dead to continue to work, and the rest usually get fired if the crash was due to pilot error. And no, I don't believe you're going to fly with a pilot who flunked out of flight school.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      Notice that I said “pilots who have been in plane crashes” and not “pilots who caused plane crashes.” This goes along with the theme of the lawyer losing the case, the surgeon losing the patient, etc. Sometimes you can do everything right and still everything goes wrong. Which is to say that the experience gained from these events makes these people better practitioners; it doesn’t matter what school they went to or what test they took if they gained real world experience practicing their craft. No, I wouldn’t fly with a pilot who flunked out of flight school, but I would certainly fly with a pilot who’s flown for 10 years without a license over a pilot with a brand new PPL and <2000 hours flight experience. Maybe for better perspective we can try this exercise: let’s say there’s a world renowned brain surgeon in, say, Norway who has worked for decades and performed tens of thousands of surgeries. No mistakes! Tens of thousands of happy stories! But wait. Our intrepid surgeon can’t practice in the US because she didn’t go to medical school here! If she wanted to operate on a patient in the US mainland, she’d lose to a doctor who just exited residency! If you were the patient who needed brain surgery, who would you pick? The world renowned expert or the guy who just finished training? Your logic dictates that the guy with the credentials wins out for no reason other than they went through whatever process to obtain those credentials, regardless if there are better metrics or methods to judge occupational success by.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  > For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar? It's not about hiring a lawyer who flunked the bar. It's more like, how many lawyers are bad lawyers despite passing the bar. I don't know about law specifically, but in my experience a lot of people who pass tests don't have deep understanding. Vice versa may also be true depending on the test.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    It's about the virtual certainty that those who didn't pass the bar are bad lawyers.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  Take all 8 billion human shapes, four right angle corners and straight sides is the test, all sides the same length is expertise. You're saying that all squares are definitely rectangles, which I agree with. I'm saying all rectangles aren't necessarily squares. Then it feels like you're saying there aren't many more rectangles than squares, citing that there are unquestionably squares. Unstated I'm suggesting there are a lot more rectangles than squares, by Sturgeons Law 95% of tests are crud, so there are far more people who passed a test than there are people who passed a test and have expertise. There are so many people in IT with coworkers who passed MCSE or A+ tests but cannot do what the test said they can do that it has become a meme, for one example. That 5% of tests are rigorous and accurately identify squares is not really something I question, but I might question that the people who pass them were "taught to take the test" and nothing else. (Would you say 7 years of degree, medical school, hospital residency, rotation around departments, counts as "teaching to the test", i.e. "an unhealthy focus on excessive repetition of simple, isolated skills ("drill and kill") [which] limits the teacher's ability to foster a holistic understanding of the subject matter."? - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test )
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    If you cannot answer questions about a subject then you haven't mastered it, holistic or not.
    - jodrellblank 5y ago
      Again you're repeating the assertion "if you have expertise you can answer questions", "squares are rectangles", which isn't the point of contention. It's the other way which is in question, "if you can answer questions, does that mean you definitely have expertise?". Is being able to answer questions the same as having expertise? Are there people who CAN answer questions but have no expertise? If so, how many? Referencing your other pilot comment, is being able to say what action you should take in an emergency, the same thing as having the calmness and presence of mind and judgement to actually take that action in an emergency instead of locking up and forgetting and panicking? Certainly the pilot who does act well in an emergency could tell you about it, but can all the people who can tell you about it, do it?

WalterBright 5y ago

> Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”? All the people who believe that "teaching the test" is not real knowledge. For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar? How about consult a physician who couldn't pass his medical boards? How about get on an airplane with a pilot who flunked flight school, but "really knows how to fly"? And yes, there are bad tests. But there are also good tests, and they work. Personally, I've never encountered a person who mastered a topic but couldn't get a good grade in it.

nexuist 5y ago
Lawyers who lose cases, physicians who couldn't save their patients, and pilots who have been in plane crashes still get to work in their occupation after the fact. Experience rules over all. In your examples all those people never got to practice their craft. Lawyers can't practice law without a bar, physicians can't perform surgery without a medical license, etc. But software development isn't like that. What if there was a surgeon who has completed 10,000 successful surgeries but never went through med school? What if there was a lawyer who won major cases with no law degree? Or a commercial pilot who successfully flew for years on a fraudulent license and only stopped flying because he got caught? (That last one actually happened a few months ago). If you could choose, would't you pick the surgeon with a wildly successful track record over the recently graduated med school student who has never done a surgery outside of residency?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I don't buy for a minute you'd choose a lawyer who didn't pass the bar, etc.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    I would certainly choose a lawyer who didn’t pass the bar provided they have won 10,000 cases in the past. Although I would settle for 1000-2000, etc.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I don't believe such a lawyer couldn't pass the bar.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > pilots who have been in plane crashes still get to work in their occupation after the fact. Most of them are too dead to continue to work, and the rest usually get fired if the crash was due to pilot error. And no, I don't believe you're going to fly with a pilot who flunked out of flight school.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    Notice that I said “pilots who have been in plane crashes” and not “pilots who caused plane crashes.” This goes along with the theme of the lawyer losing the case, the surgeon losing the patient, etc. Sometimes you can do everything right and still everything goes wrong. Which is to say that the experience gained from these events makes these people better practitioners; it doesn’t matter what school they went to or what test they took if they gained real world experience practicing their craft. No, I wouldn’t fly with a pilot who flunked out of flight school, but I would certainly fly with a pilot who’s flown for 10 years without a license over a pilot with a brand new PPL and <2000 hours flight experience. Maybe for better perspective we can try this exercise: let’s say there’s a world renowned brain surgeon in, say, Norway who has worked for decades and performed tens of thousands of surgeries. No mistakes! Tens of thousands of happy stories! But wait. Our intrepid surgeon can’t practice in the US because she didn’t go to medical school here! If she wanted to operate on a patient in the US mainland, she’d lose to a doctor who just exited residency! If you were the patient who needed brain surgery, who would you pick? The world renowned expert or the guy who just finished training? Your logic dictates that the guy with the credentials wins out for no reason other than they went through whatever process to obtain those credentials, regardless if there are better metrics or methods to judge occupational success by.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
> For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar? It's not about hiring a lawyer who flunked the bar. It's more like, how many lawyers are bad lawyers despite passing the bar. I don't know about law specifically, but in my experience a lot of people who pass tests don't have deep understanding. Vice versa may also be true depending on the test.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  It's about the virtual certainty that those who didn't pass the bar are bad lawyers.
jodrellblank 5y ago
Take all 8 billion human shapes, four right angle corners and straight sides is the test, all sides the same length is expertise. You're saying that all squares are definitely rectangles, which I agree with. I'm saying all rectangles aren't necessarily squares. Then it feels like you're saying there aren't many more rectangles than squares, citing that there are unquestionably squares. Unstated I'm suggesting there are a lot more rectangles than squares, by Sturgeons Law 95% of tests are crud, so there are far more people who passed a test than there are people who passed a test and have expertise. There are so many people in IT with coworkers who passed MCSE or A+ tests but cannot do what the test said they can do that it has become a meme, for one example. That 5% of tests are rigorous and accurately identify squares is not really something I question, but I might question that the people who pass them were "taught to take the test" and nothing else. (Would you say 7 years of degree, medical school, hospital residency, rotation around departments, counts as "teaching to the test", i.e. "an unhealthy focus on excessive repetition of simple, isolated skills ("drill and kill") [which] limits the teacher's ability to foster a holistic understanding of the subject matter."? - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test )
- WalterBright 5y ago
  If you cannot answer questions about a subject then you haven't mastered it, holistic or not.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    Again you're repeating the assertion "if you have expertise you can answer questions", "squares are rectangles", which isn't the point of contention. It's the other way which is in question, "if you can answer questions, does that mean you definitely have expertise?". Is being able to answer questions the same as having expertise? Are there people who CAN answer questions but have no expertise? If so, how many? Referencing your other pilot comment, is being able to say what action you should take in an emergency, the same thing as having the calmness and presence of mind and judgement to actually take that action in an emergency instead of locking up and forgetting and panicking? Certainly the pilot who does act well in an emergency could tell you about it, but can all the people who can tell you about it, do it?