
Developer Incompetence, an analysis - dood
http://abstractgeneratorfactory.blogspot.com/2008/04/incompetence-analysis.html
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swombat
The article is a bit hit-and-miss, but it's an interesting and difficult
problem.

I personally believe that a lot of the really bad developers came onboard
during the y2k+dot-com boom, and the population has been self-perpetuating and
growing in enterprise environments ever since.

Perhaps the way to resolve this is to create some sort of exclusive society of
good developers, which you can only join by personal invitation and after a
thorough grilling by some developers who have already joined and who are aware
that diluting the society with crap programmers is not in anyone's interest...
Something like a Mensa for programmers?

Then good developer could be identified by belonging to this society - much
like professionals in other professions are identified by memberships to such
societies (doctors, lawyers, architects, hell, even engineers).

Daniel

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phaedrus
A Mensa for programmers sounds like a good idea. I'm in favor of mandatory
licensing requirements for commercial developers, but in lieu of that, maybe a
society of competent programmers would highlight the difference between those
who can and those who can't program. But I foresee difficulties in keeping
membership pure; for instance, how would we ensure it doesn't devolve into
people paying to get in?

~~~
swombat
Well, many other professions have solved the "how to stop the profession from
being diluted" dilemma. No need to reinvent the wheel - just have a formal,
oral entrance interview administered by respected members of the community..

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hacklite
Can't legislate competence.

Feynman resigned from the National Academy of Sciences, "because that was
another organization most of whose time was spent in choosing who was
illustrious enough to join, to be allowed to join us in our organization [...]
The whole thing was rotten because its purpose was mostly to decide who could
have this honor [...]"

Well, he _tried_ to resign but they wouldn't let him because they didn't want
to lose someone of his stature!

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swombat
From the sound of it the NAS was trying to legislate greatness rather than
competence. I'd agree that you can't legislate greatness, but you can
definitely legislate competence, so long as you set the bar at a reasonable
level.

~~~
hacklite
Examples? There are plenty of incompetent doctors, and that's about as high a
bar as there is.

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phaedrus
The author says it's a paradox that although management cannot tell the
difference between a good developer and a bad one, the good developers are the
ones ultimately held responsible for the product. It's no mystery: the
difference between a good developer and a bad one is that a good developer
already holds himself personally responsible for the quality of the product.

~~~
dmoney
What if s/he holds hirself personally responsible and the product still sucks?
I suppose these developers would weed themselves out eventually. But what if a
developer holds hirself personally responsible for the quality of the product,
thinks the product is good, but is wrong?

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KiwiNige
"And that, in turn, depends on end-users being good at their job."

Incompetence is Everywhere, not just Developers and Managers, EVERYWHERE. Big
companies, small companies... maybe 95% of the population is generally
incompetent. Every so often you get a glut of the 5%'ers and it's great.

Personally I think I’m one of the 95%'ers, but hopefully not too far away from
being a 5%'er.

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Hexstream
"As for me, I'm competent, and I know I am. (Yes, this is a "everyone says
that" moment.) I know that because when I build things, the final version
looks more-or-less exactly how I though it would when I started, and took
about the estimated amount of time."

He must not tackle very difficult problems...

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mynameishere
He jumped around a lot in that, but as for foreign workers, I strongly suspect
(without any real data available) that another dynamic is at play:

That is, sometimes programmers quit their jobs. And then an inevitable process
of bitter condemnation of his code begins. This is a function of distance.
Once your code leaves your protection, it's likely to be declared garbage.
Foreign workers suffer this automatically.

