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Amazing how many developers, even from very prestigious schools, write really horrific code. As a self taught programmer getting into the industry over the past
by woah 13y ago
Amazing how many developers, even from very prestigious schools, write really horrific code. As a self taught programmer getting into the industry over the past few years, I have been shocked. Oh well, I guess it's "fuck it, ship it".
- pnathan 13y agoQuestion: why would school prestige correlate with quality of code?
- nitrogen 13y agoWhy shouldn't it? Prestige presumably had to be earned at some point. If prestigious schools are producing sub-par developers at a rate equal to other schools, what is the value of that prestige?
- droz 13y agoMore often than note prestige is something someone is born into rather than earned.
- pnathan 13y agoNot all prestige is equal, for one thing. Your fine institution might attract world leaders as speakers for its econ, foreign policy, and poly sci departments, but its CS department might be weak. For another thing, the academe and what it teaches is, as a general rule, not really focused on what the business world teaches. So excellence in the academe does not per se translate immediately to excellence in the business world. While an adaptable learner would be excellent potential and long-term capability, I would expect them to have a learning curve for the different pressures and knowledge needed to succeed in business.
- anaphor 13y agoPresumably someone who graduates from Stanford or MIT in CS will be preferred over someone graduating from Princeton or Yale in CS (Personally Indiana or NEU would be my first choices).
- ars_technician 13y agoPrecisely. Princeton is prestigious, but I don't want formal models. I want someone that can at least pass the fizzbuzz test.
- cema 13y agoBecause the quality of code correlates with the school prestige -- which, in turn, is built on the quality of education (or, at least, the quality of the graduates, may not be the same thing, if the quality of the applicants is also different).
- krapp 13y agoWhenever someone posts an article here about some exploit relating to a startup, or that it turns out they were never doing anything but storing passwords in plaintext, you'll get a small army of posters pointing out that it would be insane for them to focus on anything besides getting the product out the door working just well enough to start taking people's money as fast as possible. So yeah, "fuck it, ship it" seems to be more or less the standard.
- wellboy 13y agoNo one expects from a non-funded startup with 1 engineer on board to have all the security figured out. However, if you are VC funded with 10 engineers on the team, this is inexcusable.
- krapp 13y agoI would argue that first startup needs to spend the extra time or hire another developer if the end result otherwise is something as egregious as what QuizUp appears to be doing. But I agree, there's a huge difference between just not being able to implement security and not considering it relevant. To me, this is clearly a sign of the latter.
- joshfraser 13y agoPeople don't realize how easy it is to see the secret API's behind their mobile apps. There's no obvious view-source on my phone and a lot of devs lack a full picture of how all the pieces fit together.
- pnathan 13y agohey man - I'm putting together an unfunded product on the side by myself, and my passwords are using scrypt, and they have a salt, and the salt is per-user, and the system rejects weak passwords based on popular entries, bad entropy, and easy guessability. It honestly wasn't more than 8 hours of foolery to get all that working. Is it ready for the credit card industry? no. But it's going to stop derps who get their hands on the DB.
- djKianoosh 13y agoseems, anecdotally speaking of course, that most of the people I know who are self taught create way better (for some nebulous definition of better) software than the purely school-taught folks. maybe we just enjoy it more who knows... btw, combination of both is probably better
- krapp 13y agoas a self-taught coder who's taking a CS course I can certainly appreciate the value of each.
- woah 13y agoWell, if you went to Stanford and are able to bang together some spaghetti that only runs by pure coincidence, you're a rockstar. If the only diploma you hold is from some backwoods high school, you've got a bit more to prove.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- phillmv 13y agoThat's easy. We don't really know what it means to write good code. We can't measure it. We can barely talk about it meaningfully. It's rarely taught except via osmosis: you pair with someone more experienced and you read cargo cult blog posts.
- woah 13y agoI know it when I see it!