7 ms·

My biggest surprise - many developers, even in senior positions, are self-taught and cannot properly implement even basic stuff like binary search, don't unders

• shanelja 14y ago
  Your implying that self taught developers are unable to comprehend basic parts of computer science is really an over generalization, I and many of my co-workers are self taught and we often find that graduates, whilst being intelligent and understanding the more esoteric areas of the profession, are unable to understand certain ideas as 'time is money, don't do it cool when a simpler way will work just as well' and are also incapable of understanding how to monetize aspects of a code base. It's all well and good being self taught or university educated, but inevitably you need a mix of both disciplinary aspects to be able to function properly within a company.
  • trekkin 14y ago
    I am not implying in any way that self-taught developers are unable of anything. I know a lot of great self-taught developers. However, many developers without formal CS training learn one or two technologies (e.g. ruby or another web framework) and believe this is enough; they even call themselves "hackers". That last approach surprised me.
    • shanelja 14y ago
      I think the same applies for everyone, you have to expand your horizons unless the company you work for is extremely locked down on technologies. Everyone should know a few languages so they have the tools they need to do their job properly, would we use a chainsaw to screw something to a wall just because we hadn't learned how to use a screwdriver yet?
  • drunkpotato 14y ago
    Yes, it's exactly that attitude he is arguing against. Then it falls to people who know what they're doing to clean up after the "just get it done" morons, when it turns out just getting it done means getting it done wrong and badly and slow. Management thinks "oh, it's already done, speeding it up should be an easy job, what's wrong with our new maintenance guys that they take so long to just fix it up?" I use the term morons advisedly, it is blunt and true, an accurate description of the "get it done" mentality of people with little experience and no formal training, who don't even know or acknowledge the depth of their ignorance and error.
    • shanelja 14y ago
      I'm not saying to just 'get it done' because that is really misinterpreting what I said before, I'm saying that the low level, time intensive method is not always the best, especially when you need to push a project soon and time is really running out. Your insinuation that doing something quickly means doing it badly is, in my opinion, unfounded, being productive and speedy is merely a by product of knowing what you are doing.
      • drunkpotato 14y ago
        Fair enough. "Get it done" is a trigger phrase for me, so I responded in too personal an attack. There are many "get it done" morons out there, and I have worked with several, but that of course does not mean you are one. You recognize the inherent trade-offs involved, which I appreciate.
    • swalsh 14y ago
      Surprise, both of you guys are needed! The "get it done" guy, is almost never the "do it right" guy. Some are closer to each other then others... but almost never are they the same guy. The thing is, when you're building that first prototype, the most important thing is getting it out there and proving the concept works! It doesn't matter if you build the perfect architecture that can scale effortlessly if in the end no one decides your product has value. Of course, I've been that guy who has to clean up too. That job sucks :( almost never is the product designed the way it eventually ends up being used.
• icebraining 14y ago
  For me, it was the opposite of ignoring performance: the developers of the platform we work on have decided to use floats for accounting, because decimals were "slow".
  • mgkimsal 14y ago
    Relatedly (yet unrelatedly) I worked at a place where the IT team were given a bunch of excel docs to post to the website. They spent weeks taking all the data and created nested div/span sets with hand styling on each cell (because certain IE versions would deal with the styles right unless inline, IIRC), because tables were "depreciated" (sic). the end result looked just like HTML tables, except they were about 5 times as large in HTML, and not anywhere easily as manageable nor usable by screen readers. "tables are being depreciated - everything should be done with divs" was some mantra at this place for months, and there was no amount of logic or argumentation that would make anyone see sense. Even something like pointing out the W3C spec explicitly still had TABLE as a defined element... that was just false, because tables are "going away". This was... 8 years ago(?)... we still have tables. :/ Good times. :)
    • yuhong 14y ago
      Yep, it is tables used as layout that is depreciated.
      • mgkimsal 14y ago
        Well, I'd say not even that. When you're laying out a spreadsheet, just use tables then style them as appropriate. My recommendations were summarily passed over, and I don't work there any more. :)
• hartror 14y ago
  Self taught programmer in a senior position here. Frankly pointing to to being able to implement algorithms as a measure of a programmer's ability is next to useless. Any code monkey can ape a data structure they've seen in a book. Designing code so when requirements are changed you can easily swap that data structure with another is the real test. ps I can implement any number is algorithms and design patterns, though I rarely get to.
  • mgkimsal 14y ago
    I posted a much longer reply just now, but you get to the heart of it. On your PS of "I rarely get to", would you go further and say "I rarely need to" as well? Because that's how I feel for about 95% of the work I do. There's a few places in larger projects where I enjoy getting to test out a few different approaches to data structures in anticipation of potential use cases (speed, concurrency, reporting needs, etc). But after a while, I tend to know in advance what will work 'well enough' (or maybe even what the 'optimal' structures are) and don't need to (or get to) spend much time experimenting.
• mgkimsal 14y ago
  I fall in to that camp. I don't look down on 'theoretical CS' stuff, but it's rarely ever even had to be a consideration in projects I've worked on, which has included ecommerce systems selling billions of dollars of stuff (large qtys, small price per item), real time reporting of financial data, and numerous other projects requiring a degree of scale or speed or both (php, vb, java and other stuff over the years). Not everyone works on facebook, nor is everyone writing real-time device drivers, nor is everyone writing something that will explode up in users tomorrow, devastating the business if not every customer is served in less than 50ms. I may be one of those in the 'get it done' camp, but I've also learned over the past several years to opt for using well-known libraries when possible, to take advantage of the expertise and skills that I don't have (yet). 15 years ago, I was firmly in the 'write it from scratch and focus on performance, tightness, elegance, etc' camp, but not so much today. Part of that is because we simply didn't have the wealth of free software libraries we do today, so you had to write more stuff from scratch, but that's not as much of an excuse today. I've yet to have to write a binary search after 17 years in professional software development, and my projects have not suffered because of it. I had probably a good 10 years of hobbyist time before that, so I probably have simply picked up 'good' patterns to common problems without necessarily knowing the specific CS theory or names behind them in some cases. All that said, my answer to performance issues in my apps is generally not 'throw more hardware at it' - I will profile to look for bottlenecks, isolate specific areas and rewrite sections of code to make them more performant, which sometimes means changing how data is organized/stored, or modifying queries, or something else. Lastly, while I think I understand the type of person/attitude you're talking about "full of self-important people like this", I don't think I see myself in that particular camp (but of course, no one ever does, right?). There's a degree of pragmatism that needs to happen in 'real world' software dev (isn't agile all about "you ain't gonna need it"?). I've also had to 'clean up' after enough other developers over the past 17 years - including myself on a number of occasions - that my perspective may be sufficiently different from the type of people that work in company X for 10 years and rise to the rank of 'sr dev' only ever having worked in one or two places. Or maybe I'm just a self-important ass who's justifying himself too much in public? EDIT: One other thing that has popped in to my head - I've worked on more than couple projects where other people on the team (before me or concurrently) insisted on certain things being done "right", simply because that was the "right" way. Two things were apparent - they typically didn't know any other way at all (lack of experience) and they had no understanding of what the real use of the application was - never talked to end users or other depts/units, and were creating far more work for everyone else by not implementing things differently (in their minds, 'compromising on correctness'). Couple different scenarios in the past few years spring to mind.
• akent 14y ago
  I'd rather only have to deal with these 'high level only' folks vs the ones that literally could not code up a fizz buzz solution to save themselves. My biggest surprise is that people like this really do exist in the industry.
• ExpiredLink 14y ago
  >> 2. Few Clever Algorithms >> 1. Complexity from Aggregation
• andrewvc 14y ago
  For christ's sake. I've met far too many people with Uni degrees who don't know what a B-Tree is, or even what a linked list is (truly scary).
  • lttlrck 14y ago
    yeah but they could rewrite std::stack... um, without templates.
    • mseebach 14y ago
      If they did indeed do that without understanding how a linked list works, then they're not going to do very well at it.
      • andrewvc 14y ago
        Surprisingly most software devs I've met understand arrays and hashes, but few know what a linked list is. I think this is an artifact on many of them using high level languages where linked lists are rarely used. That's no excuse though
• michaelochurch 14y ago
  My biggest surprise - many developers, even in senior positions, are self-taught and cannot properly implement even basic stuff like binary search, don't understand basic performance considerations around algorithm complexity. Don't conflate "self-taught" with ignorance. I'm 85% self-taught (I was a math major in college, and I took a few CS courses but not enough to become a serious coder) but I've picked up a lot of that stuff, on account of curiosity, later on. Whether someone learned how to program in school or in the trenches matters a lot less than whether they had the curiosity to actually learn it, whether than a "get 'er done" attitude that leads to no real knowledge. There are a lot of people who pursued CS majors and evidently did well enough to get good jobs but, when they got out into the real world, turned out a bunch of VisitorFactory enterprise crap. Methinks they should have drunk less in college.
  • UK-AL 14y ago
    You have to be careful, many people who laugh at design patterns turn out crap spaghetti code. At least with design patterns, you are at least attempting to separate traversal from operations on the elements as with visitors. People who don't like them often turn out huge monolithic algorithms which is an even worse crime.
    • michaelochurch 14y ago
      Functional programming has "design patterns" but few of them, and those design patterns make so much sense that you stop thinking of them as such and just think of them as the way to solve problems. Referentially transparent functions and immutable records for data are design patterns in the non-pejorative sense, but they simplify code rather than complicating it. These are the two design patterns of functional programming: Noun and Verb. For mutable state (monad vs. ref cells vs. message passing) and for the Adjective problem (type classes vs. inheritance vs. functors) there is less of a consensus. Functional programming isn't always the solution, but it's amazing how often it is the right way of doing things. I just wrote some neural network code, because I'm developing AI for a card game, and I used mutable state because back-propogation feels "inherently mutable" and because mutable Arrays are fast (whereas Scala's Vector might not be). I regret doing so. If nothing else, I should have started with the immutable solution and only moved to the mutable one if there was a measured performance benefit. So many bugs are invited in when you start using mutable state. My problem with Java-the-culture is that it seems to come from a hatred of mathematics and the reality of what programming actually is: solving computational problems, and using abstractions when they simplify solutions. Large-project methodologies with the weird design patterns seem tailored to make the programming process easier for people who failed Calc 2 to manage. To make it something that non-technical higher-ups can understand and commoditize: "We have 38 Java developers, 302 kLoC, 1973 Factories, and 714 Visitors, and we're going to double all these numbers in the next 6 months." (Never mind whether any actual problems are being solved.)
• klibertp 14y ago
  I cringe in pain every time I read such posts. I'm almost entirely self-taught, but I was teaching myself for nearly twenty years now and am still learning, even faster now than ever before. And I will learn for the rest of my life. Hell, I'm writing a compiler now in my free time for fun (not that it's particularly difficult), I already did almost everything that average CS curriculum covers. Stop, please, assuming that being self-taught is in any way worse than being taught by someone else. Maybe it took me more time to comprehend certain concepts, but my understanding of them is just as good, if not better, than most of the graduates. I know that what you really wanted to say is that people who lack motivation, passion and curiosity are worse programmers than those exhibiting these characteristics, but somehow you failed and instead wrote that being self-taught means that one cannot implement things as simple as binary search. And this is plain wrong, as is equating being self-taught with programming in high-level languages.
• lttlrck 14y ago
  You are the one suffering with self-importance by virtue of your disregard for the opinions of experienced engineers.
• randomdata 14y ago
  I understand where your coworkers are coming from. Getting the application up and running to prove the concepts the application intends to solve is critical in a business setting. If you can implement search by hitting every element in the array in a fraction of the time it would take to implement a binary search, you are that much further along to seeing the application in action. If they actually refuse to go back and implement a better algorithm once the characteristics of the application are known, that is another matter. Do these people actually hold the same beliefs once they start to see the performance of their application rapidly degrade?
• gizmo686 14y ago
  This is actually suprising to me. I started out as a self taught programmer in middle-school. Very early on I ran into performance problems, and had to spend a fair amount of time making code efficient. I did, and still do, only explicitly try to make code efficient after I see it is a performance issue, but I wonder how anyone can do a large amount of programming without running into them. Also, even if you never thought of efficiency, or algorithms. If someone describes binary search to you and you cannot implement it, you are still learning to code. If someone asks you to write an efficient search algorithm, I can see those types of people missing it (especially when you consider the fact that for the general case you also need an nlog(n) sorting algorithm.