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What we need are more people who know what they're doing. I find it condescending to assume that we really need to coddle more people and make them feel good ab

by jgg 13y ago

What we need are more people who know what they're doing. I find it condescending to assume that we really need to coddle more people and make them feel good about coding. Do we need to make this same argument for electrical engineers, surgeons, pilots and air traffic controllers? I don't mean to imply that the current software world is a cabal of highly-skilled geniuses who need preserving - it's not. From personal professional experience, it's, on average, a nuthouse of self-promoting Java idiots with a "dropout genius" mentality who have no common sense and are not nearly as smart or good at problem-solving as their blogs or resumes would lead you to believe. However, I think it would another discussion entirely to ask if the wrong people feel confident enough to write code. The belief that we need to reach out and bring more people into programming, in a world where the average developer struggles to cobble together a web application that isn't full of basic security holes, is ridiculous. Also, I strongly suspect all of these efforts to drag more people into coding are at least partly sponsored by industry, in an attempt to drive the relatively-high wage of a programmer down, in the face of a perceived increase in programmer demand.

KrisAndrew 13y ago
> Also, I strongly suspect all of these efforts to drag more people into coding are at least partly sponsored by industry, in an attempt to drive the relatively-high wage of a programmer down, in the face of a perceived increase in programmer demand. Perhaps by newer and less experienced entrants into the business market. Whenever there's a boom in a certain market, you get a lot of hacks flooding in who have a lot of money, but little sense. Web development was this way post-dot-com-crash. There were many print advertising agencies that added on web development as a service to their clients. However, they didn't alter their business practices to accommodate the needs of software development. These agencies treated software developers like graphic designers. They almost always required fixed cost contracts for development ($X to build a website), and this caused a ton of problems that would be evident to seasoned developers. When I suggested that they change their compensation practices they would refuse, and just blame it on the original programmer for being unskilled. I didn't mind in the beginning, because I was making $200-$300/hr to fix their problems. However, I eventually quit consulting because I got bored with cleaning up bad code caused by time/money constraints. It wasn't stupid programmers who caused the problem, but stupid business people. Bringing it back to the main topic - I think it's wrong to get more people to code. Those who graduate with CS degrees and software development skills are entirely capable to building large, functional systems. However, a good bulk of those programmers aren't going to work at a software/tech company. They're going to work in the IT departments of companies in non-software industries. Efforts should be made to better integrate these ad-hoc IT departments into the primary business.

by jgg 13y ago

KrisAndrew 13y ago

> Also, I strongly suspect all of these efforts to drag more people into coding are at least partly sponsored by industry, in an attempt to drive the relatively-high wage of a programmer down, in the face of a perceived increase in programmer demand. Perhaps by newer and less experienced entrants into the business market. Whenever there's a boom in a certain market, you get a lot of hacks flooding in who have a lot of money, but little sense. Web development was this way post-dot-com-crash. There were many print advertising agencies that added on web development as a service to their clients. However, they didn't alter their business practices to accommodate the needs of software development. These agencies treated software developers like graphic designers. They almost always required fixed cost contracts for development ($X to build a website), and this caused a ton of problems that would be evident to seasoned developers. When I suggested that they change their compensation practices they would refuse, and just blame it on the original programmer for being unskilled. I didn't mind in the beginning, because I was making $200-$300/hr to fix their problems. However, I eventually quit consulting because I got bored with cleaning up bad code caused by time/money constraints. It wasn't stupid programmers who caused the problem, but stupid business people. Bringing it back to the main topic - I think it's wrong to get more people to code. Those who graduate with CS degrees and software development skills are entirely capable to building large, functional systems. However, a good bulk of those programmers aren't going to work at a software/tech company. They're going to work in the IT departments of companies in non-software industries. Efforts should be made to better integrate these ad-hoc IT departments into the primary business.