SoylentNews

Cowboy Engineers in the Software Industry

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 02 2014, @11:59PM   
from the was-it-much-harder-in-my-day? dept.

shabadoo writes:

"Will software engineering always be a cowboy's game? Or is it just a case of when you're a passionate expert the pimples stand out more clearly. This guy has clearly had enough. His vents are amusing, but also raise some good points about the state of the industry."

• Re:Licensing (Score: 5, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday March 03 2014, @02:41AM

  by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Monday March 03 2014, @02:41AM (#9881) Homepage

  Experience is much more useful than that piece of paper alone.

  If anything, the author should rant about companies hiring inexperienced people because they think it's gonna be cheaper than the oodles of lost productivity and handholding fuckin' noobs need. While we're on that topic, I'm going to rant about my employer who does just that because turnover is high and there's a lot of tribal knowledge in an already-niche field. Their logic is if they hire 2 noobs that can both kinda almost do the job of one expensive experienced person, they'll hire them just to have knowledge turnover in the inevitable occurrence of one of them leaving. That also means that the company hates from promoting from within, because why promote somebody if they're gonna leave anyway? Truly a vicious cycle that has already fucked the company.

  I am in the process of getting a bachelor's degree in Computer Information Systems (as opposed to Computer Science), one of the fields the author would malign in the summary, because it's the same computer science core with some I.T. and business thrown in. I already have experience writing code for companies, and a few of my programs are already deployed within my company. The only reason why I'm not a programmer by title is because my company requires bachelor's degrees for it. Why should anybody be forced to take Calculus 5 and Quantum Physics to write code that will be 90% basic algebra and maybe a little statistics or matrix operations?

  As for complexity theory, working through that is just algebra, in the real world you don't need to use set theory for anything.

  Also note: Sure, some programmers implement complex simulations or algorithms which do heavily rely on upper-level math, but the majority do not. What I wrote above applies to the average programming situation.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+3
  Interesting=3, Total=3
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5