Interesting premise David. Most intriguing. Basically what I take away
from your position is that without CS training one will be less capable
as a programmer. I can see your point and I have to ask, what about the
person who is a business programmer. What about the xBase developers of
last century? Would they be better developers if they had a CS degree?
Or is good enough good enough?
My father was in sheet metal. He was also in the union. He often spoke
of the changes in how skilled labor was becoming unskilled labor. When
he started in the 50's he was an apprentice for 4 years and had to learn
all things sheet metal. He said things had changed to the point where
someone with little training was taught to do only part of the trade and
was limited in what they could do.
In my lifetime I watched a man deliver milk to my house. He made a
living doing so. Today you have to buy your own milk and transport it
home. I also recall men delivering ice for the old iceboxes. Yes I am
old....
Until recently I had not thought about the CS / non-CS developer. I
have however thought a lot about natural raw talent and how much of that
I might have. I was introduced to the hedgehog concept about 15 years
ago -
http://99u.com/workbook/35591/find-your-hedgehog-youll-find-your-purpose
The concept is that each of us has at least one natural talent that
makes us predisposed to being rather good at that one or two things.
When others ask me about becoming a programmer I refer them to the
hedgehog concept and ask them to determine if programming is really for
them.
I know for certain what I was genetically encoded to do and I think it
is a good idea for each of us to explore the hedgehog concept to
determine what we are genetically encoded to do.
As for bloated code and websites and how much code must be processed,
that is here to stay. That is a modern reality. I like writing code on
the iron. It is fast and uses limited resources. That is not the
reality of today's PHP programmer. Drupal, Joomla, and Magento are
resource hogs. Magento 2 is especially a resource hog. I am seeing a
trend of specialized hosting houses that specialize in just one web
app. These arrangements are expensive, on the order of $500 to $750 a
month to host one web app. However from a business perspective it is a
great deal. Let me explain. In Drupal or Magento one who has the
knowledge of the particular webapp can modify the behavior of the app in
a fraction of the time it takes to modify raw code that is right on the
iron. So you load more code and spend more money to do so while spending
less on development. That is the trade off.
With modern hardware that includes powerful CPU's with lots of cores,
cheap RAM so you can have a lot for little, and SSD that make everything
fast we can make that trade off where the web app is hungry and still
have great performance.
I think David makes a good point that better training in the hands of
the capable, predisposed developer makes for an optimized developer.
The other question is - is good enough, good enough? I had a friend who
received an MIS degree (Not as CS degree). The MIS degree required 21
units of programming classes, and two of those were analysis and design.
That is 5 programming classes plus the analysis and design classes. My
friend went to work for Arthur Andersen as a COBOL programmer. They
gave him 6 weeks of classroom training before he was assign to a team to
start programming.
The question is was his training good enough for what Arthur Andersen
wanted him to do?
On 2018-01-23 03:02, 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.
>
> Perhaps. It goes on all around the world every day.
>
> All Architects can pound nails.
>
> 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.
>
> 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).
>
> If you put a person with a passion for flowers in charge of an event, it should not surprize anybody that there might be an overabundance of flowers present.
>
> It doesn't matter if that person has a BS in Biology and a Master's in Floral Design, or just grew up loving flowers.
>
> If you tell them, "I want LOTS of beautiful flowers at the event!" you're more than likely to get a FLOOD of flowers.
>
> The end result will be a LOT different than someone like me who has zero interest in flowers and floral design, and who'll solve the problem by picking arrangements from a catalog and setting them wherever I can find a place to put them down. If people happen to like what I did, it does not make me some kind of idiot savant, nor a "better choice" than someone skilled in the art.
>
> If someone can teach a dog to do fancy tricks, there's a tendency for people to grant the DOG lots of smarts.
>
> But if that person can teach ANY dog to do fancy tricks, it probably means the TEACHER is the one with the smarts, not the dogs.
>
> Unfortunately, this situation happens way too often in the programming world, and it gets way too much traction mostly because there's a shortage of programmers.
>
> I'm not saying self-taught programmers aren't smart, or that people with formal education never over-do things.
>
> Rather, I think this is an utterly stupid thing to be discussing.
>
> Here's why in a nutshell:
>
> If you decide to invest a half-million bucks into your dream home, are you going to be more inclined to: (a) hire an Architect to design it and then a General Contractor to build it; or (b) would you just scribble some ideas on a napkin (you don't know how to make blueprints, do you?), then assemble a team of construction workers with 20+ years of experience cutting wood and pounding nails (assuming they must know as much as any decent Architect), hand them copies of your drawing, point them at your plot of land, and say, "Call me when you've finished!"?
>
> Most smart people would choose (a).
>
> But it seems a lot of programmers think (b) is the smarter approach to avoid "over-engineering". (Only as long as it's somebody else's money. But if it's THEIR OWN half-a-mil, I'm betting they'd go with (a).)
>
> I would assert that the (b) group isn't as likely to "over-engineer" a solution simply because they have FEW IF ANY solid "engineering" skills in their skillset in the first place.
>
> The house might not look any worse for the effort once it's finished.
>
> But when the first hurricane blows through or the first RS-5 earthquake hits, the house collapses.
>
> Well, hey, at least the house didn't suffer from "over-engineering", right?
>
> -David Schwartz
>
> On Jan 23, 2018, at 1:11 AM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 08:57:11 -0700 Aaron Jones <retro64xyz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The whole "you will be spiritually predisposed to coding" is stupid. No one wants a computer science person on the team because having a team of ten developers who can write crappy boiler plate code is faster than 9 shitty programmers being chased around by a good developer.
>
> I have a website I work on that has a code base that is topping nearly 2gb and has to load over 986MB to load just the front page.
>
> For what? Well we have 60+ items in composer, we have jquery, we have endless numbers of libraries and plugins. Sometimes we load thousands of lines of code to do a single action that literally might be called on the rarest of second tuesdays on the new moon.
>
> Don't blame me (a programmer without a CompSci degree) for the bad design of your company's website. Why don't you offer to rewrite that website from scratch, and if they say no, walk away?
>
> And please don't call me stupid. I am spiritually predisposed to coding. No, I never coded any huge stuff like your website, but that's because I didn't want to be involved with quagmires like that. I did, however, sometimes make money doing a Perl quickie so that the big gala Java application 6 months from completion for the previous year could continue their monument to enterprise application development without the customers bolting and bankrupting the place. And the Java Jockeys thanked me for providing them a working system they could use as a model and a focus for customer questioning.
>
> Far as I know, Steve Wosniak didn't have a Comp Sci degree, nor did Paul Allen. I KNOW you're not calling them stupid. AFAIK, Linux was just a student when he made the Linux kernel. He was you will be spiritually predisposed to coding a long time before his degree.
>
> Don't get me wrong: I'd have loved to learn the stuff my buddies with both spiritual disposition and a Comp Sci degree know: The data structures, the algorithms, the techniques are astouding. But in a contest between someone spiritually predisposed to coding and a Comp Sci grad in it for the money, I'd take the predisposed guy every time.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt January 2018 featured book: Troubleshooting: Why Bother? http://www.troubleshooters.com/twb [1] --------------------------------------------------- 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 [2]
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