Trent's projects

[David Schwartz]

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 at troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 08:57:11 -0700
> Aaron Jones <retro64xyz at 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?
> https://u2206659.ct.sendgrid.net/wf/click?upn=tzJbcg2o-2FNh3kfIF32sRUb2P5Oq3MDnedSozkCrM5330ZLpaRgHiveIlA4KoFuHj_6lpMB7VLnN-2Fj9-2FEErg8-2F-2BMBpb5QxlByTgv2M3fbWD9ebvC-2BWrN3h7jImK8EVWYBeKNfMhxm5Cjsi1nmzHE5XLvTV6kRuVjnt0UhpzvbmCxCortMXj1VLlBDxpphKj1-2B354t8RrQdrF8dWtshGUAvc3LV59UcmAjRylqV-2B-2BFA1Q-2Fkzu0jd2D6swkVo7tchD5-2Fo4u4XUnaGLC4KvlfcGwH-2Ba4d4RnQTlVRKV-2FEU-2B33Niw-3D
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> https://u2206659.ct.sendgrid.net/wf/click?upn=5DvWGaZUY8Sh5aRLWfQTKYiRLVzunonVk948p8WIzMe-2FXlJ9Cta8w8U9xoku9LrUSHNMJbSd3ZEwH-2BqnW2UHlA-3D-3D_6lpMB7VLnN-2Fj9-2FEErg8-2F-2BMBpb5QxlByTgv2M3fbWD9ebvC-2BWrN3h7jImK8EVWYBeKNfMhxm5Cjsi1nmzHE5XLkAaglna4Ozub4qZvPJp1HHAaOkV0llTwAh-2Fb43-2BlU0BWK23DEvsUhZHlD42oRoAEwM5MzUViL8u1XCSFzdlKWXdz9sP5bkJ6SzUT76-2Bllu6BR9KiI79NoSslnvfrz6DyEaRPKLENtS3Rl-2F63WAhfRI-3D

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20180123/e68efe5f/attachment.html>