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I went to school with people who went into CS because they thought they were pretty good with computers and they saw money in programming. Some of them made it;

I went to school with people who went into CS because they thought they were pretty good with computers and they saw money in programming. Some of them made it; others dropped out or changed majors. "Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the same. In particular, most people can’t learn to program: between 30% and 60% of every university computer science department’s intake fail the ﬁrst programming course." (Source: http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf) Many others learn how to string glue code together, but can't really solve problems that go deeper than finding the right library to import. I've heard working programmers worrying they'd fail a FizzBuzz test in an interview. If anything, I suspect the bar for talent will go up—increasingly, programmers barely getting by now will become a commodity. But real aptitude is still rare, and I think the right combinations of talents will hold their value for a good while.

suby 14y ago
I don't understand how anyone can be a working programmer and fail the FizzBuzz test. What are these individuals working on that allows them to contribute enough to the company to not get fired?
- LnxPrgr3 14y ago
  It doesn't hurt that a lot of managers have no idea what to expect from programmers and no idea how to find and attract good programmers. They seem to learn to cope with whatever they can get and learn not to expect much. And I have a theory: there's a group of people who have picked up patterns from a bunch of examples they've found on the Internet, or in code they've managed to be allowed to work on, and they've never grown past that. They're fine as long as you're asking them to do something they've seen or done before (for generous definitions of fine), but completely screwed the moment you venture out of that zone and consulting the Internet draws a blank. They can memorize patterns, but haven't learned to think through anything more complicated than that. These people can appear productive to the right people, yet be completely stumped by FizzBuzz.

suby 14y ago

I don't understand how anyone can be a working programmer and fail the FizzBuzz test. What are these individuals working on that allows them to contribute enough to the company to not get fired?

LnxPrgr3 14y ago
It doesn't hurt that a lot of managers have no idea what to expect from programmers and no idea how to find and attract good programmers. They seem to learn to cope with whatever they can get and learn not to expect much. And I have a theory: there's a group of people who have picked up patterns from a bunch of examples they've found on the Internet, or in code they've managed to be allowed to work on, and they've never grown past that. They're fine as long as you're asking them to do something they've seen or done before (for generous definitions of fine), but completely screwed the moment you venture out of that zone and consulting the Internet draws a blank. They can memorize patterns, but haven't learned to think through anything more complicated than that. These people can appear productive to the right people, yet be completely stumped by FizzBuzz.