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from the there-are-still-some-of-us-left dept.
Over at ACM Yegor Bugayenko writes:
In the 1970s, when Microsoft and Apple were founded, programming was an art only a limited group of dedicated enthusiasts actually knew how to perform properly. CPUs were rather slow, personal computers had a very limited amount of memory, and monitors were lo-res. To create something decent, a programmer had to fight against actual hardware limitations.
In order to win in this war, programmers had to be both trained and talented in computer science, a science that was at that time mostly about algorithms and data structures.
[...] Most programmers were calling themselves "hackers," even though in the early 1980s this word, according to Steven Levy's book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, "had acquired a specific and negative connotation." Since the 1990s, this label has become "a shibboleth that identifies one as a member of the tribe," as linguist Geoff Nunberg pointed out.
[...] it would appear that the skills required of professional and successful programmers are drastically different from the ones needed back in the 1990s. The profession now requires less mathematics and algorithms and instead emphasizes more skills under the umbrella term "sociotech." Susan Long illustrates in her book Socioanalytic Methods: Discovering the Hidden in Organizations and Social Systems that the term "sociotechnical systems" was coined by Eric Trist et al. in the World War II era based on their work with English coal miners at the Tavistock Institute in London. The term now seems more suitable to the new skills and techniques modern programmers need.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by lgsoynews on Saturday April 28 2018, @05:32PM (11 children)
You are wrong on so many levels...
Ok, let's summarize the fundamental issue: computers projects -in the broadest sense- have become a LOT more complex than "back in the day". The number of tools, languages, has grown by several orders of magnitude (compare an Atari 2600 to the latest PS4 or Xbox). Expectations have ALSO grown orders of magnitude, just look at the GUIs compared to what we had in the 80s...
Nowadays, projects are MUCH more complex, involve much more layers of abstraction and the customers/users ask A LOT MORE.
Which leads me to an fundamental issue: programming is NOT about technical knowledge, it's about SOLVING PROBLEMS. Using your technical knowledge is meaningless if you cannot understand what the users want, that is communication is MUCH more important than the tech skills (of course, I don't mean those are not vital as well), because no matter how good you are, if you program a chess game while I wanted a GO game, what you have done is USELESS! And that's a problem that I've REALLY seen with my customers, you almost have to put them "to the question" to have them say what they really want, it's a HUGE fight because they change their minds every 5 minutes, I have plenty of horror stories because of that.
So your jab at some mythical "rainbow-haired freaks" falls flat on its head. Just because some people (including managers & PM) are STUPID does not change the point that soft skills are VITAL including for the programmers.
A really GOOD programmer is someone who is good both in programming (in the broadest sense) & in communication.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @05:53PM (7 children)
If the customer can't provide a final spec then you should refuse to start work. You wouldn't start constructing a house without a final, approved set of plans.
No, that's a good employee for you. It says nothing about the talent of an individual that can lock themselves away for 6 months and churn out a codebase that an organisation would be incapable of producing in years.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by lgsoynews on Saturday April 28 2018, @07:57PM (5 children)
Excuse me, but I work in the REAL world, where things are not that easy and B&W. Even when there is a spec (most of the time), the customer wants SOME flexibility, and it's difficult to say NO to everything, you HAVE to show some degree of flexibility.
In addition to that, when you are only a contractor working inside a team at some company, they can change things and you don't have much to say, even when YOU KNOW it's B.S. and a bad organization, you have no choice.
And the same code base will be unmaintainable because NOBODY ELSE will know what the "genius" has done. And you don't answer the REAL problem: YOU CANNOT STAY 6 MONTHS alone doing work on a project, that's NOT how it works in the real world, or on big projects (I've worked on telecom projects with hundreds of millions euros of budget).
Seriously, I'm sick of that "talent" B.S. that Silicon Valley's types spout all of the time. Really good workers are open to communication and work as a TEAM. Technical expertise is important -of course- but comes second. I HAVE met some "geniuses" that would churn out mounts of buffalo excrement with no consideration for documentation, maintenance, evolution, code readability, etc. You know what happened? We threw away their "contribution" because it was USELESS. Maybe I'm not as fast, but what I do (and many of my coworkers) is a solid job, reasonably well designed, with an adequate documentation (low & high level), code comments, test suites and knowledge spread to several people (because I like my holidays and I won't be here forever). And in the end, what my team and myself have done works fairly well. It's not as good as I'd like, but it's reliable and works fine. And our customers are happy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @09:30PM (3 children)
You're excused. If you've done this for any length of time, you've seen projects collapse because the customer decides to make wide ranging, fundamental changes. As an independent contractor you could not allow this because blame would be levelled at you.
Never happened. [wikipedia.org] Nothing good ever came of it. [folklore.org]
Really? [businessinsider.com]
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Sunday April 29 2018, @09:21AM (2 children)
Ok, I see that you're an expert at twisting words and changing their obvious meaning by taking them out of context.
Given that you are just trolling, I'll stop arguing, it's not worth my time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @11:37AM (1 child)
I wasn't trolling. If you want an example from the telecoms world, review the story of the failure of multics and subsequent creation of unix. Review also Brooks Law [wikipedia.org] and Price's Law [amarketplaceofideas.com]
(Score: 1) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday April 30 2018, @10:18PM
I had an old friend at NASA who said that they had done an internal study that put a ratio of 30:1 of geniuses who did the heavy creative work to their support. Not to say that the support was unnecessary.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday April 28 2018, @10:38PM
That's just straight-up nonsense.
Maintainability may, or may not, be present. That's down to how said programmer went about their work. But being a loner / genius doing this kind of work doesn't mean they went one way or another at all. It's completely a separate issue.
Knowing how to write clear, maintainable, well-documented code (and user instructions) are unique skills in and of themselves. Some who can code have one or both, some don't. Period.
The moment you try to gather everyone into the same basket, you're almost certain to have made a huge error. People are different. Programmers are different. Skillsets are different.
</rant>
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @08:44PM
I think you've been popping a few too many reds bud, best dial it back before you slip over the edge.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by loonycyborg on Saturday April 28 2018, @10:20PM (2 children)
Communication skills always were always important and their importance didn't change. In my experience people who complain about poor communication skills among hackers are drama queens and concern trolls. This article basically merely implies that those non-contributors should be treated equally to people who do the real job. This goes against principles of meritocracy, something that always captivated me most about old hacker culture. Any complex project always requires a lot of coordination, regardless of which technology it uses. And you absolutely failed to prove that things are MUCH more complex now. It's basically appeal to ignorance, hoping that people will just buy it without much thought.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @12:03AM (1 child)
Not to mention, the logic is completely absurd. "Programs are MUCH more complex, we need less skilled people to program them!" I mean really, WTF?
You still need at least 1-2 people that actually are capable of understanding what you are doing or it'll all go to shit.
Yes, ideally they are also good teamplayers because you need a team, but if not the rest of the team can probably do the extra effort to work with them anyway.
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Sunday April 29 2018, @09:18AM
That's NOT AT ALL what I wrote, please don't put invented words in my mouth. You took the beginning of a sentence and invented the 2d part!
I clearly wrote that we need communication FIRST but ALSO tech skills.