Subj : Are programmers like this in the real world?
To   : comp.programming
From : Mike Deeth
Date : Fri Jul 22 2005 04:24 pm

Hi,

     I've been coding for over a decade in all sorts of languages, as a
hobby.  My career is mathematics.  As such I was obligated to take an
intro programming class.  "Well" I said to myself, "let's get this over
with, it's the last 'nonsense' course needed for the degree so from
here on out it'll be all upper division and graduate math classes.
Anyway, I'll probably learn some new stuff!"

     Boy was that last part ever off.

     If I ran a company, I wouldn't let any of these people within 10
feet of a computer.  I wouldn't trust them to write "hello world".  And
that includes the instructor.
     We get an assignment.  Sieve of eratosthenes-- no problem at all.
Have it working in 5 minutes, just like I'm sure anyone on this NG
could as well.  Then I find out that to pretty much everyone else in
the class, it was the assignment from hell, hours of hair pulling, most
didn't finish at all.  What the hell?
     One of my classmates works at Microsoft.  He does assembly and
works with unix.  So this guy should have it together, right?  Wrong.
     As he describes how he spent 3 hours on the Sieve before finally
dispatching a bug, I am intrigued.  What, oh what, sort of exotic bug
could so thwart such a professional coder?  "Oh, well, in my for loop I
was checking i against queue.size() and of course queue.size() changed
whenever I dequeued."  (Jaw hits floor.  This guy makes a PAYCHECK??)
"Ahh yes.. that one will get you every time" I say politely... thinking
to myself, I wouldn't trust this guy to run Spybot for my grandma's
infected machine.
     In class the instructor proclaims he will enlighten us by showing
us how to reverse the order of a singly-linked list.  "So how would we
go about doing this?" he asks, that knowing gleam in his eye.  I
chuckle to myself, at his and my shared secret:  a couple book-keeping
variables for _next and _prev and this'll be just a routine run through
the list.  Nope.  "Of course, we will just push the whole entire list
onto a stack and then push it back!"  That strange smell is my faith in
humanity being engulfed in the flames of hellfire.
     So this has to just be because it's an intro class.  It has to, I
assure myself, with some desperation.  Then I head over to the CSC
computer lab.  After hearing a large group of senior level CSC students
struggle for about an hour with the sublimely vexing problem of
non-blocking sockets, my earlier assurance evaporates.

     Now I think I understand better why in general programmers are
treated like shit.  If these people are the bold new generation of
keyboard commandos, then I say their cheap cubicles are more than they
deserve.  And no fucking wonder companies want to outsource-- if this
is the shit produced in the USA!

     So the reason I'm writing is to desperately try and get
reassurance this is not how all programmers are.  Please, I beg of you,
tell me that 99% of these people will end up greeting people at Walmart
and not within 50 feet of a computer.

Exasperated,
Nathan

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