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Does the 'Hacker Ethic' Harm Today's Developers?
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the 'hacker ethic' synonymous with computer programing in American society is enough for developers to succeed in today's economy. To be sure, self-taught 'cowboy coders' — the hallmark of today's programming generation in America — are technically proficient, McAllister writes, 'but their code is less likely to be maintainable in the long term, and they're less likely to conform to organizational development processes and coding standards.' And though HTC's Vineet Nayar's proclamation that American programmers are 'unemployable' is overblown, there may be wisdom in offering a new kind of computer engineering degree targeted toward the student who is more interested in succeeding in industry than exploring computing theory. 'American software development managers often complain that Indian programmers are too literal-minded,' McAllister writes, but perhaps Americans have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. In other words, are we 'too in love with the hacker ideal of the 1980s to produce programmers who are truly prepared for today's real-life business environment?'"
Hi, I'm a self-taught cowboy programmer. Never took a single CS course.
I spent ten years on the ISO C committee. My coworkers like my code reviews because I'm thorough and careful. While my code isn't as good as I'd like it to be, the big hunk of my code that we put into our last product release has one known outstanding bug, and it's considered "cosmetic" -- it never impacts the actual output. (And that's for five thousand lines of code I produced in three weeks...)
I don't buy it. I am a big fan of the "hacker ethic" -- and I see maintainability and code quality as *central* to it. Sloppy work is habit forming. The reason I can type ten-line shell scripts in at the prompt and have them work is that I have worked really hard to be good at what I do.
So, basically, I don't accept the premise. We used to have offshore coworkers from India, and they were useless. They'd reopen bug reports because the same package failed to build for TOTALLY unrelated reasons. ("TeX is not installed" and "linker error due to frame table full" are not the same bug.) Since then, we started hiring people in China, and actually hiring them as full-time staff, and it works a lot better. They're not all hugely experienced, but they're solid, and they learn. (They even argue with us sometimes, which I'm really enthused about. That's how you get good.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I have to admit, that I'm skeptical that coders now are any more cowboyish than they used to be. I mean I've read stories about how Bill Gates and Paul Allen used to handle Micro Soft's products early on before they changed the name and locale. Somebody will have to explain to me how today's coders can be any worse than they were.
What makes you think creative thinking can't be taught?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
'American software development managers often complain that Indian programmers are too literal-minded,
Really? I think we've all seen this thing. If you aren't beign literal minded, you're making assumptions. When you make assumptions, at least some of them are going to be wrong. I spend a lot of time fighting for better defined requirements, because it means I'll spend less time doing rework when what I give my customer isn't what they wanted. The example I always give them is this:
You tell me college football, if you have possession of the ball and your knee touches the ground, the ball is down, whether or not the player was tackled. I give you a college football game, and the first time you try to kick a field goal, the ball is downed 7 yards behind the line of scrimmage because the holder's knee is touching the ground.
If you want something, your requirements better document it. Developers with "better practices" understand this. Unfortunately the people who write requirements usually don't.
Whale
The technology industry has moved beyond its infancy and become a fundamental part of most businesses. I'm a systems administrator and I started working in IT (MIS at the time) when I graduated from high school in 1996. In my childhood, I spent a lot of time hacking phone systems, hanging out at 2600 meetings, and doing all sorts of other not so legit activities with computers. I was interested in whatever systems I could get my hands on, whether it was a System 75 running Audix, a 5ESS/SS7 switch, Linux, Cisco routers, whatever. I read Internetworking with TCP/IP by Comer not because I was in college and had to, but because I wanted to understand what those around me were talking about. All of that development left me with a broad skillset that lacked focus. I developed a very high level understanding of how systems interconnect, and by working for some very good bosses, I developed an understanding of how the systems support the business processes of the organizations I worked for. I'm very much a stereotypical "Jack of all trades, master of none." sort of administrator.
When there weren't many people out there with an interest in or hands on aptitude with computer systems, people with my skillsets were in high demand. In the small business sector, where companies can't afford separate DBAs, system admins, network engineers and so on, I fit in quite well. In the corporate world, I can't even get a job interview because they are looking for individuals who are highly focused on a single aspect of the overall network. The same thing holds true for developers.
"Back in the day", being able to write code to get the job done was a mystical science for management types. Skilled coders were in short supply, so people who could hack programs together were employable. In this day and age, anybody can go to any number of colleges or trade schools and learn how to write decent code. Anybody can go to college or trade school and get an MCSE, or a CCIE, or any number of system/network specific certifications. Managers and employers want known quantities. They want developers who are going to deliver predictable code. They want system admins who are going to follow industry best practices.
The technology industry has grown up. We aren't in the days of "Just make it work" anymore. We're in the days of refining how things work. Best practices have been established. Frameworks for doing things have been established. Companies are just looking for people who can "Make application X do A and B." reliably.
There are just a bunch of really bad programmers out there. Degrees and nationality are largely irrelevant to skill at it. Don't blame "kids these days" or whatever because you're not good at filtering out the bad ones. It's not particularly difficult to spot the good ones, they're pretty enthusiastic about the questions you ask them and the problems you give them when you're interviewing.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
are we 'too in love with the hacker ideal of the 1980s to produce programmers who are truly prepared for today's real-life business environment?'"
If only we were more in love! The thing is... the "cowboys" who can't shoot straight (e.g. write scalable, maintainable code) aren't real hackers anyway. It's a lot easier to be able to bang something together with glue and nails than it is to truly hack development. Any responsible hacker is going to know all about best practices, when to break them, and when to find new ones. There is beauty in simplicity as well as in obscure complexity. Whatever. Let the next generation all take classes in SharePoint or some crap like that and the good programmers among us may have even better job security than we had hoped for!
When Indian companies come up with globally game-changing software on the same timetable as a Silicon Valley start-up like Facebook or Google, we'll talk. When a Chinese company has the long-term track record of quality and maturity that IBM and Oracle exhibit, we'll talk.
Until then, the cowboy coder makes better software in less time at the beginning of their career, and matures into a more competent team player as the years roll by and experience piles up. This isn't a weakness, this is why we have an IT industry at all. H1B coders are generally useless until they learn to Cowboy Up... and once they do, there's not really much difference between them and the locals. (I wish more of them would apply for permanent residence and bring their families over. I like immigrants who want a better life, I don't like scabs.)
Engineers at Honda start out their career working for the racing division, designing high-performance parts. Engineers at the end of their careers are assigned to subcompacts and mini-vans. This is because Honda needs fresh insights and youthful eagerness and excitement, and if the engineer flubs it, the only ones who know are the racing team. More importantly, Honda needs experienced hands who know their craft inside-out and upside-down to engineer the components millions of their customers will be using everyday, and their senior engineers generally appreciate the stability and predictability of a long-term ongoing project.
This is the approach that my college took, and I have to say I find it a horrifyingly bad one. One or two courses could easily extend education to cover actual use of tools, and common practices in industry at the time.
Having personally graduated from a 4 year college with a CS degree with very little real experience is something I found extremely frustrating. I finally came to the conclusion that the lack was primarily due to the educators themselves lacking real-world experience, and happily living in their own little world of academia.
I do believe strongly in the approach of teaching students how to learn over teaching them specifics and the benifits of a broad education. What irks me, is that it should be possible to do both - but where I went they didn't even offer electives that I could have optionally taken to expand my horizons.
I think you forget one thing, there are no college courses about
- what to do if a task you scheduled for 6 weeks gets cut to 2 due to somebody in management arbitrarily deciding that 6 weeks "is way too long"
- what to do if you are asked for a detailed estimate of a 2-3 month long task in an area you are not familiar with 'by the end of today' and that estimate will be binding
- what to do if your technologically sound solution is shot down 'because this would cost too much to implement, can't you hack something for the next release next week'
etc. etc. etc.
If put in a job that rewards creating good quality code, good developers will flourish, if put in a job that rewards 'just hacking something together' then the 'self-taught coder' usually will do better because they won't even have to waste time architecting or really thinking, they'll just take the requirements and run with it, whether or not the requirements make sense and whether or not the resulting product will be mantainable, documented, working, or any combination of the above.
What the US needs, rather than better schools/programs, is better companies focused on creating quality products, not companies that just because there is a perception that 'coding/coders are cheap, we can also outsource' get by with the absolute minimum of quality the market will tolerate.
-- the cake is a lie
This will probably get me modded down, but what the hell, i got karma. You want to know the REAL difference between an American and an Indian coder, and why they think of us as "cowboys"? One word: Adaptability.
Working on this job with a really sweet Indian girl, who was quite happy to be an American citizen now and said she wouldn't go back if you paid her, I asked why does Indian tech support suck. This was after we were all rolling on the floor laughing as she dealt with tech support by cursing them in Hindi when they told her to reboot again. She rolled her eyes and said "it isn't just the tech support, it is the programmers too. I would take one American over a dozen of my countrymen if they have never lived here for any length of time". She then sat down and explained it like this-
"It is the caste system" she said, "There you NEVER question those above you, ever. if your boss says the sky is purple and 1+2=12 then that is the truth. You never question those above you for any reason. Which works fine as long as it is something that can be written down and followed step by step. But life and computers rarely work that way. They always throw you curve balls and pull weird things that somebody forgot to write down. In those cases the American will "pull a Macgyver" and make it work. The Indian will just be lost, as you just don't do things like that. That is why I am quite happy to be here, thanks."
So if you want to know why they think of us as "cowboys" there you go. It is because an American will try to figure out a weird problem while the Indian will wait on his/her boss to tell them what to do. Which is fine if you want nice little drones that can't think for themselves, but we just aren't built like that. And I for one am quite happy about that. So call us "cowboys" all you want, but it gets the job done.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's not so much that it can't be taught as it can be completely squeezed out of the children by the time they reach college age.
The bar is *very* high in india-- you either pass or you are screwed and may as well kill yourself (as about 3,000 a year do).
Who wants to be "creative" in that kind of environment- you want to master the material and get the best possible grade. Creativity has no value until you are a grad student anyway.
Americans tend to overvalue creativity from an early age-- wasting a lot of opportunities to be good worker bees. The result is poorly trained but creative individuals.
I saw it this way once...
American tries a thousand ways to draw a fish and finally masters drawing a fish. All along the way they are creatively making variations of the fish.
Chinese are taught the one perfect way to draw a fish. Once drawing a fish that way is mastered, then they start creatively varying on the mastered fish.
The sub-masters in China would be less creative while the sub-masters in America would be more creative.
The masters in both cases are basically equally creative.
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I don't know for sure about Indians. Mainly- they just seem less bright and more "yes men" than they were in 2002-2003. I think the bright ones were promoted and the tremendous demand means that we now have bachelors degree types competing against our bachelors degree types where we used to have their masters degree and doctorate candidates competing against our bachelors degree types.
So now they are average decent coders-- who are not as creative (because the creative types were filtered out by their culture, schooling system and national exams), more prone to agree to things which are impossible, and (slightly) lacking in communication skills.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My employer's off shore developers generally produce nothing better than "acceptable" and it's generally hard to get them to maintain things. They like to developnew things and don't even like the idea of maintaining their own code.
But they're dirt cheap. So they have better equipment and more developers than we have in the UK. We're still waiting to get two developers replaced that left. Apparently they think we can replace them without placing adverts.
To be fair to the off shore guys, the only reason why they develop rubbish (as has been done in the UK too) is that the people coming with the requirements don't have a fucking clue what they're doing. There is a lack of ownership to see the project through once its launched and in general, the low level people have a better idea about technology than management and as a result anyone with any decent skills move on. This goes for the UK and the off shore developers.
If you are good with technology, why stick around in a country where half of households don't even have toilets?
Because it doesn't really matter as long as *your* house has one. Metaphorically speaking, if you have the option of making $40k in India -- which goes a LONG way -- and staying at home, living like a king, keeping your social support system, etc. vs. migrating to the states and starting anew for $80k., then a lot of perfectly rational and obscenely talented people will choose to stay there. Money really isn't everything.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
The way we dealt with that was simple (if a bit patronizing). We have a couple "cowboys", myself included. We blaze proof of concept code in whatever the heck language suits our needs for a task at hand. The task is defined as we have these constraints, these goals, and need this data to sift out (this is machine test code). One of us will hack it up in a quarter or two*. Then it is handed off to the test engineering team to make a polished product out of it (usually in C/C++). During this transition we are answerable to the test devs at their leisure and whims, thus if you didn't doc things you'll be in more meetings (and who wants that, when you could be hacking the next shiny thing together).
It works exceptionally well, as we can react quickly to somewhat amorphous changes to the initial spec, that usually come about as the prototype code is actually run and people realize that "hey it'd be nice to have this", or "that does what I said, but not what I want". We've all encountered this before and it's horribly frustrating when changes like this have to go through committee after committee, and ECOs and all that assorted crap. By doing it as a one man hacker get-er-done these changes become less problematic, some get pushed to the formal re-write, others get implemented quickly. The best part is it basically forces the almost universally needed refactor every product could use, but never gets. The stuff that shows up on The Daily WTF.
-nB
*yes, we get about 6 months to produce properly working code. My last project was about 8 months, 60K lines of perl, 5K lines of C++, and about 4 major changes in architecture, 2 of which were ultimately reverted. In fact this latest one is good enough as prototype that they are not re-writing it and are simply running with it. Downside there is now I have to write _real_ documentation, not just code notes.
so another couple months writing about 200 pages of usage docs, and 400 pages of API docs...
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump