No kidding. I saw this news item on a guy in san carlos who took out a 1.3million dollar mortgage based on his startup salary. Beyond my lack of comprehension for how he could possibly cover the payments on a startup salary, he apparently didn't consider the risks very carefully, and as it would happen, the startup went belly up. Now he wants people to pay his mortgage for him.
My high school level geometry course gave me all the vectors and euclidean space I've ever needed. The college level super geometry course was entirely a waste. Same for college level vectors and college level differential eq.
Now linear algebra is valuable, but that wasn't one of the listed courses.
I use concepts from my discrete class on a daily basis, and have at my game software job, my enterprise software job, my cable tv software job, and my gps software job.
I've also taken the other kind of class, but I've never used: math analysis; euclidean space, differentials in 15 years of work.
I have used vectors on occasion, but that is really not hard to pick up.
They lacked one of the 5, safety. They pretty universally came from very violent countries where the religious caste can do whatever they want to you if you don't obey their rules, or even if you do and they don't like you.
You refer to the relative (someone will always have more), but the base matters. If you have food, shelter, safety, clothing, and entertainment, your likelihood of becoming a terrorist goes way down.
Nuclear scale weapons. Creating deadly plagues requires comparably cheap biolab equipment, and are really hard to detect crossing borders. It will be within the price range of a terrorist organization in 20 years to create something as deadly as ebola with the contagiousness of the swine flu.
No, you probably want to supply your own mug. We supply paper cups to avoid the risk of poisoning you with lead.
And while we may not be a A++++ employer (not sure what that is actually), we do employ multiple 5 digit slashdotters, which to my mind is a pretty awesome recommendation.
If you're an excellent java software engineer in silicon valley, we still have plenty of free coffee, and our perks are on the rise. Get in touch with me if you're interested.
So conquest or illegal immigration is their path... because we're not going to let them immigrate here legally to use that land. And believe me, we'll tax absentee landlords into submission right quick.
Subsistence style living is not an option... large scale commercial style farming is the only way to feed the number of people we have (and it isn't enough, really). So if we're headed down the path of subsistence living... well... buy a lot of guns and bullets, because there isn't enough to go around.
No kidding. The chinese are stupid if they haven't realized we're going to inflate our way out of this mess at some point. I wonder what their contingency plan is for that.
Indeed, though the premise of the conversation was that I had run into a coder whose genius was such that I was unable to recognize the fact that I didn't understand his code.
In reality, I believe that I have properly understood every submission of a solution to our hiring problem, and that most of them have been crap.
You're correct of course, but the problem is that even as a sampling problem, we're sampling a pretty huge subsection of the programming population as a whole. We get a LOT of applicants, and most of them currently DO have jobs, and have long, sane job histories. I've also worked with these types of people at previous employers, and I have to say, I'm glad my current employer has done a good job of keeping them out.
So yes, while 4 out of 5 of all programmers are not that bad, I'd actually put the number of the overall population that are that bad at over 50%.
We're actually unlikely to have any dummies, just not all geniuses. The bar doesn't need to be kept low, it just can't be so high that only a genius can maintain it. Frankly, my expectation is that no genius is going to apply for the job... they can make far more money founding their own company.
Re:One person's myth is another person's fact.
on
Myths About Code Comments
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Absolutely. Other people, who are not geniuses, will have to maintain the code for years. They must be able to understand it. Someone who is capable of writing something that is incomprehensible to me, and who can't foresee the problems with that is of no value to us.
To clarify: I can definitely recognize someone significantly more skilled than I am, because even I, at my level of dumbness, know to dumb down my answers further for the audience, so clearly the higher skilled developer does also. Their failure to do so either indicates a deficit in people skills or disdain for the job, and either way, we don't want to hire that person, it's bad for team morale, and we have a large enough product suite that we can't do without the team, no matter how fantastic the rock star godly programmer is.
Interestingly enough, we've had somewhere in the neighborhood of 100k defect reports. That's one per 3k loc. Factor in the undiscovered bugs and we're probably in the ballpark of the 300.
It's a pretty decent sized company, which has been accumulating code for a reasonably long time at this point. It's all not necessarily active, but it exists.
No, I assure you, that is clearly not the case. I can definitely tell the difference between the people who might be smarter than I am, and those who turned in a crap solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, lots of people don't live within their means, and that is the problem.
No kidding. I saw this news item on a guy in san carlos who took out a 1.3million dollar mortgage based on his startup salary. Beyond my lack of comprehension for how he could possibly cover the payments on a startup salary, he apparently didn't consider the risks very carefully, and as it would happen, the startup went belly up. Now he wants people to pay his mortgage for him.
http://helpuskeepourhome.org/
Meanwhile, I didn't buy a home I couldn't afford, and for some reason no one wants to just give me money.
My high school level geometry course gave me all the vectors and euclidean space I've ever needed. The college level super geometry course was entirely a waste. Same for college level vectors and college level differential eq.
Now linear algebra is valuable, but that wasn't one of the listed courses.
I use concepts from my discrete class on a daily basis, and have at my game software job, my enterprise software job, my cable tv software job, and my gps software job.
I've also taken the other kind of class, but I've never used:
math analysis; euclidean space, differentials in 15 years of work.
I have used vectors on occasion, but that is really not hard to pick up.
It only has to escape an earth mass black hole, so about 12km/s will do.
They lacked one of the 5, safety. They pretty universally came from very violent countries where the religious caste can do whatever they want to you if you don't obey their rules, or even if you do and they don't like you.
You refer to the relative (someone will always have more), but the base matters. If you have food, shelter, safety, clothing, and entertainment, your likelihood of becoming a terrorist goes way down.
Nuclear scale weapons. Creating deadly plagues requires comparably cheap biolab equipment, and are really hard to detect crossing borders. It will be within the price range of a terrorist organization in 20 years to create something as deadly as ebola with the contagiousness of the swine flu.
I foresee this being the next 3 wolf moon t-shirt.
No, you probably want to supply your own mug. We supply paper cups to avoid the risk of poisoning you with lead.
And while we may not be a A++++ employer (not sure what that is actually), we do employ multiple 5 digit slashdotters, which to my mind is a pretty awesome recommendation.
The very best employees you have, the ones who can easily get another job in any economy are the ones who will leave, unfortunately.
Which is why most companies secretly have 2 or 3 levels of perks and benefits.
If you're an excellent java software engineer in silicon valley, we still have plenty of free coffee, and our perks are on the rise. Get in touch with me if you're interested.
I guess we could ship them some dirt. Just not too much.
So conquest or illegal immigration is their path ... because we're not going to let them immigrate here legally to use that land. And believe me, we'll tax absentee landlords into submission right quick.
Subsistence style living is not an option ... large scale commercial style farming is the only way to feed the number of people we have (and it isn't enough, really). So if we're headed down the path of subsistence living ... well ... buy a lot of guns and bullets, because there isn't enough to go around.
No kidding. The chinese are stupid if they haven't realized we're going to inflate our way out of this mess at some point. I wonder what their contingency plan is for that.
Indeed, though the premise of the conversation was that I had run into a coder whose genius was such that I was unable to recognize the fact that I didn't understand his code.
In reality, I believe that I have properly understood every submission of a solution to our hiring problem, and that most of them have been crap.
You're correct of course, but the problem is that even as a sampling problem, we're sampling a pretty huge subsection of the programming population as a whole. We get a LOT of applicants, and most of them currently DO have jobs, and have long, sane job histories. I've also worked with these types of people at previous employers, and I have to say, I'm glad my current employer has done a good job of keeping them out.
So yes, while 4 out of 5 of all programmers are not that bad, I'd actually put the number of the overall population that are that bad at over 50%.
We're actually unlikely to have any dummies, just not all geniuses. The bar doesn't need to be kept low, it just can't be so high that only a genius can maintain it. Frankly, my expectation is that no genius is going to apply for the job ... they can make far more money founding their own company.
Absolutely. Other people, who are not geniuses, will have to maintain the code for years. They must be able to understand it. Someone who is capable of writing something that is incomprehensible to me, and who can't foresee the problems with that is of no value to us.
To clarify: I can definitely recognize someone significantly more skilled than I am, because even I, at my level of dumbness, know to dumb down my answers further for the audience, so clearly the higher skilled developer does also. Their failure to do so either indicates a deficit in people skills or disdain for the job, and either way, we don't want to hire that person, it's bad for team morale, and we have a large enough product suite that we can't do without the team, no matter how fantastic the rock star godly programmer is.
Interestingly enough, we've had somewhere in the neighborhood of 100k defect reports. That's one per 3k loc. Factor in the undiscovered bugs and we're probably in the ballpark of the 300.
It's a pretty decent sized company, which has been accumulating code for a reasonably long time at this point. It's all not necessarily active, but it exists.
No, I assure you, that is clearly not the case. I can definitely tell the difference between the people who might be smarter than I am, and those who turned in a crap solution.
No, I meant the codebase at my company, which is not MS.