On Mon, 06 Nov 2006 11:50:16 +0530, sastry wrote: > On Monday 06 Nov 2006 8:48 am, Biju Chacko wrote: > > Two different things. Jace was talking about a management hierarchy. > > Freeman was talking about the relationship between more experienced > > ppl and novices. > > Fair enough, but doesn't "more experience" almost automatically > translate, in practice, to a higher management position?
In companies that don't value technical competence, yes. You're describing a way to institutionalize technical incompetence: ensure that nobody gets more than five years of technical experience by moving them into nontechnical jobs at that point. > On a different note, and putting it bluntly, does "management" > remote or non remote in the IT industry take the attitude "We're > paying you shitloads, so you'd better be ready to eat shit." What leads you to ask such a question? On Sun, 12 Nov 2006 07:02:58 +0530, shiv sastry wrote: > On Sunday 12 Nov 2006 4:45 am, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote: > > Other dimensions of being a bad programmer might > > include producing no code at all, taking the time to produce good code > > when bad code would be more appropriate, willingness to accept > > impossible constraints, and willingness to commit to decisions without > > enough information to know if they're good ones. > > This is an interesting list. > > But could you give me an example of a situation in which someone > could take "the time to produce good code when bad code would be > more appropriate"? Here's a somewhat fictionalized scenario from a previous job. Suppose you want to know whether it's possible to configure a particular wireless access point to only forward packets to a particular VPN server --- so that wireless clients can only access the network through the VPN. The code you're writing to configure the AP is not going to go into the product --- indeed, even if it works, the feature might not go into the product, and the point of writing the code is to learn whether it's possible and how much work it would be to implement the feature for real. If you write it in a quick-and-dirty fashion, it might take you four or eight hours. Given this situation, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to start the process with unit tests, a GUI for configuring which VPN server to let the clients talk to, and detailed code reviews. It's probably OK to leave known bugs, especially performance bugs, in the code, and you might not have to worry so much about the quality of the comments either. And formal methods are right out. > Considering the abstract meta-value of code - I wonder if coding > itself should become a profession like medicine. I have a friend who > was born into a family of doctors who used to tell me when we were > medical students "Anyone is allowed be a doctor, but you need the > degree in order to charge money" I think coding should become a profession like writing, and perhaps medicine needs to move in that direction, too.
