New Book Describes 'Bluffing' Programmers in Silicon Valley (theguardian.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. pointed us to this an excerpt from the new book Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Portland-based investigator reporter Corey Pein.

The author shares what he realized at a job recruitment fair seeking Java Legends, Python Badasses, Hadoop Heroes, "and other gratingly childish classifications describing various programming specialities." I wasn't the only one bluffing my way through the tech scene. Everyone was doing it, even the much-sought-after engineering talent. I was struck by how many developers were, like myself, not really programmers, but rather this, that and the other. A great number of tech ninjas were not exactly black belts when it came to the actual onerous work of computer programming. So many of the complex, discrete tasks involved in the creation of a website or an app had been automated that it was no longer necessary to possess knowledge of software mechanics. The coder's work was rarely a craft. The apps ran on an assembly line, built with "open-source", off-the-shelf components. The most important computer commands for the ninja to master were copy and paste...

[M]any programmers who had "made it" in Silicon Valley were scrambling to promote themselves from coder to "founder". There wasn't necessarily more money to be had running a startup, and the increase in status was marginal unless one's startup attracted major investment and the right kind of press coverage. It's because the programmers knew that their own ladder to prosperity was on fire and disintegrating fast. They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software. The programmers also knew that the fastest way to win that promotion to founder was to find some new domain that hadn't yet been automated. Every tech industry campaign designed to spur investment in the Next Big Thing -- at that time, it was the "sharing economy" -- concealed a larger programme for the transformation of society, always in a direction that favoured the investor and executive classes.
"I wasn't just changing careers and jumping on the 'learn to code' bandwagon," he writes at one point. "I was being steadily indoctrinated in a specious ideology."

Comments

older generations already had a term for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Older generations called this kind of fraud "fake it 'til you make it."

Re: older generations already had a term for this

[Z00L00K]

It's not really faking it completely but a matter of code re-use.

Code re-use is fine if you know the code, but introducing security issues if you use the wrong code.

To write good code you need to understand the problem it shall solve. The code itself may not be efficient or use the optimal features offered but if it really solves the problem without issues from the black box perspective then you can use someone more skilled to optimize it. This is the main problem in most cases - people are either coders without knowing the business they code for or they know the business but are unable to make decent code and just produce shitty powerpoints and excel sheets. Find someone that can do both and you'd get a great boost for the company.

Re:older generations already had a term for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Older generations called this kind of fraud "fake it 'til you make it."

In the bad old days we had a hell of a lot of ridiculous restriction

We must somehow made our programs to run successfully inside a RAM that was 48KB in size (yes, 48KB, not 48MB or 48GB), on a CPU with a clock speed of 1.023 MHz

Because of it, we had to FAKE a lot of things --- such as, updating the users, at least once every 2 seconds or so, when calculations (there was no spreadsheet yet back then) might take minutes

Nowadays with GBs or memory and GHz of clock speed, with multicore CPUs, if the programmers are still faking it, to tell you the truth, they are not fit to call themselves programmers

Re:older generations already had a term for this

[molarmass192]

These restrictions is a large part of what makes Arduino programming "fun". If you don't plan out your memory usage, you're gonna run out of it. I cringe when I see 8MB web pages of bloated "throw in everything including the kitchen sink and the neighbor's car". Unfortunately, the careful and cautious way is a dying in favor of the throw 3rd party code at it until it does something. Of course, I don't have time to review it but I'm sure everybody else has peer reviewed it for flaws and exploits line by line.

Re: older generations already had a term for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh bs. Code reuse is not the issue, most programmers are outright frauds.

This is certainly not a new problem, I regularly interview people with 20+ years experience who cannot tell me how things work under the hood.

The issue is kids these days basically have point and click development experiences and never learn how to build things from the ground up.

If you program C/C++ you had better be able to understand the asm for the architecture you target, if you program in a high level interpreted language then you better have pulled apart the interpreter you often use to understand how it works.

Otherwise all you get is a bunch of code sloppily taped together by someone who cannot really tell you how or why it works or more importantly how it may break or why it is broken.

Re: older generations already had a term for this

[gbjbaanb]

That's not strictly true, you don't need to go down that low to be good at what you do, but you do still need to understand what it is doing, and why.

If you don't, you end up with stupidity like the ASP.NET programmers who built their identity system to use strings as primary DB keys, or the .NET programmers who created an array class and called it List (yes, Lists in .NET are arrays under the hood, with array-style performance).

this kind of nonsense makes it next to impossible to get things done properly, how many systems are built with entity framework gobbling up masses of CPU and DB time because the coders didn't want to use SQL when they could write C# code for everything (I'm still surprised they don't have a C# engine to create client side javascript!)

I think the problem has been the "crack it out quick" attitude to programming where everything is thrown away after a few years for the new cool tech. As a result, everybody ends up reinventing everything over and over and nobody gets good at it. Net result: programming becomes a low-skill job plugging blocks of code together from tutorials and examples, and its no wonder bosses now consider programmers to be low skill workers deserving of lower pay. All the best guys have gone and become architects instead.

Re:older generations already had a term for this

[tlhIngan]

b) No computer ever ran at 1.023 MHz. It was either a nice multiple of 1Mhz or maybe a multiple of 3.579545Mhz (ie. using the TV output circuit's color clock crystal to drive the CPU).

Well, it could be used to drive the TV output circuit, OR, it was used because it's a stupidly cheap high speed crystal. You have to remember except for a few frequencies, most crystals would have to be specially cut for the desired frequency. This occurs even today, where most oscillators are either 32.768kHz (real time clock), 12MHz (USB 1.1/2.0 interfaces), 19MHz, or 27MHz. Or the two TV frequencies (3.58 and 4.43MHz).

But back then, before we had the influx of many devices with standardized frequencies, there were only a few standard crystals - mostly related to TV or radio frequencies. And custom-cut crystals were expensive, so you generally wanted crystals that could be ordered trivially easy, which meant limiting yourself to bog standard TV or radio IF crystals.

Another crystal was 4.43361875 MHz - this was used in PAL countries and divided into as well.

People grew very adept at multiplying and dividing the frequencies - the IBM PC's 4.77MHz was derived from the 3.58MHz crystal (even IBM couldn't get away from bog-standard crystals) - at a ratio of 4/3.

Re:older generations already had a term for this

[AmiMoJo]

Unfortunately, the careful and cautious way is a dying in favor of the throw 3rd party code at it until it does something.

Of course. What is the business case for making it efficient? Those massive frameworks are cached by the browser and run on the client's system, so cost you nothing and save you time to market. Efficient costs money with no real benefit to the business.

If we want to fix this, we need to make bloat have an associated cost somehow.

Re:older generations already had a term for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, nice talk. You could have stopped after the first sentence. The other AC is referring to the Commodore C64. The frequency has nothing to do with crystal availability but with the simple fact that everything in the C64 is synced to the TV. One clock cycle equals 8 pixels. The graphics chip and the CPU take turns accessing the RAM. The different frequencies dictated by the TV standards are the reason why the CPU in the NTSC version of the C64 runs at 1.023MHz and the PAL version at 0.985MHz.

Re:older generations already had a term for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the careful and cautious way is a dying in favor of the throw 3rd party code at it until it does something.

Of course. What is the business case for making it efficient? Those massive frameworks are cached by the browser and run on the client's system, so cost you nothing and save you time to market. Efficient costs money with no real benefit to the business.

If we want to fix this, we need to make bloat have an associated cost somehow.

Because, latency of a request is the most important factor for getting users to continue using a service. Its more important than anything that comes from product management, the design dept or the executive suite (which is surprising). Its gotten so bad that I have seen companies miss out on 10 figures a year in revenue because of bloated software with poor latency. Meanwhile, they want to run an A/B test on if the pink background makes more money than the green one (turns out it doesn't fucking matter). Its OK, if it wasn't for ppl like you, I wouldn't get paid so well to clean up your messes. Hint, you are one of the fakers an part of the problem.

Re:older generations already had a term for this

[50000BTU_barbecue]

"b) No computer ever ran at 1.023 MHz."

Only the Guinness World Record highest selling single model of home computer.

So much for "no". That's the NTSC version BTW. The VIC-20 also ran at that frequency.

"or maybe a multiple of 3.579545Mhz"

So why contradict yourself?

14.31818MHz/14 = 1.022MHz. What a coinkydink!

Hey, what about the Atari 800?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

1.79MHz.

ZX80?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

3.25MHz...

You're a poser, friend.

Re:older generations already had a term for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Commodore 64 for the win. I worked for a company that made detection devices for the railroad, things like monitoring axle temperatures, reading the rail car ID tags. The original devices were made using Commodore 64 boards using software written by an employee at the one rail road company working with them.

The company then hired some electrical engineers to design custom boards using the 68000 chips and I was hired as the only programmer. Had to rewrite all of the code which was fine because I actually had access to a C compiler. The original developer had used some system he'd pulled from a magazine that was a really bizarre pseudo assembler.

I had the luxury of having a full 64kb burnable ROM to hold my code, though it was setup with only 1 of 4 16kb pages accessible at at time so did have to do some bank switching to use it all. Fun days.

Re: older generations already had a term for this

[locketine]

My company is dealing with the result of this mentality right now. We released the web app to the customer without performance testing and doing several majorly inefficient things to meet deadlines. Once real load was put on the application by users with non-ideal hardware and browsers, the app was infuriatingly slow. Suddenly our standard sub-40 hour workweek became a 50+ hour workweek for months while we fixed all the inefficient code and design issues.

So, while you're right that getting to market and optimizing later is the correct way to go, there's a baseline level of performance the customer will demand and you must meet their expectations or you've lost your chance to win in the market. The customers put up with the issues though, primarily because we have an amazing vendor lock-in strategy, but most of our team quit as a result of the long hours fixing everything and had been telling management over and over that we needed to ensure baseline performance expectations were met.

Btw, this wasn't the first time I've been on a team that experienced this. Last time we did not have a vendor lock-in strategy and the product died a quick death after spending millions of dollars on R&D.

Re: older generations already had a term for this

[goose-incarnated]

You don't understand the point of an ORM do you? I'd suggest reading why they exist

They exist because programmers value code design more than data design. ORMs are the poster-child for square-peg-round-hole solutions, which is why all ORMs choose one of three different ways of squashing hierarchical data into a relational form, all of which are crappy.

If the devs of the system (the ones choosing to use an ORM) had any competence at all they'd design their database first because in any application that uses a database the database is the most important bit, not the OO-ness or Functional-ness of the design.

Over the last few decades I've seen programs in a system come and go; a component here gets rewritten, a component there gets rewritten, but you know what? They all have to work with the same damn data.

You can more easily switch out your code for new code with new design in a new language, than you can switch change the database structure. So explain to me why it is that you think the database should be mangled to fit your OO code rather than mangling your OO code to fit the database?

Re: older generations already had a term for this

[serviscope_minor]

Interesting, lets pick those apart a bit.

Oh this should be good.

To implement a NiMH or NiCD charger, you need to have an analog input, which the PIC doesn't have.

It's an Epson 4 bitter which you'd know if you bothreed to do anything other than rage-read my post. They have similar computational capacity to the PIC. And they're 4 bits not 8.

To implement a NiMH or NiCD charger, you need to have an analog input, which the PIC doesn't have. You will also need to be able to store at least 32 samples at 10 bits each sample so that you can detect the charging peak and the *small* voltage drop that signals end of charge.

Yes no one ever did a bodge job with a trickle charger. No siree. Never worked.

Given that, you will have to have a separate battery management IC,

Do an actual teardown yourself or simply watch one of the teardown videos on youtube. They don't have battery management ICs.

The rest is simply a mechanical switch with the appropriate FET and resistor to drive on LED directly from the switch. Putting a uC on a toothbrush is a pointless waste of money, and the fact that it has one in it will last only until downward price pressure from cheap Chinese knockoffs that do not have a uC push the over-expensive product out of the market. I'm not saying that a uC wont be a better solution, as the battery charger chips start at around $1.50 in quantity; What I am saying is that these low end PICs are essentially useless.

Except that's not how they're made. The uC also provides the 30 second and 2 minute timers which the device has. $0.17 is hardly enough to make the produce "over expensive".

Alarm products can come in two varieties: Centralized control and distributed control. For a centralized control, you have "dumb" remote sensors, and a central control IC that can ready the electrical signals from multiple channels. In this case, the central IC needs to have many pins (at least one for every IO sensor attached to the system). For the decentralized controls, the individual devices need to have enough smarts to understand their addressing, but not much more. In the first case, a PIC just isn't going to cut it. In the second case, it would be cheaper to simply use any of a variety of addressable buses devices that can handle the i/o and the bus interactions. again, there is no need for a uC in the "smart" sensor, so why waste the money?

They're 0.17. Are your bus addressable chips which can then plug to arbitrary bits of hadware (a) as cheap and (b) as quick to develop thereby reducing the time to market? A clue: no.

For the blender, motor control requires a feedback mechanism that will require an analog input that the PIC can't handle.

First, speed controllers don't need analogue inputs, you need timer inputs which it does have. Second, you can bodge analog in with a comparator which the 10F204 has.

You want a MOC3021. No need to do any programming, it is a standalone chip that does the same thing, is cheaper per unit than the micro, and has the opto-isolation built in.

First, you missspelled "more expensive". Second that IS the triac. It doesn't do anything by itself. So good job, you have a TRIAC.

You can do the same thing with a 555 timer chip ($0.03 in large quantities), and a half dozen external passives to gate the behaviors.

Pics or it didn't happen. Either post a circuit diagram showing how you can build a dimmer which can be switched form leading to trailing edge and calibrated using only the main button press with a 555 or you're full of crap.

If you want that product to do anything fancier, the PIC wont have enough horsepower for it anyway, so you need a beefier uC anyways

All you've done is demonstrate your lack of knowledge of existing products and the capabilities of various chips.

... A job fair can easily test this competency.

[wierd_w]

Many of these languages have an interactive interpreter. I know for a fact that Python does.

So, since job-fairs are an all day thing, and setup is already a thing for them-- set up a booth with like 4 computers at it, and an admin station. The 4 terminals have an interactive session with the interpreter of choice. Every 20min or so, have a challenge for "Solve this problem" (needs to be easy and already solved in general. Programmers hate being pimped without pay. They dont mind tests of skill, but hate being pimped. Something like "sort this array, while picking out all the prime numbers" or something.) and see who steps up. The ones that step up have confidence they can solve the problem, and you can quickly see who can do the work and who can't.

The ones that solve it, and solve it to your satisfaction, you offer a nice gig to.

Re:... A job fair can easily test this competency.

[ShanghaiBill]

Then you get someone good at sorting arrays while picking out prime numbers, but potentially not much else.

The point of the test is not to identify the perfect candidate, but to filter out the clearly incompetent. If you can't sort an array and write a function to identify a prime number, I certainly would not hire you. Passing the test doesn't get you a job, but it may get you an interview ... where there will be other tests.

Re:Nothing worse

[Anonymous Coward]

The moment you said "contractors", and you have lost any sane developer. Keep swimming, its not a fish.

Re:Most "Professional programmers" are useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the good old 80:20 rule, except it's recursive for programmers.

80% are shit, so you fire them.
Soon you realize that 80% of the remaining 20% are also shit, so you fire them too.
Eventually you realize that 80% of the 4% remaining after sacking the 80% of the 20% are also shit, so you fire them!

...

The cycle repeats until there's just one programmer left: the person telling the joke.

---

tl;dr: All programmers suck. Just ask them to review their own code from more than 3 years ago: they'll tell you that it sucks, and the person who wrote it should be fired.

Silicon Valley is Only Part of the Tech Business

[Anonymous Coward]

And a rather small part at that, albeit a very visible and vocal one full of the proverbial prima donas. However, much of the rest of the tech business, or at least the people working in it, are not like that. It's small groups of developers working in other industries that would not typically be considered technology. There are software developers working for insurance companies, banks, hedge funds, oil and gas exploration or extraction firms, national defense and many hundreds and thousands of other small niche companies that most consumers have never heard of. To view Silicon Valley as the place where everybody in tech wants to be is to observe the tip of the iceberg while ignoring the enormous mass that exists beneath the surface. More and more software development and writing code are becoming an everyday part of every business and just as the large home building corporations have not put the small craft builders out of business so too will there always be talented individuals dedicated to the craft and laboring behind the scenes to write the code that keeps everything running smoothly. There will be new and powerful tools, like AI as a service, that will take over and automate some tasks but like a conductor there will always be a developer, baton in hand, orchestrating the symphony.

Re:Nothing worse

[Anonymous Coward]

That being said, I've also seen projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, with years of delays from companies like Oracle, Sun, SAP, and many other "vendors"

Software development is a hard thing to do well, despite the general thinking of technology becoming cheaper over time, and like health care the quality of the goods and services received can sometimes be difficult to ascertain. However, people who don't respect developers and the problems we solve are very often the same ones who continually frustrate themselves by trying to cheap out, hiring outsourced contractors, and then tearing their hair out when sub par results are delivered, if anything is even delivered at all. Conscientiousness, humility and respect get you much further in this business than hubris, arrogance and haste.

Re:Most "Professional programmers" are useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a theory that

10% of people are good at what they do. It doesn't really matter what they do, they will still be good at it, because of their nature. These are the people who invent new things, who fix things that others didn't even see as broken and who automate routine tasks or simply question and erase tasks that are not necessary. If you have a software team that contain 5 of these, you can easily beat a team of 100 average people, not only in cost but also in schedule, quality and features. In theory they are worth 20 times more than average employees, but in practise they are usually paid the same amount of money with few exceptions.

80% of people are the average. They can follow instructions and they can get the work done, but they don't see that something is broken and needs fixing if it works the way it has always worked. While it might seem so, these people are not worthless. There are a lot of tasks that these people are happily doing which the 10% don't want to do. E.g. simple maintenance work, implementing simple features, automating test cases etc. But if you let the top 10% lead the project, you most likely won't be needed that much of these people. Most work done by these people is caused by themselves, by writing bad software due to lack of good leader.

10% are just causing damage. I'm not talking about terrorists and criminals. I have seen software developers who have tried (their best?), but still end up causing just damage to the code that someone else needs to fix, costing much more than their own wasted time. You really must use code reviews if you don't know your team members, to find these people early.

Re:Nothing worse

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with this. I consider myself to be a good programmer and I would never go into contractor game.

I also wonder, how does it take you weeks to interview someone and you still can't figure out if the person can't code? I could probably see that in 15 minutes in a pair coding session.

Also, Oracle, SAP, IBM... I would never buy from them, nor use their products. I have used plenty of IBM products and they suck big time. They make software development 100 times harder than it could be. Their technical support takes months to figure out the same answer we already had, and only fix they have ever provided was to disable a feature that had a bug in it. Don't get me wrong, if you buy from small companies there is no guarantee that you get anything better. There is one trick you can do to get good results, but I'm not revealing that, because I hate it.

Other than that, your best option is to hire your own developers. Do initial screening by asking them to write a simple application, something that is trivial for a good programmer, but still requires you to understand loops and conditions. Something that takes about 10 minutes max for a good programmer to do. Just to filter out those who can't code at all.

Re:Bigger building blocks

[Anonymous Coward]

But, I suspect you could write the component if you had to. That makes you a very different user of that component than someone who just knows it as a magic black box.

Because of this, you understand the component better and have real knowledge of its strengths and limitations. People blindly using components with only a cursory idea of their internal operation often cause major performance problems. They rarely recognize when it is time to write their own to overcome a limitation (or even that it is possible), often don't know just how easy that is, and frequently pull in massive modules for the sake of minor functions.

My education including designing a microprocessor from logic gates, building it in a lab, programming in a diverse array of languages from assembly up, writing an assembler, and writing a compiler.

In the work world, I've written an OS, drivers, a C standard library, a compiler, several interpreters, database engines, etc. When I use these things, I understand them at a level that makes my code better. If you don't think you could write something like that, you are probably just a script kiddie and have no business architecting major applications.

Re:Most "Professional programmers" are useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

to find these people early

and promote them to management where they belong.

Re:Bigger building blocks

[Tony Isaac]

If I'm a plumber, and I don't know anything about the engineering behind the construction of PVC pipe, I can still be a good plumber. If I'm an electrician, and I don't understand the role of a blast furnace in the making of the metal components, I can still be a good electrician.

The analogy fits. If I'm a programmer, and I don't know how to make an LZW compression library, I can still be a good programmer. It's a matter of layers. These days, we specialize. You've got your low-level programmers that make the components, the high level programmers that put together the components, the graphics guys who do HTML/CSS, and the SQL programmers that just know about databases. Every person has their specialty. It's no longer necessary to be a low-level programmer, or jack-of-all-trades, to be "good."

If I don't know the layout of the IP header, I can still write quality networking software, and if I know XSLT, I can still do cool stuff with XML, even if I don't know how to write a good parser.

Seems about right. Constantly learning, studying

[raymorris]

That seems about right to me.

I have a lot of weaknesses. My people skills suck, I'm scrawny, I'm arrogant. I'm also generally known as a really good programmer and people ask me how/why I'm so much better at my job than everyone else in the room. (There are a lot of things I'm not good at, but I'm good at my job, so say everyone I've worked with.)

I think one major difference is that I'm always studying, intentionally working to improve, every day. I've been doing that for twenty years.

I've worked with people who have "20 years of experience"; they've done the same job, in the same way, for 20 years. Their first month on the job they read the first half of "Databases for Dummies" and that's what they've been doing for 20 years. They never read the second half, and use Oracle database 18.0 exactly the same way they used Oracle Database 2.0 - and it was wrong 20 years ago too. So it's not just experience, it's 20 years of learning, getting better, every day. That's 7,305 days of improvement.

Re:Most "Professional programmers" are useless.

[Tablizer]

at least 70, probably 80, maybe even 90 percent of professional programmers should just fuck off and do something else as they are useless at programming.

Programming is statistically a dead-end job. Why should anyone hone a dead-end skill that you won't be able to use for long? For whatever reason, the industry doesn't want old programmers.

Otherwise, I'd suggest longer training and education before they enter the industry. But that just narrows an already narrow window of use.

The people who are smarter won't

[raymorris]

> The people can do both are smart enough to build their own company and compete with you.

Been there, done that. Learned a few lessons. Nowadays I work 9:30-4:30 for a very good, consistent paycheck and let some other "smart person" put in 75 hours a week dealing with hiring, managing people, corporate strategy, staying up on the competition, figuring out tax changes each year and getting taxes filed six times each year, the various state and local requirements, legal changes, contract hassles, etc, while hoping the company makes money this month so they can take a paycheck and lay their rent.

I learned that I'm good at creating software systems and I enjoy it. I don't enjoy all-nighters, partners being dickheads trying to pull out of a contract, or any of a thousand other things related to running a start-up business. I really enjoy a consistent, six-figure compensation package too.

Re: ... A job fair can easily test this competency

[wierd_w]

Again, the quality applicant and the code monkey both have something the fakers do not-- Actual comprehension of what a program is, and how to create one.

As Bill points out, this is not the final exam. This is the "Oh, I see you do actually know how to program-- show me more" portion of the process. This is the part that HR drones are not capable of performing, due to Dunning-Krueger. Those that are actually, REALLY competent will do more than just satisfy the requirements of the challenge, they will provide actually working solutions to the challenge that properly validate their input, and return proper error states if the input is invalid, etc-- You can learn a LOT about a potential hire by observing their work. *THAT* is what this is really about. The triviality of the problem is a necessity, because you ***DON'T*** try to get free solutions out of people.

I realize that may be difficult for you to comprehend, but you *DON'T* do that. The job fair is to let people know that you have a position available, and try to curry interest in people to apply. A successful pre-screening is confidence building, and helps the potential hire to feel that your company is actually interested in actually hiring somebody, and not just fucking off in the booth, to cover for "failing to find somebody" and then "Getting yet another H1B". It gives them a chance to show you what they can do. That is what it is for, and what it does. It also excludes the fakers that this article is about-- The ones that can talk a good talk, but could not program a simple boolean check condition if their life depended on it.

If it were not for the time constraints of a job fair (usually only 2 days, and in that time you need to try and pre-screen as many as possible), I would suggest a tiered challenge, with progressively harder challenges, where you hand out resumes to the ones that make it to the top 3 brackets, but that is not the way the world works.

Re: ... A job fair can easily test this competency

[ShanghaiBill]

Someone could Google the problem with the phone then step up and solve the challenge.

If given a spec, someone can consistently cobble together working code by Googling, then I would love to hire them. That is the most productive way to get things done.

There is nothing wrong with using external references. When I am coding, I have three windows open: an editor, a testing window, and a browser with a Stackoverflow tab open.

im sick of reinventors and new frameworks

[cheekyboy]

Stick to the one thing for 10-15years

Often all this new shit doesnt do jack different to the old shit, its not faster, its not better.

Every dick wants to be famous so make another damn library/tool with his own fancy name and feature, instead of enhancing an existing product.

Learn to code courses

[Njovich]

They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software.

Kind of hard to take this article serious after saying gibberish like this. I would say most good programmers know that neither learn-to-code courses nor AI are going to make a dent in their income any time soon.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

in the silly cone valley

[Escogido]

there is a huge shortage of decent programmers. I have personally witnessed more than one phone "interview" that went like "have you done this? what about this? do you know what this is? um, can you start Monday?" (120K-ish salary range)

partly because there are way more people who got their stupid ideas funded than good coders willing to stain their resume with that. partly because if you are funded, and cannot do all the required coding solo, here's your conundrum:

- top level hackers can afford to be really picky, so on one hand it's hard to get them interested, and if you could get that, they often want some ownership of the project. the plus side is that they are happy to work for lots of equity if they have faith in the idea, but that can be a huge "if".

- "good but not exceptional" senior engineers aren't usually going to be super happy, as they often have spouses and children and mortgages, so they'd favor job security over exciting ideas and startup lottery.

- that leaves you with fresh-out-of-college folks, which are really really a mixed bunch. some are actually already senior level of understanding without the experience, some are absolutely useless, with varying degrees in between, and there's no easy way to tell which is which early.

so the not-so-scrupulous folks realized what's going on, and launched multiple coding boot camps programmes, to essentially trick both the students into believing they can become a coder in a month or two, and also the prospective employers that said students are useful. so far it's been working, to a degree, in part because in such companies coding skill evaluation process is broken. but one can only hide their lack of value add for so long, even if they do manage to bluff their way into a job.

Duh!

[quonset]

All one had to do was look at the lousy state of software and web sites today to see this is true. It's quite obvious little to no thought is given on how to make something work such that one doesn't have to jump through hoops.

I have many times said the most perfect word processing program ever developed was WordPefect 5.1 for DOS. Ones productivity was astonishing. It just worked.

Now we have the bloated behemoth Word which does its utmost to get in the way of you doing your work. The only way to get it to function is to turn large portions of its "features" off, and even then it still insists on doing something other than what you told it to do.

Then we have the abomination of Windows 10, which is nothing but Clippy on 10X steroids. It is patently obvious the people who program this steaming pile have never heard of simplicity. Who in their right mind would think having to "search" for something is more efficient than going directly to it? I would ask the question if these people wander around stores "searching" for what they're looking for, but then I realize that's how their entire life is run. They search for everything online rather than going directly to the source. It's no wonder they complain about not having time to things. They're always searching.

Web sites are another area where these people have no clue what they're doing. Anything that might be useful is hidden behind dropdown menus, flyouts, popup bubbles and intriately designed mazes of clicks needed to get to where you want to go. When someone clicks on a line of products, they shouldn't be harassed about what part of the product line they want to look at. Give them the information and let the user go where they want.

This rant could go on, but this article explains clearly why we have regressed when it comes to software and web design. Instead of making things simple and easy to use, using the one or two brain cells they have, programmers and web designers let the software do what it wants without considering, should it be done like this?

Tech industry churn

[swb]

The tech industry has a ton of churn -- there's some technological advancement, but there's an awful lot of new products turned out simply to keep customers buying new licenses and paying for upgrades.

This relentless and mostly phony newness means a lot of people have little experience with current products. People fake because they have no choice. The good ones understand the general technologies and problems they're meant to solve and can generally get up to speed quickly, while the bad ones are good at faking it but don't really know what they're doing. Telling the difference from the outside is impossible.

Sales people make it worse, promoting people as "experts" in specific products or implementations because the people have experience with a related product and "they're all the same". This burns out the people with good adaption skills.

filter the lame code monkeys

[luis_a_espinal]

Lame monkey tests select for lame monkeys.

A good programmer first and foremost has a clean mind. Experience suggests puzzle geeks, who excel at contrived tests, are usually sloppy thinkers.

No. Good programmers can trivially knock out any of these so-called lame monkey tests. It's lame code monkeys who can't do it. And I've seen their work. Many night shifts and weekends I've burned trying to fix their shit because they couldn't actually do any of the things behind what you call "lame monkey tests", like:

1. pulling expensive invariant calculations out of loops
2. using for loops to scan a fucking table to pull rows or calculate an aggregate when they could let the database do what it does best with a simple SQL statement
3. systems crashing under actual load because their shitty code was never stress tested (but it worked on my dev box!.)
4. again with databases, having to redo their schemas because they were fattened up so much with columns like VALUE1, VALUE2, ... VALUE20 (normalize you assholes!)
5. chatting remote APIs - because these code monkeys cannot think about the need for bulk operations in increasingly distributed systems.
6. storing dates in unsortable strings because the idiots do not know most modern programming languages have a date data type.

Oh and the most important, off-by-one looping errors. I see this all the time, the type of thing a good programmer can spot on quickly because he or she can do the so-called "lame monkey tests" that involve arrays and sorting.

I've seen the type: "I don't need to do this shit because I have business knowledge and I code for business and IT not google", and then they go and code and fuck it up... and then the rest of us have to go clean up their shit at 1AM or on weekends.

If you work as an hourly paid contractor cleaning that crap, it can be quite lucrative. But sooner or later it truly sucks the energy out of your soul.

So yeah, we need more lame monkey tests ... to filter the lame code monkeys.

Re:filter the lame code monkeys

[pete6677]

Throughout my career I've had to deal with most if not all of the issues you cite above. However in most cases I've found these problems were introduced not by code monkeys, but by hotshot wannabe leet-coders who could easily pass any interviewing programming test and can quickly rattle off complex algorithms. But they don't think beyond getting a cool quick solution that "works on my machine" at which point they move onto the next project.

Test code? We don't need to test, because we're so good at what we do. Performance testing, not my department. Slow database access, blame the DBA.

I'd rather deal with a system built by code monkeys who know they suck and thus do a lot of testing vs a system built by leetcoders that falls over and dies at the slightest abnormality.

Interesting

[DaMattster]

From the summary, it sounds like a lot of programmers and software engineers are trying to develop the next big thing so that they can literally beg for money from the elite class and one day, hopefully, become a member of the aforementioned. It's sad how the middle class has been utterly decimated in the United States that some of us are willing to beg for scraps from the wealthy. I used to work in IT but I've aged out and am now back in school to learn automotive technology so that I can do something other than being a security guard. Currently, the only work I have been able to find has been in the unglamorous security field.

I am learning some really good new skills in the automotive program that I am in but I hate this one class called "Professionalism in the Shop." I can summarize the entire class in one succinct phrase, "Learn how to appeal to, and communicate with, Mr. Doctor, Mr. Lawyer, or Mr. Wealthy-man." Basically, the class says that we are supposed to kiss their ass so they keep coming back to the Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Volvo, or Cadillac dealership. It feels a lot like begging for money on behalf of my employer (of which very little of it I will see) and nothing like professionalism. Professionalism is doing the job right the first time, not jerking the customer off. Professionalism is not begging for a 5 star review for a few measly extra bucks but doing absolute top quality work. I guess the upshot is that this class will be the easiest 4.0 that I've ever seen.

There is something fundamentally wrong when the wealthy elite have basically demanded that we beg them for every little scrap. I can understand the importance of polite and professional interaction but this prevalent expectation that we bend over backwards for them crosses a line with me. I still suck it up because I have to but it chafes my ass to basically validate the wealthy man.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Bigger building blocks

[frank_adrian314159]

I was with you until you said " I can still do cool stuff with XML".

Re: Most "Professional programmers" are useless.

[luis_a_espinal]

Who gives a fuck about lines? If someone gave me JavaScript, and someone gave me minified JavaScript, which one would I want to maintain?

I donâ(TM)t care about your line savings, less isnâ(TM)t always better.

Because the world of programming is not centered about JavasScript and reduction of lines is not the same as minification. If the first thing that came to your mind was about minified JavaScript when you saw this conversation, you are certainly not the type of programmer I would want to inherit code from.

See, there's a lot of shit out there that is overtly redundant and unnecessarily complex. This is specially true when copy-n-paste code monkeys are left to their own devices for whom code formatting seems an unknown, never heard of thing.

Then you end up with a mess of poorly formatted, hard to read code mutated by god-knows how many rounds of copy and paste with fundamental bugs spread all over the place (like one I was working recently where some pieces were using dates in the server time zone and other pieces in UTC because someone with multiple programming personality disorder copy and paste the worst snippets he could find on the internet and somehow decided to change time handling to UTC without remembering to go back and change all the shit he copied and pasted before.

About 10K of lines reduced to about 1k "core" lines and a brand new 1k lines to encapsulate repeated logic that provides consistent behavior not only on datetime handling but also in other areas that were broken.

And oh my God don't get me started on another piece of code (PL/SQL) to read table partitions where the "genius" would query database metadata in XML format and then pass it to a parser when all he needed was just query USER_TAB_PARTITIONS within a pipeline table function of just 2 dozen lines length.

For these people it's like, the more unreadable, redundant lines, the better. It's almost as if they are building job security by obfuscation. But it's not even malice, it's pure incompetence, an inability to think in abstractions.

Systems are inherently complex, there's no need to make them more complex just because assholes do not know how to put appropriate structure and abstractions in place.

Re:Most "Professional programmers" are useless.

[gweihir]

I think that is a misinterpretation of the facts. Old(er) coders that are incompetent are just much more obvious and usually are also limited to technologies that have gotten old as well. Hence the 90% old coders that can actually not hack it and never really could get sacked at some time and cannot find a new job with their limited and outdated skills. The 10% that are good at it do not need to worry though. Who worries there is their employers when these people approach retirement age.

Important, and dumb.

[raymorris]

Of course they are important. I wouldn't have done those things if they weren't important!

I frequently have friends say things like "I love baking. I can't get enough of baking. I'm going to open a bakery.". I ask them "do you love dealing with taxes, every month? Do you love contract law? Employment law? Marketing? Accounting?" If you LOVE baking, the smart thing to do is to spend your time baking. Running a start-up business, you're not going to do much baking.

If you love marketing, employment law, taxes, etc, then start your own business. If you love writing software, and you're really good at it, then someone will pay you six figures to do what you love.

Of course, the ideal for a really good programmer is to partner with young Bill Gates on a new business, and you do the software while he does the business. That doesn't happen often, though.

Four tips for a better job. Who has more?

[raymorris]

I can tell you a few things that have worked for me. I'll go in chronological order rather than priority order.

Male friends in the industry you want to be in. Referrals are a major way people get jobs.

Look at the job listings for jobs you'd like to have and see which skills a lot of companies want, but you're missing. For me that's Java. A lot companies list Java skills and I'm not particularly good with Java. Then consider learning the skills you lack, the ones a lot of job postings are looking for.

Certifications, posted on your LinkedIn, let recruiters find you when they want someone with your skills. Some people will point out that certifications don't prove skill, people can cheat. But certifications CLAIM a certain skill level. When I list "Cisco CCNA" on my resume, I'm claiming a very specific level of networking knowledge, which can be confirmed in an interview. People also point out that (entry-level) certifications don't prove expert-level knowledge. Duh. Entry-level certifications show entry-level knowledge. Advanced certifications like CCIE show expert knowledge. But the point is, certificates are clear, industry standard ways that recruiters actually use to find candidates that match.

With those three steps done, you should have multiple requests for interviews. You have the right skills, and recruiters looking for those skills find you. So now what about the boss that makes you hate showing up for work?

Plan how you can screen the company and interview the boss. I see a lot of job ads for Wells Fargo because they are trying to hire people with my skills in my city. But we know from the news that Wells Fargo corporate culture is to lie, cheat, and steal to make monthly targets. I won't be applying at Wells Fargo. In interviews, I try to ask questions that give me some insight into the boss and the company. I can afford to walk away to the extent I've done the other steps, acquiring skills that are in-demand and marketing myself.

I bet other people reading this have some good tips of their own. Who has one to share?

Typo: MAKE friends. Not MALE friends

[raymorris]

Here's another tip I just learned - proofread what you write. :)

My first tip was supposed to be "make friends in the industry", not "male friends". Indeed when it comes to networking and friendships, in average females are probably statistically more open to relating than males are.

Re: ... A job fair can easily test this competenc

[PaulRivers10]

The only thing fuzzbuzz tests is "have you done fizzbuzz before"? It's a short question filled with every petty trick the author could think ti throw in there. If you haven't seen the tricks they trip you up for no reason related to your actual codung skills. Once you have seen them they're trivial and again unrelated to real work. Fizzbuzz is best passed by someone aiming to game the interview system. It passes people gaming it and trips up people who spent their tume doing on the job real work.

Re:Bigger building blocks

[careysub]

The main advantage is that JSON is that it is consistent. XML has attributes, embedded optional stuff within tags. That was derived from the original SGML ancestor where is was thought to be a convenience for the human authors who were supposed to be making the mark-up manually. Programmatically it is a PITA.

Re: ... A job fair can easily test this competenc

[Hognoxious]

they trip you up for no reason related to your actual codung skills.

Bullshit!

Re:Most "Professional programmers" are useless.

[Cederic]

It's an interesting thought. Only hire programmers that can tell you why the code they wrote three years ago sucks.

Re:Bigger building blocks

[Cederic]

I got shit for decrying XML back when it was the trendy thing.

I've had people apologise to me months later because they've realised I was right, even though at the time they did their best to fuck over my career because XML was the new big thing and I wasn't fully on board.

XML has its strengths and its place, but fuck me it taught me how little some people really fucking understand shit.