[LRUG] Code samples: To do or not to do

[Murray Steele]

2009/4/7 Vahagn Hayrapetyan <vahagnh at gmail.com>

> Very interesting that in the UK, there's this strictly industrial attitude
> towards computer people, while the country has been at the forefront of the
> digital revolution in the 20th century. Actually, computing came primarily
> from England. The highest CompSci award is the Turing award (again, a Brit).
> Many top researchers are from the UK (Tony Hoare, et al). I think it was E.
> Dijkstra who once said that "the ultimate goal of all Computer Science is
> the program", ie there should be very little "prestige gap" between a brainy
> researcher and a coder. Yet, in the commercial UK, programmers are (*
> mainly*) viewed as these low-level digital bureacrats.
>

The problem is that I'd say the majority of programmers literally do. not.
give. a. fuck. about computer science, software craftsmanship, development
methodologies; essentially everything and anything that we strive towards to
make our chosen profession any good.  I'd go one step further and say that
the majority of development teams, software houses, and other collections of
programmers in employment also don't care about it, because they don't have
technical leaders that do.

This creates a problem for those of us that do care about these things.
When we start talking about them when we already work somewhere we likely
get blank stares and our ideas ignored, or pushed aside in the name of
"speed" or "just do it this way this once 'cos the client is on the phone".
When we talk about them when being interviewed we get blank stares and
passed over in favour of some other drone who won't come in and change
everything and frighten the rest of the drones.

These are the people we are mostly trying to convince when recruiters ask
for our CVs and our "2-3 lines of code".  It's not the recruiters, they're
just responding to the requests of their clients.  If we're lucky, the
recruiters will also be representing sensible companies with people like
Paul driving their recruitment process (for what it's worth, our process to
that which Paul describes).

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and murder a unicorn, as I'm not sure
I've increased the cynicism in the world enough today.

Muz
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20090407/ee675dfc/attachment-0003.html>