Re: Testing job applicants

[gillies@cs.ubc.ca (Donald Gillies)]

As for the difference between "loves to program, is mediocre at it"
and "dull but competant", I think that through the miracle of positive
and negative feedback, the mediocre programmer will eventually not
enjoy programming any more.  And the competant one may even come to
enjoy it as his or her career progresses.

Bryan Villados <news001@macgeek.org> writes:

>When I was a ROM-BIOS Engineer at Phoenix Technologies, virtually none
>of the engineers/programmers learned programming in college or
>vocational school. I learned how to program on an Intel 8085 simulator,
>and later on an Apple II.  The point I want to make is that,
>mentally, there is a difference between a self-taught programmer and
>someone who learned to program in school.  ...

Wow, awesome post.  Applause, Applause, Applause !!!

As for the current generation of "line-pumping promgrammers", I've
noticed quite often that the fastest coders produce the worst product.
It's not that their quickly produced code is inherently bad, but it is
inherently expensive to 

	(a) test
	(b) tune
	(c) document
	(d) grow

There is a good reason for this.  If you just pump out many lines
quickly, code bloat starts to kill your productivity in all these
peripheeral aspects of software development.  Over the long run, these
peripheral aspects dominate the cost of software development.

The difficulty of testing and debugging a piece of code of N lines is
probably proportional to O(N^2).  So, those of you who enjoy writing
simple, compact code can take solace.  You will leave the line-pumping
speed-programmers in the dust over the long term, and you are the
ideal coder to "begin" a project, whereas the line pumper is probably
going to be the last guy who works on the project because he'll do so
much damage, they won't be able to continue the project when he gets
done with it ..


Don Gillies - t_dgilli.x@qualcomm.x.com - Planetwide Software, Inc.
(consultant) / Globalstar Satellite CDMA Project, Qualcomm Inc.,
6455 Lusk Blvd San Diego, California 92121 - phone: 619-651-2326.
Adjunct Professor of EE, UBC, Vancouver BC Canada V6T 1Z4
http://www.ee.ubc.ca/home/staff/faculty/gillies/etc/www/index.html
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