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Why Learning To Code Won't Save Your Job (fastcompany.com)
Over the years, several governments and organizations have become increasingly focused on teaching kids how to code. It has given rise to startups such as Codecademy, KhanAcademy and Code.org that are making it easier and more affordable for many to learn how to program. Many believe that becoming literate in code is as essential as being educated in language, science, and math. But can this guarantee you a job? And can coding help you save that job? An anonymous reader cites an interesting article on Fast Company which sheds more light into this: Looking for job security in the knowledge economy? Just learn to code. At least, that's what we've been telling young professionals and mid-career workers alike who want to hack it in the modern workforce. Unfortunately, many have already learned the hard way that even the best coding chops have their limits. More and more, 'learn to code' is looking like bad advice. Anyone competent in languages such as Python, Java, or even Web coding like HTML and CSS, is currently in high demand by businesses that are still just gearing up for the digital marketplace. However, as coding becomes more commonplace, particularly in developing nations like India, we find a lot of that work is being assigned piecemeal by computerized services such as Upwork to low-paid workers in digital sweatshops. This trend is bound to increase.
Learning to code at school isn't just about gaining employability, any more than physical education is about becoming a professional athlete.
An understanding of how to write software will teach skills around how to approach complex problems (decomposition, logical thinking, planning, separation of responsibilities, etc), how to troubleshoot systems (not just IT systems but other workflows), how to identify opportunities for optimisation and automation, and so on.
Bad! Bad logic! No conclusion for you! The point of learning to code isn't to get a job coding. The point of learning to code is to be able to fluently speak the language of the workers of tomorrow. Those workers will be decidedly more metallic, simplistic, rational, and deterministic than today's workers. The person who can speak their language will be in the proper position to make the best use of their efforts.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
To code is like to know how to drive. It is important as a basic requirement in the digital era, but that's all.
Because there are many different types of drivers, the ones can control a bicycle, a motorcycle, a small economic car, a big family car, a construction truck, a tractor, a small ship, a big petroleum container, a plane, a space shuttle, etc.
So, it is right to know how to drive "well", but it is what happens after this basic knowledge what could or not to help you to have and to keep a job.
Protectionism. Tariffs. The end of Work Visa programs and if need be all but a few immigration programs. We take care of our own first. Let them leave. America is a resource rich country. They can leave, but they don't get to take the ball home. Taxes. Massive taxes to take back internal capital from the ones that leave.
Or we could just roll over and die. Pretend like the market can somehow be free and do nothing as workers to protect our quality of life as we hang desperately onto the principles of Laissez-faire and trickle down economics that were droned into our heads when we were children too defenseless to know any better. I've already made my decision. I'll vote for the left candidates. The Democratic Socialists. Can't get any worse for me but it might get better.
My question is: What are the rest of you going to do? Give up or join guys like me and Bernie?
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I fail and pass applicants not so much on the ability to code, but the abilities to attack problems and to maintain code.
There is a very simple formula for getting and/or keeping a job:
problems_you_solve > problems_you_create
Keep this equation in balance by minimizing the right-hand-side (RHS) and maximizing the left-hand-side (LHS).
As an employee, you will inevitably create problems for your employer. Most notably you will expect to be paid. Other unavoidable problems include the onerous government paperwork that is required for each employee and the legal liability of keeping you as an employee. These problems are unavoidable. To help minimize the RHS, however, you should avoid creating unnecessary problems. This means being reliable, honest, and getting along with other employees and with customers.
There is only so much you can do to minimize the RHS of the formula. But there is no bound on maximizing the LHS.
These days, many employers think (rightly or wrongly) that they have programming problems that need solving. So if you are able to write code, then that might help increase the LHS of the equation. Note, however, that this only works if you are good enough of a programmer to actually solve real problems. Having completed a coding bootcamp, or having a diploma in computer-science, helps but does not guarantee that you can solve real problems. And that is the crux of the issue. Employers want problems to be solved. They don't really care about your credentials, they care about capabilities and your willingness to apply those capabilities to productive ends.
So, yes, the article is correct in pointing out that learning to code is not a magic recipe for making you more employable. To the extent that learning to code can help you become a better problem solver, then it is valuable. But if you emerge from boot-camp with no new problem solving skills then you have indeed wasted your time.
On the flip side, learning to code usually involves doing lots of problem-solving exercises. And the best way to become a better problem-solver is to practice solving problems. So learning to code may well make you more employable even if you never touch a computer again.
It comes down to focus: If your reason for learning to code just so that you can say that you have learned to code, then that is probably not going to help you are anybody else. But if you are learning to code as an exercise in improving your problem-solving skills, then that are likely to benefit both you and society.
To know how to design you need to know how to code. Otherwise you will end up with horrible designs because the designer don't know the abilities and shortcomings of the platform they design for.
But coding alone doesn't make you useful, it's knowing the business for what you design and code for that makes you useful.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
In a way "designing your own website" might be a skill on the level of "write a letter to someone" was in the last century. Public education should prepare you to be able to do it in a pinch, but you can't really make living out of that.
These stories have been around forever. There are armies of minions going around canvassing for kids with developer skills. It's tosh.
I have a degree in Computer Science and just finished a post grad in same and I can assure you I can develop. Despite thousands of applications for developer jobs over the years, all I ever got was one developer interview and even though I completed the programming challenges they asked of me, I still didn't go any further.
I work as a business analyst at present under contract and will continue that as long as I can, as I have a child on the way now. But ultimately, I deeply regret studying computer Science as it cost me dearly in terms of expending time and energy for no return. I really want to do my own freelance development work, with one simple caveat - it's not for open source or commercial use. Just as my sincere attempt to work as a develop were somewhat lost in translation, so too will be anything I develop. It will come with me to the grave. That's what I want.
Material for good engineers is as common in India as in other places with fresh water, sanitation, electricity and public schools that is there is not much of it available and you get what you pay for - almost always that is if you outsource , searching for cheap only, you will get cheap. Sometimes it works sometimes it does not. You need a complex job done you need a team of people that speak common language. This is even rarer.
Fortunately we are approaching situation especially simple cohders are not as needed as they used to be.
No worry tho - there is always an option of becoming a taxi driver ooooooooops damned google so nail painter then...
Don't forget to include the ability to understand what the customer really need. Essentially the unspoken part of the requirements.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It's generally more efficient for design and execution to happen close together. If coding moves to India, watch the design work follow shortly afterward.
On the other hand, most code is written to be used, not sold. We're a smallish financial institution, and we have an in-house software development group the gives us a key competitive advantage over the industry's behemoths. Putting developers in the same office as business users shortens development times, improves the quality of deliverables and increases flexibility.
If programmer productivity doubled, we'd probably hire more developers, not fewer, as the cost-benefit of various projects would improve.
Whatever the Twitterati say, we will continue to need a steady supply of high quality, intelligent, adaptable, proactive IT professionals for the foreseeable future.
"Looking for job security in the knowledge economy? Just learn to code."
This is like telling a farmer to learn aircraft engine maintenance for job security. Or telling a plumber to learn knitting to ensure he keeps his job.
NOT EVERY JOB REQUIRES KNOWING HOW TO CODE. Stop telling us that it does.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I'm concerned that they'll teach coding the same way that many schools teach math. Reinvent the paradigms every few years, require extensive retraining of all the latest teachers in the latest paradigm, and care more about the fad than about the basic skills.
For reference, I've linked to Tom Lehrer's "New Math" song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And one must remember:
The important thing is to understand what you're doing, and not to get the right answer.
I'm afraid I've been dealing with the results of changing fads in math, and in programming classes, for decades.
Design has nothing to do with code. A good coder can code any design as good or bad as it is. Designers should be programmers that are so good they can see the whole project but typically designers these days are the managerial types that have no idea what they want to begin with. They then outsource the design and get what they asked for, in those terms outsourcing to India is cheaper.
The problem comes in when what they want is not aligned with what they say they need or are so dense in what they work up that it is a bundle of generic ideas that change interpretation every week, for that you need coders or at least a leading team that knows what the business needs and that's what makes for "good" coders. There are as much good coders in India as the US, that has to do with inherent talent of an individual. But if bottom of the barrel is all your company pays for, they get that in either country, just cheaper over there.
An external company is tied to contracts and paperwork so design specifications can't just change without a lot of money changing hands every time, so in the end outsourcing will be cheaper because the shit ideas gets them just that. But in the long term as every change has to be paid for after the initial contract, they will spend increasing amounts until they either fail as a company or realize their mistake 5-10y down the line.
Manufacturing companies already learned that. They outsourced to China and got their ideas stolen and their products counterfeited. I worked for one of those companies during the time they realized a factory in the same city had hired all their staff and their production facility was left abandoned. A lot of them already (especially smaller ones) are now reverting production back to the US. It was an expensive mistake for a lot of them, they lost their talent and some even failed. But there is a resurgence in my area of smaller production facilities now taking orders from the bigger companies they once worked for.
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False, moving design where coding is done doesn't improve anything. The design is more tightly coupled to the business processes and needs than to the coding. The design is what makes the software useful in the way the business needs it. If you move the design off-shore, you decouple it from the business, unless you move the business as well off-shore. However, moving the business off-shore decouples it from its customers.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Learning to code might not "save" your job directly, but (for certain fields, anyway) it can definitely make you a more valuable employee.
I've lost count of the number of times I've come across a coworker doing something that's taking forever, and a little time spent automating the task (even if it's a one-off) saved gobs of time.
Unfortunately, many have already learned the hard way that even the best coding chops have their limits.
It all depends on your butcher and if you picked lamb, pork or veal chops.
Achille Talon
Hop!
"WTF is wrong with this country and it's politicians?"
You mean that people don't know the difference between "It's" and "its"?
"Don't these corporate idiots realize that society(Country) can't function without employment."
Or that questions finish with a question mark?
"The point of employment is to keep people busy, give them some meaning in life, and as well to evolve into a better species."
Really? I usually only hire people because I don't have the time or the skills to do it myself.
"The purpose of money(value set by people, well, supply and demand) is for the exchange of goods and services it's not meant to be horded."
That's why I hoard mine and don't give it to the hordes.
"Even gold and silver has imaginary value that we set."
You mean a handful of people in New York and London who sometimes go to jail for it.
"No point in having machines replacing human workers in manufacturing jobs even if the machines cost less and are more efficient than humans."
So you don't have a dishwasher and washing machines but you employ people for that?
"It's better spending $100 on an American made quality product than one that costs $20 made in china. "
Sorry, but there are no 'American made quality products' anywhere, not even for 5 times the price.
"You will end up replacing the Chinese one 10 times anyway even if it's from a different brand. Of course everything in life has wear and tear, but come on, I know people who still use 30 year old ovens and refrigerators and still work without issue. I know people who had to replace new appliance after just 6 month's of use."
That's why people buy German stuff for that. You sound like your father and grandfather, who ridiculed Japanese cars in the past.
Probably, because our Legislators, largely still ignorant about computer "innards" can't understand it. We need population-wide, overarching understanding of systems, and how to design them. Coding is just capturing design in code. I'm amazed at the number of people who think "feedback" is either your critique of their latest ill-formed idea, or the sound that speakers make when the sound gets into the microphone. They have no concept of how "feedback" is--in the language of systems design and cybernetics--a much broader concept. The notions of sequence, iteration, conditional execution, and formal definition of values are utterly beyond most of today's adults, but second nature to those of us who'd learned how to translate those system implementations into reliable code. Teaching coding is about giving kids a tool set, and an old car, and say, "Go to it, kid!" They don't understand what the transmission is for, or the principals behind a crankshaft, no matter how many times they unbolt parts, and bolt them back on. Sure, they know that you're supposed to used a "torque wrench," but they seldom understand the concept of "torque" and why it's important...which is why the "shade tree mechanic's" only wrench is a pipe wrench.
If our electorate is to understand governments, and businesses, and economies are systems, they need to understand what systems are, and how they work, and how they can go wrong. Teaching them coding is just rote learning, and it imparts a false sense of "understanding" what systems are all about.
If I read advice here from 2005 most Slashdoters thought there would be 0 IT jobs here by now.
Guess what? We are still employed and get paid alot!
The only jobs are non important entry level work. Any Indian who knows his shit is here on h1b1 visa making the same. Yes same as senior engineer because of his skillset.
Once you pull in 3 years you go visa and work 2 more. After 5 you are no longer cheap.
Employers found a steal in 1999 but that went away in 2016. The cheap talented worker is rare indeed.
http://saveie6.com/
But but look at the excel spreadsheet! Half the costs??!
http://saveie6.com/
I prefer the Disney her to "engineers", "imagineers". as in "Imagine if I could get this code to work".
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Then learn to code. If you do not know what you are doing coding is pointless.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This only makes sense if the number of jobs which use computers to solve problems is limited. Thus far, the reality seems to be that it's growing exponentially.
Or for that matter fix the economy. If you are in any of many tech fields. You have to constantly add to your skill sets. The big push to learn code is fine but it does not solve the general lack of skills employers face. Code without hardware is just a bunch of one and zeros with nothing to do. Always adding new skill sets tend to allow you to move into new wide-open fields before anyone else.
You cannot have a steady job as a Coder or Programmer in the United States. You will end up as just an expensive worker bee. You need to widen your skills across the organization. Most of the time they may call you a programmer, but need a consultant, someone who can look at what they are doing and come up with solutions. Understand their business and find ways to make it better or more efficient. If you just want to sit there and wait for your next program you will need to make, chances are you may be next on the chopping block.
Because.
1. They are cheaper programmers out there.
2. The company is not benefiting from the technology
3. Your skills are not being directed towards the need of the organization.
Just by focusing on one job, coding, your are making yourself vulnerable, because you are not the type of employee you want to keep, but someone they either need at the moment, or can't find a better alternative.
BTW:The above advice isn't 100% for a solid steady job, but it helps to make sure you are more valuable to the institution and are less likely to let you go.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I always figured teaching everyone to code was to enable a future where everyone earned money by hacking ATMs, the few people that could not learn to code would have jobs refilling ATMs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
why not try something? Anything? Like I said, for 90% of us it can't get worse but it _could_ get better. It's happened before. It could happen again.
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93% of communication is non-verbal(tonal 38% and body language 55%, which differs by culture) and 60% of knowledge cannot be communicated because it is too nuanced for natural language to handle. You can write all of the documentation you want, but you'll at best communicate 10%-50% of the 40% that you can communicate, and probably miss-communicate a larger portion if working with people from another culture. The best projects are analyzed, architected, designed, and coded by the same team who have domain expereience.
Which was exactly the point that I was trying to make. I suspect that offshoring of coding has reached its peak: it's impractical for very many projects.
Indeed. The main reason I code these days is that my architectures and designs would be way more expensive to describe on the level needed to have somebody else implement them than to implement them myself (at full consulting rates). Another reason is that they are mostly C and some Python (often with embedded C modules), and that is something basically nobody that learned to code just to get a job is capable of handling.
Make no mistake: If you are a really good coder (hint: if you are just a coder in one or two languages and do not have solid algorithm, datastructure, system-administration, network and writing skills, you do not qualify), you professional future is bright, even if you are probably going to do more architecture and design than coding. But all these "instant" coders will just be as out of demand as they are in their current profession.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A designer is someone who understands the requirements well enough so that they get translated into reality. That can benefit from being a very experienced coder, but there are many cases where you need to know more than simply how to code. Design and code are complimentary, but different skills. I don't think you have to be a coder to be a designer, although I think you will be better off if you have a designer who is a good coder as well. What should happen is that one picks the hybrid over the dedicated designer unless the hybrid individual actually has higher design skills than the dedicated designer. Design is too important to leave in the hands of someone who is merely a gifted coder.
I fully agree. That is why I keep doing some coding work. Otherwise, after 5 years or so, your designs begins to be disconnected from reality. And there are enough opportunities to do it on the side or as part of a larger job. Outsourcing, say, 10 days of coding to India does not make sense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I agree that design and coding is different. I also agree that the only way to get a good design is when you know coding on a level that you could code that design well. If people without such skills do designs, you often end up having to guess what they meant and having to re-do the design.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Have you seen code coming from India? No smart Indian engineer is working in outsourcing there and many of the smar ones leave the country to work someplace else. That means only the inexperienced and the not-smart ones do outsourcing work. Coding there is already an almost unmitigated disaster, having these people do design can only result in utter failure.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I keep reading everything here commenting on the paradigm that your job becomes coding; that you're just in competition with generic coders in India or the IT department for that matter. It's all about "coding" as a specialty, as a job in itself.
That's the problem. That has to stop. It's hurting corporations terribly, keeping them from realizing the full benefits of personal computing.
We acquired personal computing technology, but corporations remained in a paradigm of corporate computing development, where the corporation develops all applications as a body corporate, using specialists to do all the coding. It was actually an *offense* in my old employer for non-programmers to program. People had tools taken away, accounts cancelled.
You don't learn to code so that you can become a coder; you learn to code so that you become an accountant, technician, engineer, salesman, secretary...who can code and script their job. How much more productive is an engineer who can do Excel VBA from one who only knows your basic spreadsheet formulas? How many more documents can a secretary manage who can put together a small, three-table database? She becomes the *key* secretary everybody goes to, the one who gets things done, the one who gets the promotion, is the last one fired.
It worked for me; I actually got a CompSci degree but only ever called myself an engineer; I was just an engineer who knew EXACTLY what he wanted from IT and could insist on it...or do it myself if they weren't agreeable (which tends to make them more agreeable). I only ever wrote bash, Perl, and SQL scripts, but automated vast amounts of my job with just that. Oh, yeah, and Excel VBA, of course, which probably doubled my engineering productivity. I taught every engineer who worked for me to do SQL and basic scripts and sent them off all able to automate basic tasks. I believe they all see themselves as more productive and employable for it.
for vs while is a decision that is made because of the code. Need to iterate N times? for loop.
Don't know how many times a loop needs to execute? while loop.
These aren't the sort of decisions that are made by "software designers", nor should they.
They work at a much higher level.
3 days of coding at home or 3 weeks of coding in India yields the same result. This because people in India don't have a clue about why we in the western world do some things that are natural to us but unknown to them.
I want a snowflake to be displayed in the instrument cluster when it's between +4 degrees C and -4 degrees C. It's logical to anyone living where snow and ice appears every year. But to explain why that's wanted to someone in India can take a few hours.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Matches my experience. Example: Just recently about 5 "engineers" from 3 different teams at a customer failed to find out for more than a week that the source of their problems was their test server not running. Took me about 20 minutes to get approval to look at it (I am an external consultant and wayyy more expensive), 5 minutes to look at it and 20 minutes to write it up with evidence so they could understand it. This is not a rare or unique situation. That is the level of people you routinely find in the industry. You also find a few that are really really good and are fed up because they get to clean up every mess the others make. I think only having these few really good people would be far better.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That's like saying that designing a house as an architect doesn't have anything to do with knowledge of building materials and how they are used.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Indeed. Scalability, reliability, efficiency, security, being fit to be deployed, maintainability, KISS, etc. all things that are not for beginners. You begin to understand these after maybe 10 years (if you are dedicated, smart and talented), and become good at them later.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Who says anyone cares about talented? Cheap is what counts.
As for cheap talent being rare, ask the folks at Disney. Among other places.
As has been depressingly reprised here ad nauseam, your coding, admin or support job is just another H1B away.
I got into project management, then sales, then management, then consulting.
Still enjoy getting into the tech now and then, but that's not what pays the bills.
If your value-add is up-front visible you're never out going to be out of a job.
I had to laugh at that delegate (Curly Haugland, a delegate from North Dakota) when he said "The rules are still designed to have a political party choose its nominee at a convention. That’s just the way it is. I can’t help it. Don’t hate me because I love the rules.". Evidently he is a 1%'er.
Ok, coding != software development, ...
But considering that it's usual to expect a new software developer to take 4-8 weeks to start being productive, I somehow don't see tickets being distributed via Amazon Turk to some Indian coders, ....
There's a lot that can be done one the back-end that makes me think that we really haven't got time for teaching all of that. Are you saying we should teach 'em all PHP, AJAX, Ruby, MySQL, MongoDB, etc? There's more to a website than slapping up Joomla and throwing a theme on it. Also, plenty of people make money doing this. Hell, Twitter, Slashdot, and Facebook are websites. There are others that are far more complicated.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
> If you like to stand between the feet of these giants (at the lowest level of this pyramid of giants), feel free.
Sure but then there is both the pride of having been the giant and the need for new giants all the time as our overall knowledge and skills increase.
Though, I suspect that, at a deeper level, even those giants we stand upon stand upon giants themselves. It's giants, all the way down.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
To create a spec that a bad engineer can deliver a well-working product on is much more effort and much more difficult than to create the well-working product directly.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yeah, the guru part of your name is totally justified.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's only one word for that spew - horseshit. Words mean things, and if you have to make up definitions and blow smoke to make them mean something different to prove your 'case' - that shows the falsehood.
You reckon? I'd say it's about the same level.
However a bridge is equally useless whether it's the first span or the second that's down. Or indeed the third...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Proud of yourself much? Feels like I'm suffocating in a cloud of smug.
I can assure you I can develop.
Not to be a pest, but... what did you develop?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Disney kept their senior IT staff.
http://saveie6.com/
The cheap talented worker is rare indeed.
They're easy to get.
In the crash of 2008, quite a few very good people were thrown out on the street. And many are grateful to get a job. I'm getting people who used to be paid $80K/year for $65K. New grads for less than $40K.
Many unemployed IT workers and developers have never recovered because of the asinine hiring practices of people. My neighbor, who was also a developer, was shit canned because the new 20 something who came in to run the place told him that he was too old to know anything and he didn't have a degree from Stanford - as far as he was concerned, no Stanford degree == you're stupid. And even though age discrimination is illegal, just try to prove it. "You don't have the skills." goes a long way.
I had a discussion with recruiter recently who bitched and moaned how they have to get into these bidding wars for new CS grads. I was incredulous. I told her that I don't see that at my local university. She said that she only recruits from top schools. Which to her, GA Tech is a top school.
So, you have one guy who thinks Stanford is it and some other person who thinks GA Tech is it.
In the meantime, they bitch how there aren't enough "good" people when the reality is that they are just snobs.
Gimme a hard working sharp kid who went to state and I get a value with no bullshit ego crap. I get kids from state who commuted to school, have no student loans. Are ambitious, creative and smart - but they just don't have the name recognition of a good school. They work harder to overcome the prejudice.
tl;dr: the IT employment practices are fucking retarded.
It may not be 1999 anymore, but it is not 2008 anymore either. No one cares where you went to school unless it is your 1st job. If you suck on your resume a degree from harvard won't save you. If you rock on your resume with 7 years experience showing more responsibility any degree will help and sometimes an employer will ignore the degree requirements.
Sounds to me from your post you are new. Yes, it sucks in the real world but realize who you are. You are a kid with no real world experience so your first job if you made the mistake of not interning is to start help desk and at the bottom until you get your certs and some recommendations and experience. Then move on to the next big thing. But you can't move up until you are over qualified at the job you currently have.
http://saveie6.com/
Since the 90's programming has become about minutiae, and not about problem solving. "Programmers" strive to please web forums full of their socially-awkward-but-now-connected peers, rather than their bosses. They test each other during interviews to make sure they are hiring someone autistic who has learned some useless facts rather than looking for people who can solve problems and talk to people. They saddle their employers with flavor-of-the-week technologies because they are so afraid of doing something a webforum didn't approve of that they won't write anything themselves. They *pride* themselves in not writing things themselves. They turn simple problems into large projects by bringing in "frameworks" and other webforum-approved technologies they can put on their resume, rather than solving the damned simple problem they were handed.
I've noticed as things are supported by Microsoft based sites, the site is crappy. Sometimes I can't even connect to it because the site doesn't even support the minimum encryption for Firefox to connect to it. Have a problem with the site? Send them a trouble report - fill it out and it doesn't even work because the people that did the site are almost completely incompetent. Oh by the way, they're also in India. Same old garbage. You want it done right, keep it in America, Europe or Australia.
Hehehehe, nice. And they followed the letter of the contract, but not the spirit.
Good engineering cannot be formalized. It needs understanding, insight and experience on the part of the person doing it. That is why so much bad engineering is around these days, but software is by far the worst offender.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's also the same players doing the sweatshopping that are pushing the coding. Both are designed to lower their costs.