Computers fail every single day. It seems like everytime I call my mortgage company, credit card company, go to the bank, order a pizza, there is a better than 50% chance that their computer will be "down".
With this being such a common occurence, why isn't this affecting our national infrastructure?
As every other facet of our legal system, Patent law has been corrupted and twisted for the benefit and gain of the very people who are trusted to implement the legal system.
I work for a company that is being forced into the creation of patents, just because our competitors are becoming patent creating machines in their attempts to take over our market and destroy us.
This patent systems is allowing extremely generalized patents that are meant to do only one thing, destroy competitors rather than protecting ideas. Patent law is being used as offense rather than defense.
With all of this happening before our eyes, I can tell you that there is only one interest group that is benefitting from it. It is not the corporations and it is definetly not the little guy, try to guess who it is.
This article gets into a subject that I worry about myself. I am 28 and have never "been in" a tough economy and I think it will change someday, for high-tech workers, especially.
I do think that a select few will continue to be valuable in the future, through any economy, and those people are not these "programmer-in-a-box" people that I am reading about in these comments.
I think what makes a real programmer so much more valuable than a "progrmamer-in-a-box" is ingrained analysis, troubleshooting, and "osmosis-based" learning skills. In every job I have been at in the last decade, I have worked with people who like to play "hot-potato" with bugs, issues, and problems. It all eventually ends up in 1 or 2 persons laps, and those few people are the ones that will stay valuable, no matter what new technologies come down the pipe.
Real programmers can debug anybody's code, and don't mind doing it either. Real programmers can program in any language that a task requires and can usually deal with tasks outside of programming better than most people. For example, these skills come in handy when handling taxes, personal finance, fixing cars, dealing with electronics, handling emergencies, etc...
Also, just because one knows a language, doesn't mean that they can analyze a complex problem and implement an elegant solution in that language. If they were able to implement a solution, could they then debug that solution and maintain it? A real programmer doesn't need a class to learn any of these BUZZ-technologies like XML, Corba, ASP, etc... , just give me a few hours with a tight reference book to that language and a quick look at omeone elses source code, and I will be able to get the job done.
The LOC/Year measurement is not even valid in today's environment. As a programmer, I spend more time fighting with the OS, the tools, debugging, figuring out the intricacies of C++, figuring out how to hookup third party APIs/Components/Libraries, redesign, rewrites, documentation, trying to cleanup and improve the code for maintainability, code reviews, balancing marketing requests vs. what is technically possible, etc... etc... etc...
In other words, American Programmers don't just sit in a cube and hack out code 40 hours a week anymore.
Of course someone way off in another country can create more LOC, when all of the above tasks + dozens more are ignored.
Most projects I know of start with the goal of delivering a quality, maintainable, well-documented product, not just a hacked up product that is impossible to maintain, add features to, and crashes all the time.
The article does hint to the fact that the code delivered from elsewhere is not quality. The article fails to mention how maintainable this code is and if they ever tried to add functionality to the code.
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Computers fail every single day. It seems like everytime I call my mortgage company, credit card company, go to the bank, order a pizza, there is a better than 50% chance that their computer will be "down".
With this being such a common occurence, why isn't this affecting our national infrastructure?
As every other facet of our legal system, Patent law has been corrupted and twisted for the benefit and gain of the very people who are trusted to implement the legal system.
I work for a company that is being forced into the creation of patents, just because our competitors are becoming patent creating machines in their attempts to take over our market and destroy us.
This patent systems is allowing extremely generalized patents that are meant to do only one thing, destroy competitors rather than protecting ideas. Patent law is being used as offense rather than defense.
With all of this happening before our eyes, I can tell you that there is only one interest group that is benefitting from it. It is not the corporations and it is definetly not the little guy, try to guess who it is.
This article gets into a subject that I worry about myself. I am 28 and have never "been in" a tough economy and I think it will change someday, for high-tech workers, especially.
I do think that a select few will continue to be valuable in the future, through any economy, and those people are not these "programmer-in-a-box" people that I am reading about in these comments.
I think what makes a real programmer so much more valuable than a "progrmamer-in-a-box" is ingrained analysis, troubleshooting, and "osmosis-based" learning skills. In every job I have been at in the last decade, I have worked with people who like to play "hot-potato" with bugs, issues, and problems. It all eventually ends up in 1 or 2 persons laps, and those few people are the ones that will stay valuable, no matter what new technologies come down the pipe.
Real programmers can debug anybody's code, and don't mind doing it either. Real programmers can program in any language that a task requires and can usually deal with tasks outside of programming better than most people. For example, these skills come in handy when handling taxes, personal finance, fixing cars, dealing with electronics, handling emergencies, etc...
Also, just because one knows a language, doesn't mean that they can analyze a complex problem and implement an elegant solution in that language. If they were able to implement a solution, could they then debug that solution and maintain it? A real programmer doesn't need a class to learn any of these BUZZ-technologies like XML, Corba, ASP, etc... , just give me a few hours with a tight reference book to that language and a quick look at omeone elses source code, and I will be able to get the job done.
The LOC/Year measurement is not even valid in today's environment. As a programmer, I spend more time fighting with the OS, the tools, debugging, figuring out the intricacies of C++, figuring out how to hookup third party APIs/Components/Libraries, redesign, rewrites, documentation, trying to cleanup and improve the code for maintainability, code reviews, balancing marketing requests vs. what is technically possible, etc... etc... etc...
In other words, American Programmers don't just sit in a cube and hack out code 40 hours a week anymore.
Of course someone way off in another country can create more LOC, when all of the above tasks + dozens more are ignored.
Most projects I know of start with the goal of delivering a quality, maintainable, well-documented product, not just a hacked up product that is impossible to maintain, add features to, and crashes all the time.
The article does hint to the fact that the code delivered from elsewhere is not quality. The article fails to mention how maintainable this code is and if they ever tried to add functionality to the code.