tedd wrote:
No, I had not read that -- but the article drives home the point I was
making in that it's very difficult to test a person's ability to program.
And it is definitely language specific. Tackling a problem in PHP may be way
easier than using Assembler.
Programming is more akin to the basic method of a person's ability to
resolve and interpret the world around them. I have my own theories, but
I don't think they would be acceptable in academic circles.
But think of this -- we all know that color-blind people see things
differently and that's considered a disability. However, in WWII we
successfully used color-blind personnel to detect camouflaged enemy
positions. Now imagine a color-blind person trying to teach normal
visioned people how to do that. That's the type of problem you run into
teaching programming. But on the same point, a color-blind person would
have little problem explaining that to another color-blinded person (of
course of the same color-blindness). That's the main reason for the
two-humped test results the article mentions. You either "get-it" or you
don't.
That is probably true for the pure logic, but I tried pretty much any
programming environment I could get my hands on and I failed in all but two.
One was the now defunct VB6 and the other one is PHP. I tried Java and C/C++
and they are just way too complicated. You have to do so much stuff upfront to
get to the point where can even bother to think about how to solve a problem.
That is what I like to so much about PHP, there is often already a good set of
pieces to the puzzle available and since those are big pieces it is also easy
to put them together. And in the end the result is as pretty as using
something else. And still I think even PHP makes programming often way more
difficult than it has to be, best example is any date or time related
function. One third uses the illogical US notation, one third uses the less
illogical european notation, and the last third uses something entirely
different. Absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary.
Some of the top programmers I ever met, had no formal education. Explain
that.
The top programmers understand the business and therefore know the
expectations. My guess is that those things that make them great programmers
have nothing to do with programming and the fact that they didn't have formal
education didn't cloud their minds. Not to prejudice an entire group, but back
at IR when we started working with the developers from India, they impressed
with all their knowledge about algorithms and SQL skills and what have not.
All the stuff they learned in the universities. The problem was that they had
no clue what our business was about and what they needed to do in order to
satisfy the expectations. They worked hard and put a lot of effort into their
work, but were too focused on numbers. Rather than giving us 50 lines of code
that did work well thay cranked out 10,000 lines of code that didn't even
compile, but in their view they did an awesome job, because they used all the
examples from their text books. Even worse, you could ask them to do the
dumbest thing and they just said yes and did it. We also worked with other
foreign developers and they tended to be way more critical of what was asked
for. If they thought there is a better way they said so and often were right.
We worked with one dutch guy who joined the company as an intern. The
internship was required before starting the studies at the university. He
never went back to school and just learned what he needed on the job. He is a
good programmer, but his real skill is that he gets what the business is about
and what he needs to do to get from A to B and that over and over again. Now
that's a good programmer, he is so important to the division that he gets paid
very well, although I am sure that he'd have a tough time getting hired
somewhere else. The formal education is often just the means to land a job.
Once you are hired you start at zero.
I made that experience at my current job. I did QA and support for 7 years at
IR and thought that this experience will help me a lot. It really didn't. This
industry here works entirely differently, the audience is different and
compared to what we did at IR what we work on now is far more important to the
operations of our customers. That makes it much easier to get access to the
decision makers and get IT and other resources to get a system implemented.
That also means that the expectations are way higher.
That written, I really should get back to work....
David
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