Ad Exec: Learn To Code Or You're Dead To Me

theodp writes "In a widely-read WSJ Op-Ed, English major Kirk McDonald, president of online ad optimization service PubMatic, informed college grads that he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two programming languages. 'Teach yourself just enough of the grammar and the logic of computer languages to be able to see the big picture,' McDonald advises. 'Get acquainted with APIs. Dabble in a bit of Python. For most employers, that would be more than enough.' Over at Typical Programmer, Greg Jorgensen is not impressed. 'I have some complaints about this "everyone must code" movement,' Jorgensen writes, 'and Mr. McDonald's article gives me a starting point because he touched on so many of them.'"

Comments

Re:Online ads?

[ArcadeMan]

You say that like it was easy to remove online ads.

Oh, wait.

O'rly?

[ArcadeMan]

Guy who owns a technical company tells people they're no good to him if they can't be technical.

News at 11.

Re:O'rly?

[ColdWetDog]

Who in the hell wants to listen to an "English major" who runs an online ad service? This guy should be drawn and quartered, not quoted.

Re:O'rly?

[jones_supa]

Like Bill Hicks said it, if anyone is in advertising or marketing, just kill yourself.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no. How about the people in advertising or marketing kill themselves?

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Job creep. This is the kind of who wants people to be able to do much more than their normal job descriptions.

You want to be a graphic artist and create artwork for our ads? That's great! If you can't mark them up in HTML & Javascript, and code the PHP/PERL/Python backend, then GTFO!

You get what you pay for, asshat. If you hire "amateur" or non-programmers to do your programming then enjoy the fruits of your laborers.

Re:O'rly?

[ShanghaiBill]

If you want only graphics artists who can program, prepare to have some really shitty artwork.

If you only hire graphic artists that don't have a clue about programming then they will waste a lot of time manually performing tasks that could be easily automated. I once had a GA spend two weeks resizing and changing the background color of several hundred images. I could have written a script to do that in a few minutes, and it could have run in a few seconds. Even if he couldn't write the code himself, if he had a few clues about programming, he would have at least have had the sense to ask for help rather than wasting two weeks.

That was just once incident, but I have seen many like it. In the modern world, nearly everyone should have a basic mental model of how computers work and what they are capable of. They don't need to be coders, but they should have a basic understanding of what coders do.

Re:O'rly?

[TheRaven64]

There's a difference between hiring artists who are good programmers and hiring artists who understand the basics of programming. It amazes me how much time commercial artists waste doing grunt work that can be trivially automated. If you hire only the ones that know a tiny bit of programming then they'll spend a tiny bit of time writing some crappy code instead of a lot of time doing everything by hand.

Re:O'rly?

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you think you can just write a custom program in 10 minutes that will do that for Photoshop files with dozens of layers and effects, you're the deluded one.

Re:O'rly?

[buybuydandavis]

"Go away, or I will replace you with a tiny shell script."

Much of the "nonprogrammer" work in business is a massive waste of time, transferring information from document A to document B, which *if you think like a programmer*, you'll be looking for a tool to replace. If you don't program, grinding it out by hand seems the natural thing to do.

Re:O'rly?

[Zerth]

You know that Photoshop has an API for javascript, VB, and Applescript?

I used to do exactly that sort of thing for a product photographer. And it didn't usually take 10 minutes, unless you include the time to execute.

I currently do the same for Indesign documents with linked Photoshop artwork. The Indesign part is worse, actually. Makes dealing with effects and layers seem simple.

Re:O'rly?

[Pseudonym]

If you want only graphics artists who can program, prepare to have some really shitty artwork. Any artist worth shit is not going to be a programmer because they'll have spent that time honing their artistic skills instead of wasting it on learning how to code.

There is a middle ground, you know.

Nobody would expect an expert chemist to be an expert statistician. They are different jobs requiring different skill sets. But would you hire a chemist who had no understanding of statistics whatsoever?

We are already at the point where pretty much every professional job requires at least some number literacy, and some knowledge of project management, and any number of other things to a not-especially-onerous level of competence. Any artist "worth shit" knows how to create art, but they also know how to manage their time, and how to manage colleagues and clients (and possibly underlings), and how to manage a budget (even if it's only a modest budget). An artist without these ancillary skills, or a lack of willingness to acquire them, is useless.

We are getting to the point where for some professions, code literacy is another one of these required ancillary skills.

Re:O'rly?

[hackula]

As a developer, I hope business analysts start churning out loads and loads of scripts. In ten years, my business will be through the roof! Automating one small task is easy. Creating a scalable and maintainable system... not so much.

Re:O'rly?

[DaveV1.0]

No, he is telling the NONTECHNICAL people filling NONTECHNICAL jobs in his pseudo-technical company they are useless to him if they can't do something technical that isn't their job. He is saying this to accountants, HR people, administrative assistants. To make this clear to you, imagine the CEO of a medical laboratory company telling college grad he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two medical diagnostic tests. How about if the CEO of an electronics supply company telling college grad he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity designing amplifier circuits? Or, the CEO of a financial company telling college grad he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two methods of analyzing stock performance. Or, the CEO of a musical instrument company telling college grad he considers them unemployable unless they can play two methods different musical instruments. To put it bluntly, McDonald is an idiot.

Re:O'rly?

[minstrelmike]

Shades of E.O.Wilson saying not every college grad needs to understand high-level math; that in fact you're better off partnering with an expert mathematician than trying to become an expert yourself. I guess it depends on whether you want a single, all-in-one employee or a team of employees.

Re: O'rly?

[JakeBurn]

You just made my day. Thank you. There really should be a law against anything but simple, factual advertising. Execution for first time offenders.

Moronic

[MrHanky]

There are thousands of occupations with no need for programming skills. Ah, how about nursing, for instance. This is just an ad salesman trying to give off the impression of being relevant in this day and age. He's an ad salesman. An idiot.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

There are thousands of occupations with no need for programming skills. Ah, how about nursing, for instance. This is just an ad salesman trying to give off the impression of being relevant in this day and age. He's an ad salesman. An idiot.

I agree!

I'm a technical recruiter and I can tell you that we need people who can program in askee! Really! Why the other day, I demanded an askee file from a candidate and he sent me a file with a ".txt" extension!

Really?

Are people that stupid?

I asked again, and he sent me a file with an extension of ".asc"!

Come on!

We just can't find qualified technology people!

Finally, this brilliant kid from Deli sent me a ".askee" file.

Finally!

We hired him to program SeeKwell in C+#.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of a single job on the planet where I can't come up with a place where coding wouldn't be useful.

I can't think of a single job on the planet where being able to keep track of the "n't"s in your sentences wouldn't be useful. Also, just because there are occasions when being able to code would be useful doesn't mean every single person needs to be able to do it.

You lack imagination and probably aren't going to be worth employing anyway

[citation needed]

I'm guessing your comment is a denfensive response to your fear of becoming obsolete.

You do realise that people can comment on matters that aren't directly relevant to them, right?

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

He can develop a genetic program to solve the travelling salesman problem of his pickup route and optimize the amount of time it takes him to complete his run.

Re:Moronic

[ArcadeMan]

The garbage man does the route he's told. He's not in charge of the route, the fuel expenses, etc. That's his boss' job.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets say that you are a nurse. Part of your job is to move (one by one) all patients from the hospital database into dead or cured folders, depending on which flag they have on the database.
a) You don't know anything about programming, so you spend an hour every day doing this task.
b) You know a little about programming and you ask from yourself: I wonder could the computer do this task for me.

I'm a programmer and I see the world in a very different way than everyone else. When ever I see people at work, doing anything. I ask myself, could we automate that job or part of it. I think that automating repeating tasks is a very good idea, because it saves money and reduces errors (when properly implemented). We are currently teaching kids at school all sort of things that they often don't need later in life ever again. Why not spend a few hours for programming also?

There are two ways to solve this:
a) Hire a programmer to monitor people when they do their work and ask the programmer if there is something to be improved.
b) Teach non-programmers to view the world like that.

While the a) would perhaps provide better quality in short term, b) has the advantage of being adaptable and it can also help people at home.

Note also that there are many ways of doing programming. You can do it by learning a language, or you can do it by just drag&drop: http://scratch.mit.edu/

Re:Moronic

[MrHanky]

Due to the magic of capitalism, most people don't work for themselves (hence the term 'employment' at the root of this discussion), and therefore have a limited set of tasks in their jobs. For instance, a programmer doesn't need cooking skills, despite cooking being of enormous daily importance compared to churning out code. Likewise, most cafeteria personnel does not need to be able to code, as any coding job is done by someone else, preferably someone more skilled at the task. Everyone doing everything is inefficient, as is everyone doing one thing, whether that thing is cooking or coding or laundry or being a doctor or whatever.

Everyone coding in every job is simply not economically sensible. The idea is pure idiocy.

Re:Moronic

[ceoyoyo]

Research agrees with you. Some studies have shown that the majority of jobs could be done more efficiently if people knew a bit of basic scripting. Not much, just a little, to be used to write bits of personal code to make repetitive tasks easier.

When I was in elementary school most people couldn't type well. Now it's pretty much taken for granted that everyone can type. Basic coding skills will be like that in ten years.

Re:Moronic

[MrHanky]

Yeah, and if you programmers were half as smart as you think you are, you'd notice that if all employees were to stop and model every little repeatable task on their computers, you'd have lots of employees stopping and modelling all the time. You'd have dozens of different models and no standard for how things should be done. One employee calls in sick, and there's no one to replace her because everyone does the job slightly differently and the whole place is in total chaos. How about leaving the programming to one person who's really good at it, or a small team, and just have the rest of the workforce report their problems to them.

I swear, if you programmers were a little less infatuated with your skill set, and a bit more attentive to how your products actually work, software wouldn't suck nearly as much.

Re:Moronic

[Darkness404]

Exactly. Not everyone is good at everything and the trend towards job creep leads to people who are mediocre in several areas and proficient in none. Sure, coding is useful in advertising, but it isn't crucial, that's what programmers are for. A good programmer will be much more useful creating useful, secure and bug-free code than someone who is a marketing major who learned Java on weekends.

A company who tries to save money by making people go beyond their specialty will end up being outclassed by a company who hires people for their specialty.

Re:Moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

b) You know a little about programming and you ask from yourself: I wonder could the computer do this task for me.

And then you buy yourself a huge lawsuit because the person doing programming as a hobby has no idea about how to handle HIPAA regulations in coding, how to handle concurrency when talking to the database, or much about security and opens a nice security hole.

Now orders are messed up, people have died because they didn't get medication because their data was screwed up, and the hospital is facing huge lawsuits.

Kind of as dumb of an idea as allowing the programmers to give IV's and perscribe medications to the patients.

There is a reason people specialize in careers these days.

Re:Moronic

[Ironhandx]

This is happening all over the place, big time. No one wants to do physical labor anymore, they're all growing up fucking soft.

I am actually a trained programmer(and actually a pretty good one, top of class, etc). I currently build houses. More money in it.

Re:Moronic

[pepty]

I think the real answer is:

c) teach non-programmers to view the world like that so that they can recognize these situations, submit an intelligently written ticket that actually explains the problem, and have the presence of mind to mention possible exceptions (transferred to a different hospital, etc) when talking about the possible solution.

I don't think medical facilities are really willing to pay nurses to write and debug code or scripts. Even if they didn't already cost more per hour than IT, they would take many more hours to solve the problem.

Re:Moronic

[readin]

There are thousands of jobs with no need for algebra skills. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of biology. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of great works of literature. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of art. There are thousands of jobs with no need for an understanding of evolution, history, or geography.

Yet we require these classes for pretty much everyone who goes to college.

Computers are such an integral part of life today that everyone should really have a basic understanding of how they work and what they're capable of. Learning a programming language teaches you that.

Requiring two programming languages for an ad agency is nutty, but requiring one programming language for all college graduates is very reasonable.

Re:Moronic

[Hast]

SeekWell wouldn't be a half bad name for a language used to access databases.

This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Lendrick]

I've been a programmer for 15 years now, and the absolute worst people to work with are the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge. I don't want to work with a bunch of people who are on top of Mt. Stupid, least of all some exec who thinks a tiny bit of coding knowledge will help you make estimates about how long a bit project will take.

Let programmers program. Be serious about it, or don't do it.

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

FTS: "Teach yourself just enough of the grammar and the logic of computer languages to be able to see the big picture." Yeahhhh, I'm gonna have to go ahead & disagree with you there, yeahhhhh. I think we can all remember when we first had a taste of a programming languauge or 2, and there is no way one can "see the big picture" after simply dabbling with a language -- it takes a lot of hours of sustained effort & dealing with many failures along the way before gaining an understanding. This asshat is just trying to sound like a tough guy.

Re:This sounds like a terrible idea.

[RabidReindeer]

maybe if you rephrase it something like -

      maybe you should consider picking up a programming language. it will broaden your

      horizons - in the same way that learning a little bit of a french, or the clarinet, or how to

      graft fruit trees would.

if i paint on the weekends, maybe i can better appreciate the work of the masters. that
doesn't mean i'm a good painter.

i agree that it has little or no bearing on how good you are at your real work (unless you're
a machinist, a spammer, a scientist, or some discipline that uses computers intimately)

Let me rephrase it: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

While I think that a basic understanding can be valuable in knowing generally what can and cannot be expected from people in other professions, I can tell horror stories. Like the business analyst who found out that core memory does an erase-read cycle and demanded that the COBOL programmers immediately re-initialize all their variables everytime they read them. Or the tech company executive who insisted that customers buy caching disk controllers long after caching had become something built into the drive, not the controller.

Have some respect. Software development is no more an "All You Have To Do Is..." profession than neurosurgery is. A Boy Scout can bandage your finger or write basic HTML, but do you want him manhandling your liver? Too many people stand at the edge of the pond and think it's the same thing as the ocean.

Re:Fucking English Majors

[DoofusOfDeath]

And that's all there is to say about that.

Well, duh. Which of us can't think of an English major we'd like to fuck? But that's not what we're discussing...

Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Shados]

Everyone should know at least the basics of what is part of our daily lives.

Everyone should know how to read and write, even if they're not professional authors (and, like me, are pretty bad at it in general)

Everyone should know basic math, even if they never use it, at least to be able to calculate tip at the restaurant and be able to read their tax report.

Everyone should know enough biology to be able to make a basic informed decision when discussing a problem with their doctor or dentist.

Everyone should know at least basic economics and finance, so that they can at least understand the graphs on their 401k.

And.....everyone should know at least the very very very elementary basics of programming, as it is now part of our everyday lives. No need to know python and APIs or how to compile a linux kernel. Know just enough to understand what a conditional and a loop statement is, why software can crash, and why a single programmer cannot write an entire ERP suite in 2 weeks by themselves.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[tnk1]

Know just enough to understand what a conditional and a loop statement is, why software can crash, and why a single programmer cannot write an entire ERP suite in 2 weeks by themselves.

What you say may be helpful, but I've never had any hand in building a building before, and I can tell you that I understand very well why it may not be a good idea to rush the job.

As for the opposite, I don't think I'd want a slightly trained person to tell me that I should be able to do it *faster* than I am. Bullshit detection is one thing, but that's why you hire *technical management*, who are presumably people who used to do something at least tangentially related to programming.

I get what this guy is saying, and I agree with him if he is suggesting, and making available the ability, for interested people to learn about coding. However, the idea that you have to do something completely unrelated to your career in order to do you job is garbage.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[ceoyoyo]

No it's not. Formal logic and algorithms are are things that the majority of programmers have probably heard of, but don't really know and don't use very often. That's like saying the basics of general contracting and construction is physics and chemistry.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[Cederic]

The basics of programming are logical thinking. That's an approach to problem solving that primarily adds value through introducing objectivity and supplemental purely emotional decision making.

Even artists benefit from multiple modes of thinking.

Re:Actual coding, no. Knowing the basics, yes.

[mwvdlee]

What if no pattern exists for the problem you're trying to solve?

Re:Basic html and css

[smittyoneeach]

<head></head>
<body>
I am an HTML coder.
There are many like me.
I can has job?
</body>
</html>

Look at what they're hiring.

[Animats]

This guy is head of PubMatic, which is one of those companies on the fringes of on-line advertising. Here are their job listings. The programming jobs are in Puma, India. The US jobs are for things like "Mobile Account Executive" (i.e. ad sales rep.) Requires "proven track record of meeting or exceeding sales targets." No mention of any tech skills.

The PubMatic site is so full of business buzzwords that it's difficult to tell what they actually do. "From brand awareness initiatives looking to reach broad demographic segments through to lower funnel campaigns focused on reaching those expressing purchase intent, PubMatic has a targeting solution to fit advertisers' needs." What they seem to do is match up low-end advertisers with unsold ad space on web sites.

If this company dropped off the face of the earth (or AdBlock became popular enough to delete all their ads) nothing of value would be lost.

A programming language versus a framework

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd consider myself an experienced web developer (PHP, CSS, HTML. JS, DOM API). I wanted to learn more languages, but I found it very inaccessible to learn different "languages" since it seems these are merged nowadays in frameworks with deep learning curves. It tried Visual studio 2010, Titanium frameworks and some others. Either giving me dependencies-error during installation or a complexity level that feels disastrous to cope with as a newbie.

I just feel that it seems most programmers/developers and their tools want to protect their creed of "language" with a steep learning curve to protect their profession & expertise, and make it as inaccessible for newbies as possible. VB6 compared to the latter Visual VB is an example of simplicity morphed into "enterprise level" development.

Why don't people start to differentiate in the actual "language" and the bloated "framework".

   

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[K. S. Kyosuke]

if they just sit down with a book and type examples

Actually, he's right. You can't just sit down with a book and type examples - you also have to extract patterns from the examples and form a mental model that allows you to generalize over those examples.

As programmers, yes, as co-workers, no.

[SuperKendall]

the absolute worst people to work with are the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge.

That's very true, but the BEST non-coding co-workers are those with similar levels of knowledge who then have a better understanding of what is possible, why some things may be hard and a tolerance for mysterious delay.

Let me guess

[NotSoHeavyD3]

He's probably the type that thinks for example that for example C# is totally different than any other object oriented language. Most likely he would be honestly surprised to find out somebody that understood general OO concepts and was in an expert in another one like C++ could pick up a second OO in a matter of days or less. (Sorry, I get that a lot. I think it took me 1-2 days to get up to speed from C# from C++. Not sure how long it'd take me to pick up java but I'd expect a week at most.)

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so you're still at the "I know everything" stage of programmer development.

Re:Let me guess

[Actually, I do RTFA]

It depends on how much you consider "knowledge". I can read pretty much any OO language well enough to understand any recent graduate's code for hiring purposes. I also understand enough to be dangerous in all of them; that is enough to open the IDE, change behavior to suit a requirement, and make sure it works. What I don't know in most of them is when I'm re-inventing the wheel, when I'm doing something a backwards-ass way, etc.

Re:This guy is a fucking idiot

[mwvdlee]

Pretty much every programmer I've met knows more than one language.
I have used atleast several dozen, "know" about 5 or 6 and have forgotten a couple as well (and am an expert in none).
Learning a programming language is easy. Knowing how to solve a problem is hard.

Re:Basic html and css

[ArcadeMan]

Your head has no title, no text encoding and your body has no structure whatsoever.

And that's just for starters.

Re:Jorgenson is full of shit

[tnk1]

His point could have been made better.

I'm not cut out to be a doctor. I'm probably smart enough to do the job, but I don't have the mindset for it, nor really the interest. So, I'd probably make a shitty doctor.

While it is easier to become a professional programmer, becoming someone that can legitimately base a career on it, or write something that a company can rely on is not just a matter of picking up a book. Yes, you could sit down with BASIC and your Commodore 64 and make a little balloon made of sprites fly across your screen, and I could probably sit down with an anatomy book or a first aid book and learn some stuff, even very useful stuff, from that too. However, if I was a hospital accountant, I might decide that I'd do more good for the hospital by actually spending my time being a good accountant, instead of trying to splint bones.

If they want me to learn something completely outside my interests and skillset to do a job that has nothing to do with being able to do my job well, I suppose I would consider such a directive to be idiotic. If anything, sometimes you want people who *don't understand* what you do for a living to do the jobs that are supporting you because they will not gloss over things that you take for granted.

He's Right

[echusarcana]

The guy is completely correct.

The situation: You've got a thousand applicants. You've got one or two job openings.

If you don't have the slightest idea what makes the internet and the information age run, you probably don't deserve the job. But the converse is also true: programmers should learn something of art, literature, and history. Too many software people don't even know anything about science. A person that can't think broadly in a well-rounded way is useless.

Re:He's Right

[sandytaru]

You don't need to be a mechanic, but you do need to know that when your car hits 60.000 miles you probably ought to get the timing belt changed. Or if the temperature gauge starts climbing, suck it up and pull over because it's probably not going to magically go back down again on its own. Or that you should get your tires checked (or do it yourself) once a month, especially in winter months, because they gradually lose PSI over time.

I'd be grateful if any time a marketing person found a bug in the code, they knew to snag a screenshot rather than give me a call and say, "My monitor broke again. Help!"

Right conclusion, wrong arguments

[melonman]

I think that everyone should learn to code. Not because it will make them a programmer. Not because it will enable them to estimate how long something will take, not least because experienced programmers are legendarily bad at doing that anyway. Everyone should learn to program because programming makes the modern world go round, and it's good for everyone to have at least an inkling of what that involves.

We teach a lot of kids chemistry, without any expectation that they will invent a new compound that will change the world. We teach a lot of kids physics, without any expectation that they'll make a significant contribution to subatomic particle research. We teach most kids to do creative writing and poetry, without expecting the vast majority of them to produce fiction or poetry of publishable quality. I don't see why we wouldn't teach programming alongside all those other topics that most students never master and never "need".

One argument for teaching a lot of academic subjects widely is that the skills you learn along the way have wider application than the topic itself. And it seems to me that this argument holds at least as well for programming as for, say, pure math. As programmers keep saying, programming is about analysis, structure, models... is there really no application whatsoever for those skills outside of hardcore programming? Does no-one ever wish that their managers had a better grasp of "system"? Yes, of course, you can acquire these skills in other places. But the thing about programming, pretty much from the outset, is that your pious beliefs about system will stop your code from performing correctly unless those beliefs are reasonably accurate. I sometimes tell people that I do executable philisophy - it's all about logic, but, unlike the philosopher, my logic has to work.

No, a bit of Python won't enable people to produce estimates for projects. But it may enable managers to understand why writing code once to do something that needs doing often is often a good plan (and, also, why it sometimes isn't). It may enable managers to understand why "Can we just change this one assumption" at the end of a project may involve restarting the entire project.

Yes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But the little knowledge is out there already on the TV station of your choice. I don't even like Python that much, but I'd still much rather deal with erroneous assumptions based on a bit of Python experience than deal with erroneous assumptions based on watching Mission Impossible and NCIS.

Re:Basic html and css

[game kid]

Gah!!! It's all wrong! Here, lemme help you:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns:fb="http://ogp.me/ns/fb#">
<head><script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.0/jquery.min.js"></script></head>
<body>
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>
I am an HTML coder.
There are many like me.
I can has job?
<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://example.com/" data-send="true" data-width="450" data-show-faces="true"></div>
</body>
</html>

There, now you're ready for today's web.

Re:This guy is a fucking idiot

[PolygamousRanchKid]

and have forgotten a couple as well

. . . I have used some languages that I wish I could forget . . .

Re:Not a program per employee

[93 Escort Wagon]

Each garbage collector need not write a separate program. An employee of the company employing dozens of garbage collectors can write the program, and the team for each truck can load a map into that program.

You, sir, have obviously never worked on an open source project.

please no

[Tom]

If you've ever worked in IT, you know that the clueless secretary isn't your worst enemy. At least she knows the knows nothing.
Your worst enemy is the "power-user". The guy who knows just enough to fuck everything up. This is the same thing. Breeding people who know a little bit about 2 programming languages is breeding a catastrophic collection of idiots who don't know that they know nothing.

Teaching someone the basic principles of programming, that's cool. Let them know a little about how algorithms work and stuff, a little bit of basic understanding of what, exactly, programming is. But please don't teach someone a little bit about a programming language or two.

Re:Basic html and css

[smittyoneeach]

Proof link.

Re:Basic html and css

[ArcadeMan]

"You fail" is not in German.

Re:"Most employers?" "More than enough?" WTF!

[Cederic]

Interesting. If you want to work for the successful companies I've worked for, you need to be intelligent.

People with non-technical degrees still qualify. I can teach someone intelligent to program a hell of a lot more easily than I can teach some muppet with a technical degree.

"Ad exec"?

[PopeRatzo]

This is pretty funny. An advertising executive telling college students what they have to know to not be "dead to him".

A guy who makes his living by getting people to buy stuff.

He doesn't realize how little it takes to make his entire existence meaningless. Plus, don't you hate guys who go speak to college students and tries to do this kind of tough talk? Too many people got boners when they saw Gordon Gecko give his speech in Wall Street. They thought, "I wanna be that guy who makes young people quake in their boots". I bet his family hates him.

Fair's fair...

[ZeroPly]

I have no problem with him requiring his sales people to know how to program.

But when you come by looking to sell ads for our hospital, you need to demonstrate knowledge of least a couple of basic surgical procedures. Someone who doesn't understand surgery shouldn't be making ads for us. You don't need to be able to fix an aortic dissection on your own, but you should at least know what instruments to use, and the overall procedure.

Re:Fair's fair...

[tehcyder]

But when you come by looking to sell ads for our hospital, you need to demonstrate knowledge of least a couple of basic surgical procedures. Someone who doesn't understand surgery shouldn't be making ads for us.

Why on earth not? What sort of ad for a hospital is going to have any technical content whatsoever?

Re:how many of you took physics?

[YoungManKlaus]

well, you also repeat 400-year old experiments because the theory behind them is comparatively simple and the experiment does not require an LHC ;)