NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

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