Subj : Re: Industry Calls for More Foreign Programmers
To   : comp.programming
From : spinoza1111
Date : Fri Aug 19 2005 03:27 am


Jim Slade wrote:
> spinoza1111@yahoo.com wrote in news:1124170671.897969.295870
> @z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:
>
> >
> > Flavius Vespasianus wrote:
> >> spinoza1111@yahoo.com wrote in news:1124016883.271702.217090
> >> @z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:
> >>
> >> >
> >> > No, just the facts. Graduate students are attracted as students and
> >> > employees to top-flight people.
> >> >
> >>
> >> That's an assertion, not proof.
> >
> > A justified assertion. It's a nerd dodge to demand unreasonable "proof"
> > in social science, and it's based on an elementary misunderstanding,
> > that "studies" are a dialog with the people "studied" in sociology.
> >
>
> I know plenty of people with graudate degrees in computer science who are
> completely inempt when it comes to working with computers.

No, they are "inept" in working with poorly-designed legacy systems and
users so moronized by those legacy systems that the users, in cahoots
with programmers themselves moronized by over-specialisation, resist
needed change.

In other words: legacy systems create legacy systems bureaucracies
which have their own goals, and those goals do not coincide with the
goals of all stakeholders.

Within legacy systems bureaucracies, a "reality distortion field" is
created in which assertions which are mathematically false can become
true.

For example, engineering users in my experience use broken compilers
for in-house languages for years while "working around" the fact that
the compiler fails to conform to the published syntax of the language.
Because the engineers have released source code which only compiles
under the broken compiler, a computer science A+ student who "fixes"
the compiler, by making its parser conform to the documented language,
has, in the reality distortion field, messed up.

Unfortunately, from the point of view of the executive suite, these
reality distortion fields are pure cost centers and due for
elimination. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, demands that companies
change their procedures to use the Oracle DB most effectively.

In my experience, which spans thirty years, a false expertise in
computing was created by specializing in mistakes including Cobol but
this "expertise" is losing its claim to legitimacy to computer science
as taught in the university.

>
> Ergo: Graduates students are not top-flight people.
>
> NOT. But that's the same logical falacy you, and the industry lobbysts use.

The brutal truth: if, for example, a programmer has specialized in
financial Fortran for several years, he will not have adopted the
structured, storage management, and (god forbid) object-oriented (if
any) improvements to Fortran but will stick to canonical Fortran,
including overuse of overexposed common data and Equivalence for shits
and giggles.

He will be too busy, with the time sink that is non-union white collar
work and his family, to keep up. Furthermore, his managers will
encourage him not to become better technically but instead study
"business", as if much of "business" is a fit subject for study, or can
be codified in a way that does not itself change the rules of
"business" (as in the case where only the failed options trader writes
a book on options trading).

The brutal truth is that 20 years ago, an alarming number of
programmers could not write a sequential match and merge routine *ab
initio* in America. The brutal truth today is that many programmers
have to separate multiple Joins in SQL to be able to understand them,
and therefore prefer unnecessary temporary tables for a multi-way match
rather than a single Join.

Computer science teaches how to manage complexity and change. Working
in a micro-managed programming job doesn't.

.