I’ve been in the IT field long enough to get to know many programmers, both experienced and just wannabies. During this time, I’ve realized that most of them are just bad programmers, simply said. I find myself agreeing with a brilliant post by Jeff Atwood, which alleges that programmers can’t program. What are the reasons for this? Many. Probably, IMHO, the main fault has to be addressed to the lousy education that people receive. But then again, the ability of giving education remains directly proportional to the ability of getting it, and where I see people complaining about low quality of education in University, I also see students with no interest in learning. Let’s see some of the reasons why programmers can’t really program.
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Young people study Computer Science just because it’s a trend. It sounds almost unbelievable to me, but I must admit it’s mostly true. The vast majority of my old University mates just applied to the Computer Science department because… well: everybody was doing so. They followed the rest of the sheep.
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Young people study Computer Science because they wouldn’t know what else to do. That’s really another strong source of applications to Computer Science. A lot of young people in their teenage years just don’t know what they want to do as grownups. Computer Science still seems to be a good career opportunity, so they just go for it.
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Young people study Computer Science because they think it’s a sure way of getting a job. 10-something years ago there was a big boom, and if you just knew some HTML, were thought to be a computer guru. These types of belief mark a deep footprint on popular sayings, hence the wave of people applying to Computer Science just because they can work, is still there.
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Many of today’s programmers, were doing nothing else than surfing the net or using Word till last year. Especially in small and vertical based markets, improvisation just rules. People learn something, and literally throw themselves on the field. Drawbacks for quality of their work are simply inevitable. This is not only a group of illiterate people that just jumped in to catch the big wave (what big wave, nowadays?), but people with no passion whatsoever. In other words, I don’t think it’s possible, nowadays, to become a great programmer if you didn’t start getting some interest in the field when you were very young, say about 10 years old (with the due exceptions, of course).
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Many of today’s Computer Science students have no interest whatsoever in what they’re forcefully studying. Just put together the previous items in this list and what do you get? A bunch of people who just don’t care, who want to get their piece of paper (the degree) as soon as possible, and have absolutely no passion in what they learn. That’s the worst. I strongly believe that programming is not just a job like many others, but you need passion to get best at it.
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A lot of programmers just don’t like to program. This goes for 100% of my ex University mates! Think of that: 100%. Of course it’s not the whole world but it makes a small statistics.
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A lot of programmers just don’t get it. Not even the easy things. I was asked, few weeks ago, by a friend of mine who’s been studying Computer Science for now 4 years, what the difference is between a
privateandprotectedmethod in Java. Apparently reading the books isn’t enough anymore, nowadays. Another guy asked me: “I’ve studied pointers in C, and I think I understood them. Still I can’t find any use for them… are they really used at all?”. -
Basically all of the programmers, or wannabe programmers, mentioned above, are miles away from the technical community. These people will totally ignore the existence of:
- Slashdot and similar
- RSS
- Usenet
- IRC (“Is that like MSN?”)
- SVN and similar
As you can see, a really strong point, in my opinion, is the lack of care and passion for the subject of programming itself. Lousy programmers are bound to program to take a wage home; good ones are bound to program for the sake of programming itself. Or course you can do that but still miss to be a good programmer, but all falls down to numbers.