Re: [LUG] Re: Perl

[Julian Hall <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anton Channing wrote:

> I find computing CVs frustrating. A bad progammer
>
> can learn every feature of a language by heart and
> recite them to a clueless manager/interviewer and
> sound impressive, but still be a bad programmer.
>  
Managers, at least in my experience, are almost always clueless of what 
technical people under them do.

That takes me to an old question of "Which is better to employ, a person 
with a bit of paper that says back when he was in 
school/college/university he *could* do X Y or Z, or the person without 
the paper who sits down and *proves* he can?"  Regrettably my 
ex-employer picked the one with the paper and BS interview technique 
every time.  Buttt we won't go there :)  The problem is Managers who try 
to tell Technical people how to do their jobs (everyone from programmers 
to network engineers inclusive, and not only IT technical people 
either).  This example you'll love:

Manager negotiates a contract with a client for them to outsource 
callcentre ISP technical support to him.  As a condition of the contract 
he agrees to "90% first time fix" and also that if his team fail to hit 
this three months in a row that a hefty fine will be paid to the client.

Hmm.

10 customers:

1.  Doesn't know the error message
2.  Calls from work, so not at PC
3.  Only one phone line, rings off to check it
4.  Hasn't checked today "but it didn't work last night".

If you're lucky you'll hit 60%.

Needless to say that announcement was met with a) disbelief b) derision 
c) annoyance; by all technicians concerned.  Oh yes, he then followed 
this up by handing us the hospital pass of supporting our callers with 
removing viruses - and there I was thinking Symantec etc did that.. 
silly me.

90% first time fix?  What's that?

> A good programmer on the other hand, may not
> know by heart every feature of a language, but
> can easily look up what they need in a reference,
> learn a new language without too much effort.
>  
A good programmer IMHO, as will a good *anything*, knows the structures 
and logic of the subject, a lot but not all of the details, but knows 
where to find what he/she wants and how to package the end product in a 
neat presentable *efficient* manner.  A bad programmer will know the ins 
and outs of a cat's backside about the subject and packages the required 
product in such a convoluted way that the manager finds to their cost 
that they *have* to keep the idiot on because only he/she can make head 
or tail of the code!

Simple network related example of this principle:

Friend of mine called in by a taxi firm with two computers networked 
that wouldn't talk to each other.  He got there and saw:

2 PCs
A router
A hub
Several reels of cable (evidently the muppet who set this circus up 
thought more was better)

They'd been paying the idiot £50 per hour.  My friend ripped it all out, 
replaced it with one CAT5 crossover and it worked first time.  It's 
worked ever since.

Point being, bad practise can make the person indispensable and 
sometimes they *know* it.

> The principles of PHP are pretty much the same
> as ASP.
I really do need to start getting my head around PHP, and ASP for that 
matter :)

>  And the way I've started structuring my
> code
>  
Sounds in principle how I structure websites.  Mine always have separate 
folders for graphics, html files etc and relational links, so if I move 
any I don't have to fanny about changing links.

> I'm in a temporary contract at the moment, and
> its a haven of bad practise.  Spaghetti code, no
> code reuse, pathetic security, badly cut and pasted
> html.
Sounds like a lot of programmers these days.  My Windows folder 
currently takes up 2.57Gb of diskspace.  I wouldn't know where to begin 
to write something that badly that it takes up over 2.5Gb doing 
something that Windows 98 fitted comfortably into 250Mb!!  Maybe they 
left all the REMs in? ;)  Granted I wouldn't know where to start writing 
an OS anyway, but the point is that the basic function (giving the user 
a GUI with which to interface with the hardware) hasn't changed in the 
period between the two and yet XP takes up 10 times more space.  It 
could be argued that XP has more bells and whistles than 98.  It could 
also be argued that if MS wrote efficient code they could make it a heck 
of a lot smaller - assuming Intel weren't paying them to keep it big so 
they can sell bigger better faster PCs that is.

Oops I forgot <conspiracy_theory> </conspiracy_theory> :)

Kind regards,

Julian

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