Subj : Re: Are programmers like this in the real world? To : comp.programming From : efriedNoSpam Date : Sat Jul 23 2005 06:19 am In article <1122071054.876109.126310@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>, "Mike Deeth" wrote: >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 Well the Microsoft guy makes sense. ;-) I have a MS in CS and I graded papers/programs for a few into classes to help pay tution. I was appalled at the low quality of 90% of what I graded. 5% of them were very high quality - but they belonged to members of 1 nationality and were identical. If you are going to steal, steal from the best. ;-) But the members of these intro classes came from a variety of disciplines and most of them were not CS majors. Most programmers work with business applications and don't need to be computer scientists or mathmeticians. Most of us don't write operating systems or compilers. In my early days I used mainframe Cobol and implemented a hashing algorithm to do some lookups. No one in my group had a clue how it worked - but they knew what they knew and were a big help when my program threw an exception. Eric .