this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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It is a career, for sure. It can be hard to get into, but I’ve been in the industry for a long time and I have worked with people who have been paid a developer’s salary for years who were unbelievably bad at their jobs.
I used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.
I’d say there are a lot of developers who are barely competent at copy/pasting code from stack overflow until it works. Maybe 10-20% of the people in SMEs are that. The majority are pretty decent, but kinda lazy. Then there are the incredibly competent and hard-working people who are like gold dust. A really good developer who isn’t a complete drama king/queen, has good communication skills and just gets on with their work instead of getting sucked into personal pet projects is incredibly rare.
I'm sorry but there's just no way that anecdote is true. I refuse to believe it.
Honestly, if anyone else had told me this story, I'd assume that they were either exaggerating or that they were being an asshole to the other person in a way that made them shut down and not really want to engage with them, but it's as near to an accurate recollection as I can make it. I've taught programming to people from all walks of life, from 13 to 60+ years old, I've mentored quite a lot of devs, I've taken kids from "yeah I'm interested in computers, I like playing games" to senior developers, and while I'm sure that my teaching style may not be perfect for everyone, I've never once heard any complaints that I made someone feel stupid, belittled or like they couldn't make mistakes. I always encourage people to be as honest and open about what they do/don't understand because if someone says "I don't get it" I can explain something in another way that might make it click. But yeah, that day when I had just been through the whole for-loop thing and he asked me about integers again, it was as close to just completely exasperated as I've ever been with mentoring someone. It was a surreal, groundhog day feeling, like I was sisyphus, and my boulder was explaining to a computer science graduate what a whole number was.
Are you sure you managed the team? I'm joking, but how did this person get through an interview, let a lone survive so long working as a dev?
Haha, it’s a fair comment - it’s a team I inherited, it wasn’t my hiring decision. I don’t know what the interview process was like before me, but I’m guessing it was a very old fashioned “where do you see yourself in 5 years” affair.
I’m pretty sure that they just muddled through by copy/pasting stuff seemingly at random and tinkering until it worked. Which can be a good way to learn, for sure, but it’s not really what you want from a professional developer, full time.
The guy who managed the team before me didn’t believe in object oriented design, and not in a cool Haskell way, in a really old fashioned “I can do everything with batch scripts” way. The team was using a programming language that was so old that they were using dosbox to compile it because the compiler was a 16-bit application.
Name the language, mate. This sounds a bit too insane to be true.
Yeah, it was called DataFlex. The vendor has released new versions of it called Visual DataFlex (VDF) and then renamed VDF back to DataFlex, but this language was what we called “character mode” DataFlex. It’s still used by the company as their main data entry application even today and a lot of their processes still are written in DataFlex. A lot of the work that my team did was rewriting a lot of the old crap in C#, but there was just so much of it built up over the decades.