On Feb 21, 2006, at 4:25 PM, James Gray wrote:
Greg,
I would beg to disagree with you. Perhaps I would not disagree
with you if you had said, "Most experienced developers could
pick up MOST OF those technologies quickly enough." I might not
disagree. I have been programming for 37 years and I do not know
what a lot of those technologies are, so I do not know how easy or
difficult they would be to pick up. I also do not know how skilled
they expect people to be to qualify as having the skill. If having
Adobe Photoshop as a skill merely means being able to open the
program, open a jpeg image, apply some goofy filter to the image,
and resave the image as a jpeg again then I would agree that most
developers could do that fairly quickly. However, I would really
say that being good with Photoshop is not something you can pick up
quickly. It really requires a different skill set than most
developers have already mastered. Quark Express is also a
different ball of wax. Without breaking my arm I can say that I am
pretty good with Photoshop. I have tried to use Quark Express's
closest competitor Adobe InDesign and have not figured it out yet.
I will bet they expect the contractor to put out that first montly
newsletter using Quark Express.
Jim Gray
Okay, I grant you that I did indulge in a bit of hyperbole here, but
I think the point is still a valid one. It isn't all that uncommon to
encounter people who know MUMPS (or Java) well enough to write code,
and maybe even do a decent job of it, but who really tend to rather
mechanical and rigid, and end up feeling rather lost when confronted
with a problem they've never seen before. Another issue is that many
people write code that "works" (initially), but which is fragile and
difficult to maintain or extend. I don't mean to imply that knowing a
lot of theory will make a person into a good practitioner, but it has
certainly been my experience that software development tends to be
hampered by poor understanding of the principles involved. This "de-
professionalization" of software development (some would say "de-
skilling") is only exacerbated by our tendency to focus on specific
languages, frameworks and tools. It's as if though we expect people
to learn to write by studying a dictionary.
===
Gregory Woodhouse
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes." -- Edsger Dijkstra
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