It takes a majority of coders 5-10 years to become 'experts'.
This, to someone who has worked in software engineering for 5+ years, is crap. Most coders are as productive after 1 year as they are after 10. If you can think logically (work out the steps to doing something and work out the boundary cases of those steps), and you can abstract problems (so you don't have to solve the same problem 10 different times), then that's about all there is to it. There is simply not much depth to most (although certainly not all) of the problems that coders solve.
I do however totally agree with you that the article is crap as illustrated by your example. My reasoning is slighlty different however. Simply put 95% of people lack the two aforementioned skills which are needed to be able to write code. It is what makes us (coders) special.
I'd be really curious to hear what Peter Deutch (Aladdin Ghostscript) and the commercial SSH developers have to say about idealism, commercialism, earning a living, competing against their own earlier free software, etc.
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It takes a majority of coders 5-10 years to become 'experts'.
This, to someone who has worked in software engineering for 5+ years, is crap. Most coders are as productive after 1 year as they are after 10. If you can think logically (work out the steps to doing something and work out the boundary cases of those steps), and you can abstract problems (so you don't have to solve the same problem 10 different times), then that's about all there is to it. There is simply not much depth to most (although certainly not all) of the problems that coders solve.
I do however totally agree with you that the article is crap as illustrated by your example. My reasoning is slighlty different however. Simply put 95% of people lack the two aforementioned skills which are needed to be able to write code. It is what makes us (coders) special.
I'd be really curious to hear what Peter Deutch (Aladdin Ghostscript) and the commercial SSH developers have to say about idealism, commercialism, earning a living, competing against their own earlier free software, etc.
Not sure about the SSH developers, but there is a good interview with L. Peter Deutsch at http://devlinux.org/deutsch-interview.html.
SGI is apparently still hiring (and hiring pretty young men to boot).
Yeah, but the ones they're firing are old and ugly.