Slashdot Mirror
Why Non-Coders Shouldn't Write Code
jfruh writes "Software firm FreeCause made a bit of a splash with a policy that requires all its employees — including marketers, finance, etc. — to write JavaScript code. And not just 'code to learn basics of what JavaScript can do,' but 'write code that will be used in production.' Phil Johnson, a tech writer and editor who himself once coded for a living, thinks this is nuts, a recipe for miserable workers and substandard code."
function MarketingFunction(originalText)
{
var revisedText = new String(originalText + ", which will help build synergy and increase marketshare.");
return revisedText;
}
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It will at least give the non coders an appreciation of what is being done.
Now, they need to take the coders and make them do sales for a day.. finance go clean trash for an afternoon.. .etc etc.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
While they are at it, perhaps their accounting department should replace the plumbing in their office building, the secretaries should swap the engine in the CEO's car, and let's have the janitors install a new security system. What could possibly go wrong?
sudo make me a sandwich
We were all non-coders once.
Saying non-coders shouldn't write code is like saying non-writers shouldn't write.
How about: Don't expect consistently professional-quality code from inexperienced coders.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
a recipie for miserable workers and substandard code.
Which is why non-spellers shouldn't spell. Or something
As long as I'm allowed to do production-mode finance and marketing.
Oh, wait. Stupid idea, you say? Imagine that.
Where I work I dont even trust designers javascript code. I can't imagine the garbage that business services/HR/accounting would come up with. That company will reap the whirlwind. The percentage of developer time spent fixing this entirely predictable mess will bring all production to a halt.
There's nothing wrong with making all your employees learn how to code, if you're in the coding business. That can help the non-coding guys realize the limitations of code, and let them write quick, dirty code themselves to test something. And if they have a knack for it, maybe they can serve as a coder as well as their old position (assuming your corporate structure is flexible enough for this).
But demanding everyone be putting code into production is wrong. Would you demand all your employees learn graphic design and have them all create graphics to be used in production? Would you demand all your employees study law and write contracts?
No, because that's stupid.
Node.js with v8 engine.
The language is out of the browser, and it has some nice features.
Isn't "JavaScript code" an oxymoron?
No, it's not.
Anyhow, given that JavaScript runs on the client, that shouldn't be as big a problem as if they wrote code running on a server, as long as reasonable precautions have been taken to vet what you do with incoming data.
There's still plenty of room for security holes, if that's what you're after.
Just because the code runs on the client, that doesn't mean it's not important. I can understand why a company would want everybody to know the basics of programming, but making the people who's jobs have nothing to do with programming (and therefore have little programming experience) contribute production code seems like a strange policy.
In a tech company, it makes sense to have everyone take something along the lines of CS101. Specifically JavaScript? I don't think it matters but it helps give everyone a sense of how computers really work and what they can and cannot do.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
And I can say defiantly some people shouldn't code, ever. If I have to explain why int a,b, c = a+b; is wrong one more time I'm going to burst. I'm tired of telling people why you can't give else a condition, or what the fraggin curly bracers do. I know what you are going to say, that I should just not do it anymore since it causes me grief. But for every 9 yahoos in the c++ class, there is one guy who gets it and who asks great questions that make me have faith in humanity again.
At every place I worked at, executives and managers had never any clue what they were talking about, what their decisions meant or in general what the programmers/artists/workers did. This made for lots of meetings to explain them stuff , stupid decisions and lost money and effort.
So making them learn about what the company actually does, could accomplish:
a) that they make better decisions or, preferably:
b) that they let the people who know what they are doing do their job
So he objects to the idea that non-coders should write production code? Duh!
Oh, it's interesting because one small company in the whole world tried it? What about an essay praising all the countless companies that don't have non-coders write production code?
Nothing to see here. Move along.
See subject-line, & I'd like to ask the author that (as practice makes perfect, & PERFECTION IS A ROAD - NOT A DESTINATION!)
* I don't care what ANYONE says, since I've been @ writing code since 1982, & professionally since 1994 (everything from smaller freewares/sharewares, commercially sold code from certified Microsoft partners (that did excellently @ MS Tech-Ed 2000-2002 as a finalist in its HARDEST CATEGORY SQLServer Performance Enhancement which also reviewed very well in Windows IT Pro, then as Windows NT magazine), all the way up to "enterprise-class"/"mission-critical" apps that span into MILLIONS of lines of code thar run businesses across the USA!
So - I am talking from experience.
Is he? I wonder after reading the subject of this topic...
(No, for once, I did NOT "RTFA", but based on how it's posted here, that title says it all & prompted me to ask that question above!)
Heck - even MICROSOFT & other large software production houses make screwups SO BAD, it's like the article is saying "programmers NEVER make mistakes" & buddy? They do... even me. Hence, updates/upgrades MANY times!
APK
P.S.=> Formal academic training DOES HELP, but only SO FAR... the rest? Is on YOU, the coder... & it takes time, effort, perseverance, + patience (as well as the ability to stay @ it)...
... apk
Bro,
your words have nothing to with the reasons why non-programmers shouldn't write code.
While I totally agree with what you say about the codebase ending up in shambles, your post's title has nothing to do with the content of your actual post.
Node.js is for hipsters and overgrown web monkeys who think they can code.
Unless FreeCause has a rigorous mentoring and code review process, this is a mistake. I've seen even Computer Science graduates who aren't yet very real-world experienced emit some of the most incomprehensible, unmaintainable, defect-ridden code imaginable. It is a waste of marketers', analysts', and whomever else's time to learn to create useful code.
I'm especially concerned about inexperienced developers coding in JavaScript, which is difficult to debug and is notorious for cross-browser incompatibilities. Writing good, usable JavaScript is not a trivial task.
Maybe they should also have their programmers doing marketing? "You'd have to be a complete fucking moron not to buy our shit. HELL-FUCKING-LO, I AM SHOUTING THE LOUDEST OF ANYBODY THEREFORE YOU MUST BUY! I LEARNED THIS TECHNIQUE FROM TEH USED CAR COMMERCIALS!!"
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
So long as you are willing to spend the same amount of time per job learning all the other jobs that make the company work, including management. Turns out managing people it tougher than you might think. I've no desire at all to go in to management, though if I stay working for the university it is probably inevitable that I'll be made to.
If you are willing to do the same amount of cross training (per job) that you expect people to do for yours, then ok. However it is rather arrogant to think that your job is the only one important enough to have other people need to learn, or that you "already understand those other jobs."
JavaScript? You don't understand it. Therefore, it is code.
Write text.
Many moons ago, I was called in to clean up a project which had been assigned to an individual chosen for a particular task because he wasn't doing anything at the time...
The code in question was a real-time application that was to run on an in-house production system. People would flick a badge at a badge reader, which would transmit data to the production system in question, and the app, in real time, would do the usual things -- is the user authorized for this reader, log the event, do the right thing.
Except what usually happened was someone would walk up to a reader, flick their badge, and buggy real-time code would bring down the entire system.
After a few days of this yo-yo routine on a valuable system, I was given the opportunity (sic) to fix things.
Mess, spaghetti code, dog's breakfast, n^2 monkeys on bad acid, it was worse than that.
Previous "author" returned to his previous position. I re-wrote the pig (after writing a spec), debugged it on a non-production machine, and when it was checked out, put it into production.
Pain in the ass. Yeah, most everybody can be taught to write programs. Not everybody can write correct or good programs.
Oh, HTML isn't programming, but I'll leave complex website design to them that knows what they're doing.
Why Non-Coders Shouldn't Write Code
Non-coders should write code. It's how they'll learn. Now, if you meant "Why non-coders shouldn't write code for serious business purposes," well, guess what else? Non-surgeons shouldn't perform surgery. Non-swimmers shouldn't go diving. Non-drivers shouldn't be on the roads.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Everyone will be required to perform surgery every week.
Dude, you missed the keyword "everyone".
So make that
"Pilots training flight attendants and passengers how to fly"
What could *possibly* go wrong?
I'm looking forward to see the janitor working on our modified FC kernel driver.
Corollary: Don't even think about using FreeCause products.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
THey're LEARNING code, not writing code that is being used! I swear,, slashdot is a bunch of douches who never learned to douche.
From the fecking summary
And not just "code to learn basics of what JavaScript can do," but "write code that will be used in production."
Perhaps you should read a little before proclaiming Slashdotters to be douches. Not, that they aren't.
People who are really professional coders ought to resist this kind of silliness because it is rooted in the notion that anyone can create professional quality code. If that's true, why pay the real coders?
It isn't true, of course, no more than is the notion that if you can stick a frozen pizza in the microwave you should be preparing food in a restaurant.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Did you even read TFA? It clearly states that the employees will be required to produce working code that implements new features.
FreeCause is being a bit heavy handed in requiring people to learn how to code, but overall it's a good idea. They're doing their employees a favor by insisting that they attempt to learn a commercially viable skillset instead of sending them to seminars on how to apply the Art of War's lessons to management techniques (of all things). But using that same code in production sounds extreme. There's value in learning how to cobble together some code, but they shouldn't be deploying the output unless their positions call for it.
...unless ofcourse you are one of the many IT employees required to maintain this crap.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I know better than to feed trolls, but what exactly is wrong with Node.js - I get that it is a polarizing topic (anti-hipsters versus hipsters?). I'm just making some of my first web apps, and am very comfortable in c-type languages. I don't love javascript, but I don't hate it either, and have found some really nice projects in Node that have been easy to get started with, and seem to "just work" the way I expect so far. Is there something I'm missing?
You're introducing top to bottom amateur crap done by people with different styles who have never had to do this for a living.
This is why I do not have my tax man paint the art that hangs in my house or my vet create building codes requrements.
People are good at certain things BECAUSE they have become good at certain things.
At Berkeley Systems, we once had a product hit a problem state and had the QA manager hand out our extra bugs to everyone in the company to test. This was obviously, massive stupidity.
To prevent FAIL from happening, I ended up printing out the entire bug list, stapled it to the wall, we grabbed red and green felt tipped pens, one of my coworkers took the start of the list and worked to the end while I took the end and walked to the back.
For 900 bugs.
Within two days, we had a visual representation of "how much of the product's bugs are left with an unknown state", "how many of the product's bugs are closed", "how many of the product's bugs are still open" and by watching the paper get filled in with more green lines over the day, you could see that the trend pointed to "we have a relatively stable release, though there are some bugs that we still need to address, but this is a near ship state for the product".
We didn't even finish the testing. We covered 2/3rds of the product's open bug list and there was a clear trend (assuming relatively uniform open/closed bug states through out the product history) that the product was OK.
Based on this, we were able to not cancel the product and express with confidence that it was in a near ship state and the team continued to find, fix and test bugs, we all kept our employment and the product shipped.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Javascript is serious code. Just because all you might know how to do is echo text with it doesn't mean that it isn't real programming code.
Look at the next Google Doodle interactive game or music machine or calculator all done in Javascript and say it's not real programming code.
#1 writes the code to display 9 boxes in a 3x3 grid.
#2 writes the code to remove the outside borders.
#3 writes the code to display an X or an O inside of any box
#4 writes the code to check if there are three of either X or O in a row (this will not be a Marketing Guy, probably).
#5 writes the code to look at the Xs and Os, see if is the code's turn to choose which square to mark how, and where to put the approriate symbol.
#6 writes the code to take the message from #4's code and decides if it's appropriate to issue the winner's message.
#7 writes the code to congratulate the winner (this would be a good one for the Marketing Guy).
Problems solved. #5 will probably be one of the regular programmers, of course. Others may or may not be. And this is diffferent from larg-scale projects how?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3132589&cid=41404493
* In addition to the above points I stated that essentially mirror your own? I truly, honestly BELIEVE that anyone can 1st learn to code (basics) & move on + grow to more advanced forms of it... given time, & work.
(I'm no 'natural nerd', but I had to LEARN to be IF I wanted to be even moderately successful @ the art of programming professionally! It changed me, MOSTLY for "the good" but it does "nerd you out"... I'll warn ANYONE, that!)
Lastly - per my subject-line:
"Great Minds Think Alike" -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3048265&cid=40986085
APK
P.S.=> At least YOU think like a wise person does, realizing we are NOT "born" instantly as 'good coders': THOSE? Are made... & made thru the FURNACE of working on coding to get there, like any other trade!
(As to "Good Coder" - For WHATEVER THAT MEANS, since it's purely RELATIVE, and since every coder ALIVE, writes a "bug" now & then! Hence - you LEARN by those mistakes as you go!)
... apk
Back in the 60s Robert Townsend was brought in to turn around a dying Avis Rent-a-Car. He decreed that everybody spend some time working a rental counter so they would understand the activity that was at the core of the business. He was very amused by the experience of his chief programmer, who fled in panic upon seeing his first customer!
That was appreciation. This is geekcentric nonsense. The CEO doesn't just want everybody to better understand the coding, he actually thinks everybody can contribute to the codebase in an ongoing fashion. This is the classic geek fallacy of "everybody's brain works just like mine."
Why Non-Coders Shouldn't Write Code
:-)
Why Non-Surgeons Shouldn't Operate
Why Non-Terminators Shouldn't Terminate
Why Non-Welders Shouldn't Weld
Why Non-Judges Shouldn't Judge
Why Non-Burglars Shouldn't Burgle
Why Non-Existent Shouldn't Exist
Why Non-Veterinarians shouldn't Vet
Why Non-Fiction Shouldn't Fict
Why Non-Player Character Shouldn't Charact Play
Why Non-Females Shouldn't Do the Dishes
Why Non-Males Shouldn't do Men's Jobs
And so on. If everybody does what he/she does best, all will be fine! It's that easy!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
JavaScript is such a mess of paradigms I would never make somebody learn it first. Understanding what's going on under the hood is difficult even for people that have used it for years. Concepts that are simple in any other language make no sense in JavaScript. Its standard library is so barebones it's sad, and any library you try to add to it will likely have its own approach to JavaScript that is incompatible with other libraries. Asking somebody who has never coded to try to understand it is like asking somebody who has never even learned a second language to translate Sumerian.
You understand.
Node is going to be awesome ! I look forward to charging fair rates to repair the damage done by web developers who start coding.
I'm not a software developer, but when I write code, its ALWAYS in production.
FTA "Working with my coding mentor, I came up with some new versions of the notifications, including having the pop-ups appear sooner, and between the messaging and the timing, we were able to improve clickthroughs at least sixfold."
That employee seems to be having her code used. Hard to say how much of the work her coding mentor actually did, of course.
Remember: The Truth Will Out
Just because a company requires that people write code, doesn't mean they're software engineers. Trying to create software engineers by CEO fiat is like standing in a garage to become a car. The real world implications of trying to do so will set in, and usually sooner rather than later.
After the debaucle is done, the "Lessons Learned" will boil down to this:
- Bad programmers are really f****** expensive in the long run and drive our good programmers away.
- Find, recruit, and retain good programmers with higher than market pay rates, because we absolutely need them.
Which means that all software engineers in the market worth their salary can command higher prices.
This company is spending its money to conduct a case study to prove that programming is a skill, and hiring unskilled people for it does not work.
As a software engineer worth my salary, I'm very glad that they are doing so.
I'm glad I don't work for a surgery center with the same mentality...
Karma: Bad
It took the world 10 years to work out how to write clean Javascript. But now if you're disciplined, stay away from the nastier parts of the language, use the neat conventions the community has established, and have some discipline, you can write great code in JS.
You can embed V8 in all sorts of things - node.js, silkJS and Chrome are just three examples.
Would you demand all your employees learn graphic design and have them all create graphics to be used in production?
If I were selling graphic design product, I might.
"Production" in this context means "demonstrating what the tools can do on a customer premises in order to close the sale". I'd hope to hell that if I were selling Photoshop or Final Cut Pro or Shake that I'd be able to demo it to the customer and connect with them on at least a semi-professional level so that they'd have confidence that what I'm selling them will do what I'm telling them it will do.
Anyone who works with IT but not in IT should do that to get a basic understanding how we are not plumbers with the corporate network being pipes where labor can be done for the cheapest possible price because coding is sooo easy.
Also it is great to write scripts and custom functions too. If it sucks then that is the users problem.
http://saveie6.com/
Arguably the entire field of computation is about efficiency. The field of computer science is getting computers to do mundane mental tasks so people don't have to. This goal has expanded to doing so many mundane mental tasks that all the humans living on earth couldn't do them if they wanted to, and also doing some not so mundane things pretty well. Efficiency is still the name of the game. Whether it's minimizing time complexity, space complexity (i.e. making the machines more efficient), or maximizing scalability and maintainability (i.e. making the humans more efficient at making the machines more efficient), it's all about getting the biggest bang for your buck+second. To force *everyone* to participate in programming violate this basic tenet of computation. If everyone does a little programming, why don't we also all do a little toilet cleaning, cooking, accounting, construction, farming, policing, firefighting, etc. One of the greatest advancements of human societies has been division of labor. It turns out that for most tasks, the cost of learning how to do them well is vastly outweighed by the benefit of the job being done better. Unfortunately there are too many things to learn in one human lifespan, so learning only a few things becomes the most efficient solution. Every hour an HR person spends learning to programming, is an hour that he/she is not doing HR stuff. Now you need to hire more HR people (who will also be programming) to pick up the slack. So we can hire less programmers now right? Wrong. You can hire 1 good programmer, or 2 good programmers and 10 bad ones (1 good programmer to make the thing, and the other to undo everything the other 10 bad programmers did).
1. Right brained people doing a job that uses the - left hemisphere where "math" is stored. hmm you'll probably run into a lot of conversations like, "I was in the special ed math class."
// head desk
2. People who spend their time communicating, or putting together business deals may not have the mental bandwidth or time to code properly. We divide labor for a reason. It's far more egalitarian to allow people to excel what they are naturally talented at.
3. Not everyone can "hyperfocus" to put code down properly - doesn't mean they are dumb. Can you swing a bat like Buster Posey? Write an essay like Orwell? Different skill sets.
4. There's a trend in the IT/Developer world that everyone should know how to code, and if you can't, well then you're second class. You're just one step above menial labor - here's a mop pal. Ton's of people work well with and around technology without a CS degree. It's a fact.
Throughout my career I've had to work on Flash files built by designers. Most programmers I've encountered consider Actionscript beneath them and refuse to touch it. Companies figure that since Flash is supposedly a designer's tool that designers should also code.
You haven't seen bad code until you've been exposed to a designer's creation. It's the most convoluted garbage imaginable. I'd always be handed half-finished, barely functioning junk that needed "minor" edits. It would inevitably turn into an excruciating nightmare trying to figure out what this incompetent had done. In the end I'd just redo the thing completely because it was less work than trying to decipher and modify the original mess.
I'm convinced one of the big factors that led to Flash's downfall was crap code from designers. I couldn't stand, as a designer, being expected to code Actionscript. It's why I stopped including it on my resume.
From a perspective of quality, expecting every one of your employees to code is about the stupidest thing you can do. But more importantly, it's inefficient and an incredible waste of resources.
Us programmers are bad enough at writing code. Marketing people won't screw up that much more than a bad coder.
And not just "code to learn basics of what JavaScript can do," but "write code that will be used in production."
If you are asking me to write commercial grade, production-ready code, I expect to be paid the going rate for commercial grade, production-ready code --- over and above what I am currently being paid for my day job in accounting, marketing, etc.
this isn't about altruistically teaching others a valuable skill. it's about vain programmers trying to show their non-programmer colleagues how hard it is to code in order to get more respect. how much more condescending can you get? different people have aptitudes for different skills. go teach some dis-interested people how to do the rubic's cube, or something.
In a previous life, I was a programmer fluent in at least six languages plus several ALs plus some microcode. I also taught introductory programming in two colleges.
Many professional programmers I've worked with should have chosen another profession. To require all employees to "write code that will be used in production" is lunacy and will be receive the epic failure label sooner rather than later.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
He didn't just spout computer-generated buzzwords on the phone, though, he actually put on a fake mustache and physically attended a meeting - spouting total drivel. Nobody noticed until he started drawing Dilbert cartoons on the blackboard!
http://www.tealdragon.net/humor/articles/dil-hoax.htm
The things that bothered me most about TFA were the fact that there is apparently a class of software known as "loyalty management" and that it is used by something called "affinity groups".
These people do not get it. Sure, there are a host of bad coders with limited training, talent and experience. But nobody sane wants or needs more of them. In fact, re-qualifying all of them for something that has nothing to do with software creation may be a huge boon for everybody.
Quality coding is an engineer's job. It requires far more insight that hows to get a few functions codes or how to implement some algorithm. It requires understanding ans kill in building systems. Now, I also realize that academia is rarely creating engineers and not much more often creating coders when it educates IT people. One reason why I think by now it is better to have, say, EEs learn coding and do it. At least they are engineers and understand the system aspect.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In other words, if anything, he should really be inspired by his parent company to force all his employees to learn Japanese, but JavaScript is easier.
Should non-coders write code? Absolutely. It teaches logic, strengthens problem solving, encourages efficient thinking and, above all else, develops a respect for the core employees of the business. Even just having programming experience enables you perform unrelated job tasks more efficiently. Learning to automate some of your work can mean the difference between spending days editing a document or minutes writing a quick script to do it for you.
But, should that code be used in a production environment? Not without critical review by professional programmers.
Conversely, it wouldn't hurt for the programmers to learn some accounting, sales or management. Just don't put actually them in that job position (just like you won't have marketing or finance writing production code).
Imagine if every business would dedicate half-a-day per week to assigning everyone a different job at random (perhaps not in a production environment, but in a pseudo scenario). I think it could lead to a much more cohesive and cooperative workplace, where the employees have a better understanding of each other and aren't working in a vacuum.
Sure, they wouldn't really get a lot of actual work done in that half-day, but I think the improvements they would see over the other four-and-a-half would more than make up for it.
Did you KNOW that capitalizing and BOLDING random words makes YOU look like a retard?
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This is tantamount to saying, after working diligently for a decade, I've discovered that when I take my gorilla suit, leave off the monkey head and hands, slip the feet into dress shoes, brush it out real good and wear a cummerbund, I can go to a formal dress party and people don't point and scream any more. JS does useful work. A number of fair programmers have pounded a functional subset into operational submission. Its still a gorilla suit. Rather than spending vast amounts energy coding around, over or through JS insufficiencies, it is arguable that we should either fix JS, like from the ground up clean the pesky thing once and for all, or abandon it to better more elegant tools. Just a thought.
Also a bad idea to let Indians write code, leads to sub standard code
There is plenty of industry effort aimed at escaping reliance on software developers because they are increasingly expensive.
BUT.....there is a very important reason why they are expensive: coding well is hard.
Those who don't really get it, but who are optimistic by nature, will insist that they can cut those costs by learning to do it themselves (or, better yet, making their underlings learn to do it, so they can pay one person a one-person salary to do two person's jobs).
Of course it won't work. Those who attempt will fail, and they and their clients will suffer for it.
Meanwhile, coders will become even more expensive, as a consequence of being even more rare, as a consequence of being pushed out of the industry by job insecurity and ill treatment from clients who hate having to pay a coder to do hard things that don't seem hard when spoken of at a very high level.
Deal with it.
Oh, oh... Executive Officers clean up overflowing toilets. Not so they get an appreciation of what is being done, but for the general entertainment of the rest of us!
Hell, I'd pay to see just one of the suits around here cleanin' a shitter or two...
Then try working for a small company that is owned by one person, or maybe two if they are spouses. Then you may very well see an owner come in half an hour early to clean the bathroom in the morning. And yes one person I once worked for who did so was a suit, a business/marketing guy. He never asked one of the programmers, qa/support guys or the receptionist to do so. Small shop, 6 employees, plus a consultant or two at times.
As an added bonus the suit above trusted our judgement on technical issues.
YMMV.
I do largely agree with this.
The problem is browsers. Pick a nice language. Python? Ruby? Give it some elegant DOM bindings. Now convince all the browsers to embed it simultaneously, and convince everyone to install those new browsers.
Until that happens, you have to use JS.
One good reason to use JS on the server, is to re-use the same code on both client and server. As a simple example, it's pretty common to do form validation on the client. It's essential to do form validation on the server. Why write the same validation twice, in two different languages?
Perhaps it's just a passive-aggressive way of laying off most of the company by firing them for writing malfunctioning code.
And we'll let everyone in the engineering company design parts for the next bridge we build. What could possibly go wrong? Well, they'd be in violation of the Professional Engineering legislation in their jurisdiction, for one thing. IT still has nothing like professional licensing: There is absolutely nothing preventing rank amateurs from producing code for production. That's why software crashes are a lot more common than bridges collapse. It's going to take decades, and probably some fatalities, but eventually the world will hold IT accountable for its mistakes, just like the history of engineering, medicine, pharmacy, etc.
Let them write code, but for the love of my future cat, choose something like Java or C++ or C# that actually forces them to adopt a decent coding style.
JavaScript is, like Visual Basic or PHP, an undead language that requires a decent burial and a priest of the highest order to dispatch. I mean, these languages are really, really, not good starting places for learning proper programming, they're just languages that let you learn some basics very quickly. It's like the bike you got when you were 6, that had clickety-clacks and was composed primarily of plastic; no one is saying that you can't ride them at age 12 or 25 or 40, but once having mastered the general idea of human-powered mechanics, it's best to move onto faster and more capable things. The way some of these people use these languages, you'd think someone had attached a lawn-mower engine to a preschooler's tricycle; yes, that's awesome (and no, I did not know you could do that, let alone would want to), but try out some of these bigger toys, which I think you will find much more fun.
I am John Hurt.
I think it would be more useful to let the non-coders take a day with a good programmer and have the programmer explain what they are doing, why, and how. I would make sure you dont expect anything productive on those days and for a bonus you might get that introverted programmer in all of us to open up a bit. If having the non-techs understand and appreciate whats going on is the object, it would seem this is the safest way to go about it without opening up your code base to security and stability hell.
... Here's a word of advice - your pay scale does not, in any way, reflect what kind of person you are ... I couldn't give a shit less what 'marketing people' or anyone else thinks of me ...
Here's a clue: If people think less of you it may have nothing to do with your pay scale and have everything to do with a narrow minded, stereotypical and one dimensional view of the world. Your behavior is quite literally like the behavior of those you despise, you are merely the mirror image of what you claim to despise - thinking ill of people merely because of their position.
Yeah, perhaps software coders could institute professional standards and licensing.
You know, like a real engineering profession does, before it's allowed to call itself "an engineering profession."
Because Rushkoff is wrong.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The original comment by the what-his-companys-name guy, as well as the posting of this article on /. (possibly by the same guy), were either tongue in cheek, or should have been.
What was called for was either an appropriate bit of humor (e.g. Marketing's likely contribution, see above) or a neat bit reflecting an unexpected point of view.
The many here who posted knee-jerk, "you can't replace what professionals do with rookies" failed.
The "tech" people that instituted such a policy should also be required to do at least one financial statement or report per quarter. See how they like doing accounting.
webMethods already tried this back in the dotcom days with 'all your business analysts can write code'.
except they don't have any idea about little things like data validation, logging, error handling, ect. production failures and general hilarity ensue.
One could make the "holistic" argument that we should teach everybody (or at least all our children) to code, much like we decided centuries ago that we should teach everybody to read and write. Because coding might well be considered a basic skill that's required to better understand how the information age works, what drives it, and what its challenges are. That's somewhat similar to how reading and writing skills at some point in the past were deemed necessary to successfully deal with the increasing complexity of the world back then.
Once that's done, you could go one and require all employees in a company to code (when necessary), much like you require (pretty much) all employees to read and write when necessary.
I rather suspect the motive here might just be to make the non-coders be awestruck with how dazzlingly clever and amazingly admirable the coders are.
Yes, it's insane.
The same people who come up with nonsense like this would scoff at the idea of letting everyone do the books, or run the next marketing campaign.
So why do they think the reverse would work?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Mr. Alex Belits... lol, like THAT "fools us" now... lol!
"Did you KNOW that capitalizing and BOLDING random words makes YOU look like a retard?" - by snowraver1 (1052510) on Thursday September 20, @06:02PM (#41405249)
Ahem - Again: NOT AS BADLY AS YOU DID LONG AGO HERE Alex Belits -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3132589&cid=41404769
APK
P.S.=> A brand-new 7 DIGIT username too for your "alternate registered 'luser'" sockpuppet to defend you NOW, though? Please... lol!
... apk
I'm a software tester and if I were employed there I'd cringe and probably leave the building with my handpalm imprint on my forehead...
At the very least I'd beg to do whitebox testing so I can at least correct the crap myself.
Bah.
I would not consider it rooted in that notion, and if you can't defend your contribution from that misunderstanding even when they are doing work and the result should be fairly obvious, then you should be looking at changing profession.
I've programmed for 30 years and worked professionally at it for almost 20. I would love to have everybody in my organization learn to program, as I think that would be useful for people to know.
If your guild actually had some basic education and standards for what constitutes "professional quality code" independent and irrespective of the marketing buzzword du jour, as well as some good-quality continuing education to keep up with the technology behind the latter, it might actually benefit you, people who want to learn to code, and ultimately the employers who want to hire coders.
But as it stands now, the entire high-tech industry has acquired such a fly-by-night mentality that I don't think there's any demand for "professional quality code". The demand is "do a marketing blitz quick ship it out the door before the hype dies down and let me collect my bonus and move on to the next project." The hubris and arrogance that seems typical of developers themselves doesn't help either. Whether non-coders could or should or would code is a totally minor side-issue, given the amount of professional-quality enterprise-grade crap software out there.
I'm one of those non-coders who code -- I end up writing a few scripts in Perl or PHP or Javascript or R or whatnot for miscellaneous tasks, but I don't want to be a programmer. I'm just glad I get to put my education to use and develop my skills in a different industry, where there isn't quite so much nonsense to put up with.
This is something as a mechanical engineer I notice quite often. Many people of different backgrounds come up with mechanical designs that on the surface may look feasible. But when someone with a mechanical engineering education and years of experience takes a look at it they know instantly where the problems are and whether they can be overcome. The question is when do you bring in the engineer? If it's an idea that's cheap to test and if failure is safe and permissible than go ahead and try. If you are going to spend a lot of money building it or if it fails it could kill someone it might be smart to hire someone that knows what they are doing.
It's the same with code. Heck I write code all of the time to figure out numerical solutions to differential equations or to program routines in CAD software. But I wouldn't try to write my own control system software for something that if it fails would hurt someone. I get people who know what they are doing and I write requirements and work with them to produce a safe product.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
On one hand, they think programming is so hard to learn that they require job applicants to have experience in the exact set of languages and tools the company needs, because it supposedly would take too long to learn something new.
But on the other hand, they think programming is so easy that they're willing to outsource it to the lowest bidder in Whereverstan, or in this case they expect people with no education or experience in programming to be capable of producing production code after a few weeks of part-time training.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
does anyone yet believe me its stupid day at slashdot? NO really i heard they got bought out ....they fire someone with the brains or what( pictures a tired old gnome saying I QUIT )
Just like you wouldn't ask a programmer to compute your yearly cash flow you shouldn't ask just anyone to write code.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/09/16/1631239/can-anyone-become-a-programmer
If you want to dig deeper, here's a page with the link to the 2006 study. Short version: not only can not everybody learn to program effectively, but that there's a simple test to predict if someone could or not without putting them through a year of school:
http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
The overlapping bell curves explain a lot about grade distributions when I went to college.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
FTA:
Every FreeCause employee, from CEO Mike Jaconi on down, is learning JavaScript. Inspired by the dictate within its Japanese parent company Rakuten to have all its employees become fluent in English, Jaconi decided to have everyone, from himself down to the interns, learn to code.
Emphasis mine.
A Japanese firm having staff which are fluent in English is actually useful. It's a very common language around the world. There is almost no benefit to having an entire company that knows JavaScript, especially if they're not in coding roles. Sounds like the man just wanted to make headlines as a pioneer of some sort, regardless of the fact it makes him look stupid.
I absolutely hated getting calls asking for a password reset or support for x application nobody in my group heard of. After spending 20 minutes screwing around; we end up figuring out that it was some guy in whatever department that created an application using VBA for the function rather than asking our software engineering group to create it. If it isn't coded by the team that is paid to code, there isn't going to be any real support documentation and centralized support for it.
The sales guys.
If they promise some impossible-to-deliver functionality to a customer in order to make a sale, they have to code that functionality themselves.
Then everyone will think they _can_ code. Sort of like everyone who's ever made a web page for a class thinks they're a computer programmer.
It's fine as long as you make sure you don't go over about 500 lines of code. It's well suited for cheap, single-task listening worker processes that you need to be able to spawn or kill at a moment's notice. Very Unixy, in that regard.
I do agree that it's goddamn stupid to use it to do anything that a traditional language + Apache/Nginx could do just as well. And of course we could all just learn Erlang and the world would be a better place, certainly.
To be honest, I can't stand looking at most of the terrible mess called "code" written by "trained developers". Maybe I'll go ask the Office Manger to write up a quick js fade-in modal system for me so I can use it for credit card payments.
Coding is a very simple task for the most part - it's really just listing a set of simple jobs that must be done in order to get a more complicated task done. Slashdotters seem to act like asking someone to write some code is akin to asking them to paint the Mona Lisa.
Let's face facts: Coding is something that 99.9% of people could probably do quite easily, you're just scared that people are going to see that and realize that they've been overpaying their codemonkeys for years.
One good reason to use JS on the server, is to re-use the same code on both client and server. As a simple example, it's pretty common to do form validation on the client. It's essential to do form validation on the server. Why write the same validation twice, in two different languages?
Brilliant. So now hackers can find a hole locally and exploit it remotely because you use the exact same code on the server. What web sites do you run again?
Client side validation is for protecting users from inadvertently screwing up; server side validation is for protecting the server environment from users who want to screw it up. Two different functions, which require different code.
My experience as a developer tells me that computers don't lie, people do. So it's kind of obvious that "evil programmers" write the tools that enable these "evil marketers".
My missus happens to have a Phd in marketing and has taught it at university for almost 20yrs now, there is nothing "evil" about it. What slashdoter's almost universally refer to as "marketing" is actually advertising, marketing is a methodology for running a business, advertising is a way to attract attention and the best advert of all is a genuine low price, high quality product. A marketer who can only write ads is like a programmer who can only write batch files.
Dogs sleeping with cats - We tease each other, I tell her about all the dumb shit marketing does at work, and she tells me all the dumb shit IT do at her workplace. It's funniest when it backfires: our marketers came up with a logo that consisted of three cogs arranged in a triangle with each cog touching the other two, in picture form any engineering type just laughs because they instantly realize the cogs are grid locked. She passed the "marketer test" on that one, after a minute or more of deep inspection, not a clue what was wrong.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Every framework makes it easy to make some things that 'just work.' Node.js is fine, and Javascript is fine too, but Javascript is so flexible it lets you write catastrophically bad code in ways that you just can't in other languages, like Java.
The result is, if you have to work on a large project that someone else built in Javascript, it could be horribly ugly and painful. Other languages, like Java, end up with ugly code too, but they limit you in the things you can do. You can't add members to classes at runtime in Java, for example.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm a paramedic, you're almost certainly a coder.
I write the occasional bit of quick and dirty code to do something I want done, and I imagine that you've stuck a bandaid on a cut a time or two.
That being said, barring radical career shifts, I'll never write code as well as you do, and you'll never do first aid as well as I do. I've hired a freelance coder to do something, and statistically, you have called, or someday will call, for an ambulance.
I can't imagine that anyone will ever expect me to be supplanted by a guy who took first aid in HS and has a moderately well stocked first aid kit, and I would NEVER suggest that you shouldn't apply bandaids, in fact, I would be all in favor of you and everyone you know going out and taking a CPR and first aid course. I think that would be fantastic.
I can't even imagine why you would be worried about the inverse.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
You seem to be mistaking data validation and data sanitization. That's two different things, and if you have to do the latter in your code, you probably already doing things wrong sticking user inputs in context where there is possibility of executing them.
Problems arising from bugs in user input validation can lead to application crashes, but won't be of much use for a hacker. You don't need two different versions of code to check that birth date indeed parses as date, phone number parses as phone number, password and password confirmation match and entered ZIP code exists in your locale.
Like learning math, writing an English paper, speaking a foreign language, riding a bicycle, etc. it's a learned skill and anyone over about 110 IQ points can do it with the proper instruction and motivation.
Futurist Traditionalism
They mean ZERO (especially from an unidentified ac troll like you)...
* Got that? Good...
APK
P.S.=> I didn't even bother to read your line of crap... "tl:dr", pusscake... apk
"Because APK is a known troll" - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20, @10:21PM (#41407107)
LMAO - see subject: "Says the 'courageous' (not) AC TROLL" himself quoted above!
All that, while trolling here himself ("Good Logic" that, not) - LMAO, pot calling the kettle black & all!
* Do you realize how STUPID you look saying what you did, and doing the trolling her yourself?
APK
P.S.=> QUESTION: Just HOW MANY TIMES have I utterly "dusted" you on things technical in computing that you are FORCED to try "troll me" (being the 'brave hero' you are (lol, NOT) by "ac" posts, hmmm, 'pusscake'?
... apk
Witness Oracle Applications, Java, IE and the quick to fall at Pwn2Own.
No. You said pick a nice language. Perl? Sure. Python, no.
I have to code in python and javascript on a regular basis. If all web browsers supported python tomorrow side by side with javascript then I would be using javascript.
and I hate javascript with a passion.
It tells me loads about IBM.
These people had no wish to go into programming, no initiative, they passed a two year low level qualification only because they were required to to keep a job.
It tells me that IBM just wants site fillers who are billable.
It's one thing for non-programmers to learn programming to better understand what the programmers do, it's another to learn programming to be hired out as a programmer!
The filthy liars who lied about the lies they lied?
The concept you're looking for is "hubris." The guy's ego was writing checks his productivity couldn't cash. I worked with a really talented kid fresh out of school a while back. He'd been a big fish in a small pond his whole life, and couldn't fathom a world where some people might have more talent than he did, and worse yet, might be talented in different ways.
He kept insisting he was the only one competent to get this done, and that done, and the other thing until he finally met an old man who let him try.
The crackup was pretty spectacular.
Last I heard, the kid was doubling down on a bad strategy. Not sure what it's going to take to get the kid far enough past his own ego to work with other people.
But his time is running out.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
there is not, that i am aware of, a business culture which assumes that anyone can perform emergency medicine. there are plenty of execs who think they know how to do the programmers job because one time back in '98 they made a spreadsheet that adds up a column and prorates it by the number of days remaining this month
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Some years ago, at a meeting of top engineers for the company I worked for (a top 60 software company as well as a major semiconductor equipment supplier) I stated that my job was to make my job (as software engineer) obsolete before I retired. At that time, I had written adaptive system software that is now under patent - software that lets users tell the system what they want it to do - not how to do it. That is the key thing. There will NEVER be enough competent software developers/engineers to meet the needs of the new computer generation. We need to create systems that can be told what to do, but not how to do it, and expect the correct results. Having your non-programming staff learn how to write some javascript or other code isn't the solution - in fact it will cause more problems than it is worth, in that these non-competent "programmers" will start to think they know how to write good software, when in fact they just know enough to be very dangerous! After 30 years as a top software engineer (published, patented, honored with awards) I can say with confidence that creating good (reliable, efficient, appropriate) software is HARD! It is properly an engineering discipline, and one that not a lot of so-called software professionals have mastered.
a recipe for miserable workers and substandard code
Since when has that ever mattered to upper management?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm fine with that.
If.... You get the nerds in the back office to make sales pitches to your biggest customer. For real.
and...You get the nerds in the back office to create your company accounts. For real.
and... You get the nerds in the back office to handle your court cases. For real...
and.... You get the nerds in the back office to handle your business strategy, including company takeovers. For real...
I think you get the picture...
I was just reading this article:
http://numbermonger.com/2010/12/07/should-accountants-be-required-to-code/
SQL, here I come! (or not, still have my homework to do... :P)
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
The title says "Why non-coders shouldn't write code," yet the summary goes on to explain how a company forces all non-coder employees to write code.
Nice going, editors. Has anyone ever told you you're a bunch of fucking idiots?
http://htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum-Z-H-2.html "Many professions require some form of computer programming. Accountants program spreadsheets and word processors; photographers program photo editors; musicians program synthesizers; and professional programmers instruct plain computers. Programming has become a required skill. The answer consists of two parts. First, it is indeed true that traditional forms of programming are useful for just a few people. But, programming as we the authors understand it is useful for everyone: the administrative secretary who uses spreadsheets as well as the high-tech programmer. In other words, we have a broader notion of programming in mind than the traditional one. " I agree with both of them. Although I think Javascript isn`t the best suited language for this.
Actual coders have a hard enough time writing useful code, so I can't even imagine what kind of hell that place is. Maybe it is a mass suicide experiment?
I've seen this kind of thing lead to brittle mission-critical applications that no one can understand or maintain, once the original author is gone.
Hahaha good catch apk. Alex Belits ran like a whipped dog.
Reminds me of our experience with "end user reporting".
Reporting writing is boring but necessary. Still, most coders don't really want to do it so we thought "Hey, let's get some end user reporting tools and teach the users to do their own reports".
Months later our coders are still doing the reports because our end users aren't really bright enough to use "end user reporting".
Unfortunately, now that they think they know what's going on, their requirements have grown more complex and unrealistic.
Progress?
The title of the submission suggests this company is making non-coders write production quality code. In actuality, they are only requiring about 4 hours a week of total coding. My company has similar policies. I am a technical person, but they require their employees to learn marketing, financials, and presentation skills. That doesn't mean that I do financials or marketing on a day to day basis. It does mean I have an easier time communicating with the people who do financials and marketing.
I can see some merit to this approach. I am one of the few technical guys in a sea of non-technical people. One of my jobs is to explain very technical ideas to non-technical people. I speak from experience that it helps out a lot when we have at least some level of common language.
signed, Independent Consultant
Don't worry, the market will sort this out. Most likely their code will fsk and the company will fail. Or change.
If I recall, Pascal was originally designed as a teaching language. It had distinct comparison and assignment (copy) operators.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you listen to IBM, they would say:
Popular software product lines
* CICS
* Cognos
* DB2
* FileNet
* IMS
* Informix
* InfoSphere
* Lotus
* Rational
* SPSS
* System z
* Tivoli
* WebSphere
Now, as to whether any or all of these products or product lines are actually "popular" in terms of market share, user count, or gross revenue, I have no idea.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A/C:
I'm not going to jump into the fray between you and the Slashdotter you keep mentioning, but you do make an interesting, probably generally accurate, comment about human social behavior.
Slashdot being a nerd hangout, and nerds being known for logic, I would expect less of this kind of "assume it's trash based on reputation, don't bother reading" here than in the world at large.
In particular, I would assume - perhaps naively - that down-modding posts based on the reputation of the poster rather than the content of the post would be the exeption, not the rule. To put it another way, if a crazy Slashdotter happens to say something that makes sense every now and then, I would expect those with mod points to mod bassed on what was said, not who said it. Perhaps I am naive, but I do expect better^H^H^H^H^H^Hmore logical behavior from my fellow nerds.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Even professionals wind up doing this:
CallWidgetThatWorks(Parameters)
without bothering to understand that CallWigetThatWorks is slow or otherwise inefficient for the task and hand and if they want their code to work WELL they need to either write their own widget or find another widget or widgets that get the job done efficiently given the execution environment.
Even worse, sometimes professionals wind up doing this:
CallWidgetThatClaimsToWork(Parameters)
without checking with the vendor's errata or the user-community's comments that say "be careful, this function breaks under these scenarios: ....".
It's not always the programmer's fault. Sometimes even the vendor isn't aware of the bugs or inefficiencies in the libraries it publishes until they become widely used and the flaws start to show up.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There's no better language than JavaScript for producing miserable workers and substandard code. Well done FreeCause!
"Perhaps I am naive, but I do expect better^H^H^H^H^H^Hmore logical behavior from my fellow nerds." -
Don't... most do NOT even QUALIFY as "nerds" in the traditional sense (they are far LOWER on the totem pole AND evoluationary scale, lol)...
If they were?
Then I wouldn't be able to "thrash them" as easily as I do on facts in technicals of computing!
* Still liked your post, because it IS, how it is...
APK
P.S.=> Thanks for replying - I have been getting pursued by these trolling ac coward idiots for around 2++ yrs. now, & I know WHY they do it as "anonymous coward" (since if you saw how MANY of them, 100's, that I have bookmarked in times they've UTTERLY BLUNDERED vs. myself on facts in computing, they are FORCED to try to get over their "geek angst" @ screwing up vs. myself, by trolling as ac instead so I cannot further attach said defeats to myself to their registered 'luser' names here on /.: Yes, it is THAT simple & I am sure that is the WHY of why it goes on!).
NOW, from what I understand, as to what could POSSIBLY be making them act more like WOMEN than MEN by doing that "ac stalking" of myself?
Bisphenol-A in their drinks is a GOOD start... lol!
... apk
...increase the respect that other employees have for coders (See? It's not as easy as you think! Your code is inefficient / slow / unmaintainable / easily breaks.). The attitude of those who went through college towards those who did not (and towards those who did, but didn't have to) is often contempt, and coders are often treated as interchangeable, faceless cogs. Their skills often depreciated because coding is a skill that you can teach yourself, rather than requiring years studying in school, allowing self-trained coders the ability to then jump right into the business. This ability is enhanced because the tools needed to learn and practice coding skills can be acquired cheaply if you have the right contacts, and are digital in nature, so do not require huge outlays of cash and a large physical infrastructure to maintain them.
If you want to become an engineer and build bridges etc, self-study can take you only so far. Once you've mastered the intellectual skills required, going out and practicing those skills in a real-world environment is beyond the monetary wherewithal of you're average person. And the idea of "borrowing" a bridge, or building one to test your theories is, on it's face, ridiculous. On the other hand, "borrowing" intellectual property without alerting it's owners is not only possible, but an every-day occurrence in our world, making the gathering of important hands-on experience possible. And a diploma is not necessary to show you posses (in theory) the required coding skills, submitting working code is usually sufficient to prove your chops, since it does not take a highly skilled master to evaluate the code, it only requires being executed, and it's value will become apparent.
So, the idea of showing other employees that coding is not as easy as some think, not such a bad idea. But not everyone can pump-out production-quality code, especially with no coding experience. This means that acceptable code will either have to be low-threshold code that is, by it's nature, less difficult to produce. This will cause two problems:
1) Making the entire exercise pointless (because the employee would then think, "See?! I knew it was easy!", and...
2) There are only so many projects of this type available. Either requiring make-work (but it's supposed to be production code), or causing needless bulk as duplicate code cannot be eliminated because then, it wouldn't be production code.
It's either one of those or, as the author suggested, low quality code all around.
On the other-hand, this practice could actually stem from the attitude that programming is a low-threshold skill, and so it's practitioners are easily replaceable buy low-skill workers. I mean, who needs programmers when literally anybody in the company can (and does) do what they do?
Hardly an environment that will attract skilled practitioners, or pay enough to retain them. And now we're back to low-quality code all around again.
THINK! It's patriotic
I had a graphic designer with a 10 second attention span come to me once and ask "can you show me how to do a web page without any of this computer shit". I tried but got "don't give me any computer shit" within seconds (in response to "don't make the file size of the images too big"). Sometimes that's the attitude, and you end up with a 600MB movie pretending to be a web site and stuff that is hard coded to work nowhere other than the designers laptop. I've been considered responsible by management for "sabotaging" two websites by gently pointing out that bandwidth is not infinite and other design problems newbies would be ashamed of. The people responsible found they couldn't just learn how to do it themselves in seconds and gave up in disgust. If it was done now I'd point them at wordpress or a wiki but I think the results would be just a different type of failure.
I think it's based to a degree on the contempt that many have for any sort of people that do IT work - they think some caffiene fueled video gamer is doing it so it can't possibly be any sort of real work.
Because APK is a known troll, if he posted under an account his posts would all come in at -1 anyway, which is the very reason he doesn't use a registered account, so in response to that he gets down-modded. If he stopped being a douchy stalking troll and had a registered account it would be fine, but he wants to continue with his pathetic existence to troll randoms on the net so everything he posts just gets modded down and nobody reads any of it (except those who call him out for being a loser) :P" -
The fact you TROLL me as ac posts constantly only tells me you have been "dusted" by me, SO MANY TIMES, in technical debates on topics in computing here, that "the best you have" is illogical off-topic ad hominem attack attempts...
PER MY SUBJECT LINE ABOVE vs. your quoted words above, especially the bolded part:
Roughly 220++ of them & I post as AC (hard to get even +1, as /. hides our posts & we "AC"'s start @ ZERO/0 points, unlike registered "lusers", lol!):
+5 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (6):
HOSTS & BGP:2010 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1901826&cid=34490450
FIREFOX IN DANGER: 2011 -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2559120&cid=38268580
TESLA:2010 -> http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1872982&cid=34264190
TESLA:2010 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1806946&cid=33777976
NVIDIA 2d:2006 -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175774&cid=14610147
COMPUTER ASSOCIATES BUSTED FOR ACCOUNTING FRAUD:2010 -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1884922&cid=34350102
----
+4 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (5):
APK SECURITY GUIDE:2005 -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167071&cid=13931198
INFO. SYSTEMS WORK:2005 -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161862&cid=13531817
WINDOWS @ NASDAQ 7++ YRS. NOW:2009 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28571315
CARMACK'S ARMADILLO AEROSPACE:2005 -> http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158310&cid=13263898
What I admire about Theo DeRaadt of BSD fame: 2012 -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3007641&cid=40785151
----
+3 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (6):
APK MICROSOFT INTERVIEW:2005 -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155172&cid=13007974
APK MS SYMBOLIC DIRECTORY LINKS:2005 -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166850&cid=13914137
APK FOOLS IE7 INSTALL IN BETA HOW TO:2006 -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175857&cid=14615222
PROOFS ON OPERA SPEED & SECURITY:2007 -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=273931&cid=20291847
HBGary POST in Fake Names On Socia
I'm not worried about it. Unlike the writing of spoken languages which everybody has decided they can do well since the advent of e-mail, programming fail tends to become obvious a lot sooner and is evaluated less on subjective taste. Well, except maybe to managers susceptible to 'enterprise solution' marketing tactics.
You mean like the certification processes people used to get high-paying salaries for in the '90s that people now look up on warily as if you're a snake oil salesman for having on your resume? Should there be one for every language? What certifying authority is going to stay on top of the web when the colleges still haven't figured out how to teach JavaScript competently?