I happened upon this YouTube video that talks about this very subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FioceDs7JA
On 2018-01-23 03:02, David Schwartz wrote:
> The fallacy here is that a HS dropout who's been building homes for 30 years
> could build a home as nice as any Architect just a couple of years out of
> school.
>
> Perhaps. It goes on all around the world every day.
>
> All Architects can pound nails.
>
> But most run-of-the-mill construction workers have no clue when it comes to
> structural dependencies, legal codes, how to choose a foundation appropriate
> for the ground and terroir, etc.
>
> You guys keep conflating human psychology and behavior with acquisition of
> some mythical sort of "knowledge" that's somehow learned through osmosis over
> time (or even instantly).
>
> If you put a person with a passion for flowers in charge of an event, it
> should not surprize anybody that there might be an overabundance of flowers
> present.
>
> It doesn't matter if that person has a BS in Biology and a Master's in Floral
> Design, or just grew up loving flowers.
>
> If you tell them, "I want LOTS of beautiful flowers at the event!" you're
> more than likely to get a FLOOD of flowers.
>
> The end result will be a LOT different than someone like me who has zero
> interest in flowers and floral design, and who'll solve the problem by
> picking arrangements from a catalog and setting them wherever I can find a
> place to put them down. If people happen to like what I did, it does not make
> me some kind of idiot savant, nor a "better choice" than someone skilled in
> the art.
>
> If someone can teach a dog to do fancy tricks, there's a tendency for people
> to grant the DOG lots of smarts.
>
> But if that person can teach ANY dog to do fancy tricks, it probably means
> the TEACHER is the one with the smarts, not the dogs.
>
> Unfortunately, this situation happens way too often in the programming world,
> and it gets way too much traction mostly because there's a shortage of
> programmers.
>
> I'm not saying self-taught programmers aren't smart, or that people with
> formal education never over-do things.
>
> Rather, I think this is an utterly stupid thing to be discussing.
>
> Here's why in a nutshell:
>
> If you decide to invest a half-million bucks into your dream home, are you
> going to be more inclined to: (a) hire an Architect to design it and then a
> General Contractor to build it; or (b) would you just scribble some ideas on
> a napkin (you don't know how to make blueprints, do you?), then assemble a
> team of construction workers with 20+ years of experience cutting wood and
> pounding nails (assuming they must know as much as any decent Architect),
> hand them copies of your drawing, point them at your plot of land, and say,
> "Call me when you've finished!"?
>
> Most smart people would choose (a).
>
> But it seems a lot of programmers think (b) is the smarter approach to avoid
> "over-engineering". (Only as long as it's somebody else's money. But if it's
> THEIR OWN half-a-mil, I'm betting they'd go with (a).)
>
> I would assert that the (b) group isn't as likely to "over-engineer" a
> solution simply because they have FEW IF ANY solid "engineering" skills in
> their skillset in the first place.
>
> The house might not look any worse for the effort once it's finished.
>
> But when the first hurricane blows through or the first RS-5 earthquake hits,
> the house collapses.
>
> Well, hey, at least the house didn't suffer from "over-engineering", right?
>
> -David Schwartz
>
> On Jan 23, 2018, at 1:11 AM, Steve Litt <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 08:57:11 -0700 Aaron Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The whole "you will be spiritually predisposed to coding" is stupid. No one
> wants a computer science person on the team because having a team of ten
> developers who can write crappy boiler plate code is faster than 9 shitty
> programmers being chased around by a good developer.
>
> I have a website I work on that has a code base that is topping nearly 2gb
> and has to load over 986MB to load just the front page.
>
> For what? Well we have 60+ items in composer, we have jquery, we have endless
> numbers of libraries and plugins. Sometimes we load thousands of lines of
> code to do a single action that literally might be called on the rarest of
> second tuesdays on the new moon.
>
> Don't blame me (a programmer without a CompSci degree) for the bad design of
> your company's website. Why don't you offer to rewrite that website from
> scratch, and if they say no, walk away?
>
> And please don't call me stupid. I am spiritually predisposed to coding. No,
> I never coded any huge stuff like your website, but that's because I didn't
> want to be involved with quagmires like that. I did, however, sometimes make
> money doing a Perl quickie so that the big gala Java application 6 months
> from completion for the previous year could continue their monument to
> enterprise application development without the customers bolting and
> bankrupting the place. And the Java Jockeys thanked me for providing them a
> working system they could use as a model and a focus for customer
> questioning.
>
> Far as I know, Steve Wosniak didn't have a Comp Sci degree, nor did Paul
> Allen. I KNOW you're not calling them stupid. AFAIK, Linux was just a student
> when he made the Linux kernel. He was you will be spiritually predisposed to
> coding a long time before his degree.
>
> Don't get me wrong: I'd have loved to learn the stuff my buddies with both
> spiritual disposition and a Comp Sci degree know: The data structures, the
> algorithms, the techniques are astouding. But in a contest between someone
> spiritually predisposed to coding and a Comp Sci grad in it for the money,
> I'd take the predisposed guy every time.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt January 2018 featured book: Troubleshooting: Why Bother?
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/twb [1]
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