On Tue, 23 Jan 2018 10:02:13 +0000 (UTC) David Schwartz wrote: > The fallacy here is that a HS dropout who’s been building homes for > 30 years could build a home as nice as any Architect just a couple of > years out of school. That's not the fallacy. Nobody said anything about high school dropouts. What was being discussed were people who love to code. My experience tells me most of these people are college grads, although non Comp-Sci degrees. For whatever reason, a lot seem to ride bicycles and/or play musical instruments. I've known only one HS dropout who was a programmer. The comparison here is NOT between average HS dropouts and people with relevant engineering degrees. The other thing is, a software product is a very different thing than a building. [snip] > > But most run-of-the-mill construction workers have no clue when it > comes to structural dependencies, legal codes, how to choose a > foundation appropriate for the ground and terroir, etc. When I was an electrician's helper, I was busy learning the codes. And the journeymen I helped sure nuf knew the national and local codes. But that's not even the issue. The issue is, the set of buildings resemble each other an order of magnitude or so more than the set of computer programs. There are no equations for a foundation: There's no foundation in a computer program: They're not made of concrete. IIRC there are about 13 security rules you need to follow if your code is heavily exposed on the net. Most are fairly obvious: Sanitize all user input, set all pointers on declaration, prevent arrays from overrunning their bounds, don't try to access out of scope variables. One doesn't need a college degree to know and understand these rules. > > You guys keep conflating human psychology and behavior with > acquisition of some mythical sort of “knowledge” that’s somehow > learned through osmosis over time (or even instantly). I haven't seen anyone in this thread make such a conflation. What *has* been said is that people who really like to code code, and that very soon in their career they read books, read websites, read other peoples' code, engage in discussions, to gain their knowledge. There's nothing mythical about it, and it's done by extreme interest and putting in the time, not by osmosis. =-=-= I'd like to return to the concept of "run of the mill construction workers", specifically, the "run of the mill" part. Let's discuss "run of the mill" Comp-Sci grads, because as a rule they're not like the people on this list. Once I advertised a position as my assistant programming a substantial part of a medical management package. Entry level: I'd teach em. We got several Comp-Sci grads from UCLA, and also several students and recent Associate Degree folks from Santa Monica Community College. I gave them all the exact same test: Pseudo-code a program to take an input file, capitalize all characters, and output to an output file. You have 1/2 hour. About 1/2 of the Santa Monica College people substantially completed the test within a half hour. Exactly one UCLA comp-sci grad substantially completed the test. Most of the UCLA grads bogged down after 2 or 3 lines of pseudocode. In the interviews, the UCLA people glibly buzzworded, enumerated the languages they knew, and boasted of writing compilers. But when asked to deliver, they couldn't produce a bare bones proof of concept of the algorithm basic to most back end processing. These were run of the mill comp-sci grads. Let's leave run of the mill people out of the discussion. Folks who love to code self-select themselves out of the run of the mill category. SteveT Steve Litt January 2018 featured book: Troubleshooting: Why Bother? http://www.troubleshooters.com/twb --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss