Why most programmers are lousy
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Agreed. I’ve been involved in IT and software since I was 7 years old, and I love it and I can’t tell you the times I am asked what variables are really for, why a for loop is called a for loop, what’s an iterator, what’s the difference between an object and an associative array, what’ s a hash, why hashes? the list goes on and on and it’s ridiculous.
Comment by bryan — March 8, 2007 @ 4:49 pm
@bryan
Yeah, that’s particularly doomed to happen if your the most techie or savvy of your friends.
People just find so much easier to waste your time than just google for it.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 8, 2007 @ 4:52 pm
Further agreement here. The boom of 10-15 years ago is still affecting the industry; kids who witnessed that big IT Craze decided to go into Comp Sci/programming because of the perception that it was a lucrative career choice, with a lot of money and even a little bit of glamor in it; many smarter, less fad-driven young people were turned off and got into other careers. Fast forward to present day and that first crop of kids have since finished their degree and are now out in there trying to pretend to be programmers and BS their way through. Along the way I think they even ended up effecting a lowering of standards at any university CS departments, which is not going to help matters in the future. It’s a sad state of affairs for the growing company that needs to hire programmers and really can’t afford to take on ones that are dead weight. They get tons of applicants and have to figure out how to pick out the one in a hundred that’s actually worthwhile.
Comment by chuck — March 8, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
Wow, these are the same thoughts (and even some of the same examples) that I’ve been trying to put into words for quite a while.
100% agree!
Comment by Josh — March 8, 2007 @ 5:43 pm
I definitely agree with your observations. It’s sad to see so many clueless individuals in this field.
I just have one question… what’s SVN? (just kidding!)
Comment by JMC — March 8, 2007 @ 6:08 pm
Yep, years back I thought that programmers are really smart and very professional and you need to gain a lot of knowledge to become one. Then I got to a company working with few dozens other developers and I became enlightened. Most developers are really really bad. They suck big time. Actually almost all of them shouldn’t be developers at all.
Comment by karol — March 8, 2007 @ 6:13 pm
@karol
Ironically - if all of those bad programmers were to disappear, I’m certain that worldwide mean of productivity would be about the same as it is now. How sad is that?
Comment by whorapedia.com — March 8, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
Mmmm - I agree to a degree. See responses interspersed below:
1. Young people study Computer Science just because it’s a trend. — I think this is really not the case anymore. CS entrance rates (and Engineering across the board) are decreasing every year. I think the trend is over.
2. Young people study Computer Science because they wouldn’t know what else to do. — This hasn’t been my experience. I think that’s what many business majors do, but people who try to do this in CS often have a rude awakening at the math involved.
3. Young people study Computer Science because they think it’s a sure way of getting a job. — Maybe, but there’s not as much money in it as there once was, and I think they know it by now.
4. Many of today’s programmers, were doing nothing else than surfing the net or using Word till last year. — It’s possible. A friend of my wife’s once commented that she’d probably enjoy getting a CS degree - since she likes writing emails.
5. Many of today’s Computer Science students have no interest whatsoever in what they’re forcefully studying. — I totally agree here. I LOVE to program - but I HATED getting my CS degree. Why? Because I could care less how a microprocessor works, or MIPS, or what differentiates super-pipelining from multi-processing. For me, those are problems that other people can solve - I just want to CODE! Unfortunately, there was no “Software Engineering” curriculum at my university - so CS was the next closest thing.
6. A lot of programmers just don’t like to program. — I’d probably use something a little stronger. For example “A lot of programmers just don’t LOVE to program”. In my experience, a lot of the programmers I’ve worked with did it because it paid the bills, with no special interest or aversion to it.
7. A lot of programmers just don’t get it. Not even the easy things. — Agreed - as illustrated by the FizzBuzz phenomenon.
8. Basically all of the programmers, or wannabe programmers, mentioned above, are miles away from the technical community. — Maybe so.
Comment by Jim R. Wilson (jimbojw) — March 8, 2007 @ 6:45 pm
Posts like these are totally non-productive in the long run. Replace ‘programmer’ with ‘blacksmith’ and you are hearing a lament that has gone on for thousands of years.
“In my day, were stronger, better, smarter, all above average, etc. When we used punchcards, we had to be so much more clever….”
The real issue at hand is, how do we produce more and better programmers?
Comment by John — March 8, 2007 @ 7:10 pm
[…] This says it all March 8th, 2007 Salvatore Iovene » Why most programmers are lousy […]
Pingback by This says it all « More Ramblings from a Los Angeles Programmer — March 8, 2007 @ 7:29 pm
I agree.
Working with people who don’t have a passion about their work does suck.
but I think the sentiment applies to all forms of technical careers.
Comment by _Jon — March 8, 2007 @ 7:48 pm
@chuck
Indeed. Luckly, this trend is going to dim over the years, as it seems to be starting to.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 8, 2007 @ 8:36 pm
I think the fact these ‘developers’ can get hired is even more amazing than how much they overstate what they know.
It’s not just these programmers who are to blame. Companies should have people who know what they’re talking about do the interviewing.
Comment by Jens — March 8, 2007 @ 8:37 pm
@ Jim R. Wilson
Thanks for the insightful comment.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 8, 2007 @ 8:38 pm
@ Jens (comment #13)
Probably that’s just because in a lot of cases, the quality of code, and the happiness of the employees doesn’t really matter. Consider all the business around the simple statement of “Let’s keep the customer happy, and who cares if the code sucks”.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 8, 2007 @ 8:40 pm
I’d say there are those people who learn to code, the ones that aren’t interested in the “science” but mass producing software and getting payed. And there are those who learn computer science and/or to program.
I don’t really see the problem, the situation seems to me to be the same in most other areas.
One would be math, there are those who learn math to get a job, not really understanding it, and those who understand it.
Comment by Tilo — March 8, 2007 @ 9:38 pm
You make it sound like young people just don’t care. I really think that’s the wrong attitude to have and stereotyping a bunch of individuals like that is wrong. I’m not sure what encouraged you to write a blog of this nature, but I find it insulting.
I’m in my mid 20s and have a few years of programming experience under me. I’m not in it because all my friends program. I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it because I like solving problems and facing new challenges everyday. …and here I get stereotyped because of my age.
I know nothing about you, but I can make one educated guess. If you were to interview a 35 year old programmer and a 25 year old programmer, you wouldn’t even listen to what the 25 year old programmer has to say. You’d blow him off before the interview even started because you have this crazy idea in your head that all young people have no passion, no care to write good code, and probably assume they’ve never heard of a compiler before.
You said: “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).” This makes no sense. I know a lot of people around where I live that never received a computer till they were 15 or 16 years old. They’re now moving up the corporate ladder in their programming gig very fast - blowing people out of the water that have worked for the company over 10 to 15 years. I know a lot of people that had computers their whole life and still have no idea how to remove a virus from their Windows box.
You’d be amazed how many good young programmers are out there if you just opened your eyes a little more and stop getting distracted by script kiddies.
Blame it on the HR folks that actually interview these young people with no cares. A good programmer is a little odd on the outside and inside, but HR departments look for “normal” individuals. They only screw themselves and pollute the work force.
Comment by Dave — March 8, 2007 @ 9:44 pm
@ Tilo (comment #16)
I don’t know. To me it seems like programming requires more passion than a lot of other jobs, if you want to excel. It might be the same with math and other sciences, as you say, but since there are way much more programmers than mathemathicians, I’d say the problem is more serious in the IT field.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 8, 2007 @ 9:45 pm
@ Dave (comment #17)
Dear Dave,
I’m afraid you took this too personally. I wasn’t anywhere saying that “all young people, with no exception” suck, or whatever. Actually, should you have taken the time to find out more about me, you’d have found out that I’m right about your age.
When you complain about me saying that “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)”, you’re forgetting the “with the due exceptions” part.
Sure I believe very well that you know some 15-year-old phaenomena, and so do I. This just proes that starting young does actually help (probably just likewise any other field).
Furthermore, the whole post was about the subset of young CS students who do actually not care, as a matter of fact, because that’s what I hear from their own words.
I’m happy that you enjoy your IT job, and so do I, being and employee myself, but you (or me) don’t prove that the people I was talking about exist. I wasn’t stereotyping by age, and you can consider a proof of that the fact that I’m the same age.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 8, 2007 @ 9:56 pm
I think what you’re trying to say is programmers who have a life other than programming tend to be bad programmers.
Comment by jc — March 8, 2007 @ 10:00 pm
@ jc (comment #20)
I think that you’re actually the one who says that being good programmers being lacking a life outside a computer.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 8, 2007 @ 10:02 pm
Perhaps you should find better friends or coworkers if they all suck?
If you constantly look around and you’re the smartest guy in the room that probably means one of two things: a) you’re delusional or b) you set your sights too low in accepting where you currently are.
Comment by BlogReader — March 8, 2007 @ 10:41 pm
@ BlogReader (comment #22)
Or then maybe:
c) where I work, all of that doesn’t apply, because everyone’s so goddam good and I’m not even farly the smartest guy.
In other word, I’m not necessarily speaking of what’s happening to me right now and right here.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 8, 2007 @ 10:45 pm
@Salva 23:
so you’re just being a curmudgeon complaining about the kids of today and your only data point are the people that graduated in your college class? Your other data point disproves your thesis as well.
Now I’m agreeing with the “blacksmith” comment above.
Comment by BlogReader — March 8, 2007 @ 10:54 pm
@ BlogReader (comment #24)
My data are the people that graduate in my college class, the people I worked with in the past, the people I get to talk to on usenet or IRC.
Nowhere I stated I had any rock solid data, nor researches whatsoever.
I happen to work in a kinda leet place (well at least I like it very much and it’s leet to me), so it’s pretty much an exception.
Also see the post from Jeff Atwood that I linked in the article.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 8, 2007 @ 10:59 pm
[…] Why most programmers are lousy - Salvatore Iovene […]
Pingback by Trip Hop Clan » Blog Archive » Why most programmers are lousy — March 9, 2007 @ 1:11 am
I might agree that taking mathematics as an example was a bad idea, but in a way it did make my point more clear.
As software becomes more and more mass produced, and less and less defined as individual packed solutions, we’ll need coders to write the code (”monkey coders”). These people, from the little experience I have, aren’t interested in advancing the programming subject as a science, art or craft, which ever term you like the better.
This could give the more “traditional” hackers the chance to strengthen their role as a researcher and thus furthering the subject as a wholeand make what, at least I, find really interesting furthering the subject as a whole.
What I’m really sick of is programming “wannabes” talking about the by them so called “non-realworld” research as not helping them deliver their software to their oh so precious customers.
What you are suggesting might be true, although as long as they don’t make it harder for me to enjoy the subject, which most of the time they don’t, I just don’t care.
One way in which this does bother me is if university research and education gets dumbed down because of it.
Comment by Tilo — March 9, 2007 @ 2:49 am
Well, I think you don’t have to overestimate programming. There is a lot more about building systems than just programming.
You’re right that there are a lot of really bad applications out there and I was one of those doomed who had to maintain one. But the reason for this is that software engineering as a discipline is decades behind other engineering disciplines. Having a bunch the most talented programmers doesn’t automaticly lead to success(and would also be boring).
From my point of view, software engineering is far to less interdisciplinary. And if your working with carrer changers in a project, their skill level in programming might not be the best. But you have a great chance of getting inspired, even in programming, by the questions they ask. And the questions they ask are specific to their scientific education.
I’m currently engaged in Lean Management and what we can learn from Lean Management for software engineering. And i would look forward to working in a project with someone who has a lot of experience in this area even if he’s not the most talented programmer.
Comment by Brazzo — March 9, 2007 @ 11:03 am
Interesting; a lot of truth to this. Here are a couple other perspectives.
Eli Whitney and Frederic Taylor:
(building a bit off the “blacksmith” comment)
An interesting aspect of the long war (or love/hate relationship) between labor and management since the rise of the factory system is management’s continual quest to de-skill labor and make the majority of workers interchangeable parts. Being a “mechanic” early in the Industrial Age was a complex, intellectual job, because everything was cut-and-try and one-of-a-kind. “Mechanics Halls” in many cities were basically technical schools where relatively smart people came to learn the science and technology of a skilled profession.
Eli Whitney in the 1800s invented interchangeable parts, turning production into a repeatable scientific process instead of an art. Then Frederic Taylor’s “time and motion studies” in the early 1900s applied the same approach to people. (Google “Taylorization” if you want the bolshie view of this.) Industrial engineers could look in a handbook and specify what job each worker on the production line should do, exactly how they should do it, and how fast. Any average human could learn a factory job quickly. In the near future, managers expected, machines would do it even more quickly. Life was good for them; boring and uncertain for the interchangeable workers.
In many cases this approach makes sense. Factories’ mass production blew workshops out of the water — they could mobilize essentially the entire adult population of a country (not always just adults) to produce goods in unimaginable quantities. For some perspective, the first big drop in European death rates since medieval times happened when the English textile mills made clothing cheap enough that common people could change their underwear and stop coexisting with lice and fleas.
Every job at McDonalds is supposed to be learnable in what — 15 minutes? That’s OK; if I’m in a hurry, I can count on a clean restaurant and hot food that won’t disappoint me. However I’m living in Paris now, where the cooks and bakers take quite a bit more than 15 minutes to learn their trade. There’s no comparison in the results!
It turns out that the human-as-robot-wannabe model was flawed even in factories. Japanese factories where workers were allowed and expected to think — lean production — eventually blew the General Motors workers-are-expendable-cattle approach out of the water even for jobs as simple bolting parts on auto bodies.
SW engineering, Domain Engineering, and End-User Programming:
There has been a great effort to industrialize programming, too. Again, there are many good features, and it’s a field I’m interested in. Building a large program requires a structured approach. Language design, libraries, programming frameworks and IDEs can and should incorporate as much existing human knowledge as possible — computer science, domain knowledge, solid pre-written code and human interface principles. (Check out Thomas Greene’s “Cognitive Dimensions of Notations” for some of the latter — I think of how programming tools fail to use them on a daily basis!)
On the one hand, this can allow people who aren’t great programmers — or even programmers at all — to do programming that meets a lot of practical needs. There are hundreds of millions of businesses in the world; they have needs that can’t be met with a few standard mega-programs, and they can’t all afford to hire Linus Torvalds to do something brilliant for them. They need ordinary programmers who can make computers do what they need. The analogy isn’t perfect (factory workers all did the same job, while semi-programmers basically customize), but there is a place for people who aren’t brilliant thinkers in our profession. Whether it should be called “Computer Science” is a good question — there’s much less science programmers need to know than physicists or biologists (although you can argue that biology is developing a large factory component, too.)
To sum up a rambling post: yes, if you are doing serious, new work, you need people who are great programmers. Yes, you need to winnow out a lot of chaff. If you are doing ordinary programming, you need to winnow out a lot of chaff, too. You need dependable people who understand the kind of programming they will need to do, who have a work ethic, who aren’t trying to con you, and who understand a significant amount of computer science at an applied level. Just like you want a carpenter or car mechanic who knows his trade but not necessarily statics or thermodynamics, they need to understand a little about algorithm complexity so they don’t write a program that will crawl on more data; a lot more software engineering so their programs can be understood and play nice with other components, and a lot of specifics about the programming you really need them to do.
Comment by Howie Goodell — March 9, 2007 @ 7:42 pm
@ Howie Goodell (comment #29)
Howie, thanks for the really interesting comment. Very good ideas, there.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 9, 2007 @ 8:04 pm
[…] After claiming that most programmers just can’t program, and actually addressing most of the problems to the lack of passion of people who decide to start a career as a programmer, I would also like to express my point of view on a tightly related subject: what can be done to improve the situation? The problem that I was trying to bring up in the spotlights, is that a lot of people just start (or wish to start) a career in the IT for no particular reasons. Those are the ones who don’t love and don’t loathe programming, and they just see it as something that pays their bills. Well, maybe the first question that I should address, actually is: why is this bad? Sure there are so many jobs which don’t require passion at all, and people just do them because a job is just a job, and don’t really care. In my opinion, being a programmer is different. […]
Pingback by Salvatore Iovene » How to improve the quality of programmers — March 9, 2007 @ 10:25 pm
“Young people study Computer Science because they wouldn’t know what else to do.”
Comment by raveman — March 10, 2007 @ 1:34 am
lol, my comment was auto-cut
but maybe that is better
Comment by raveman — March 10, 2007 @ 1:35 am
are this great guru blog is open for sql injection? or my comment was too long?:>
Comment by raveman — March 10, 2007 @ 1:36 am
It is all about education. The quality and depth of education for the average person has steadily declined for the past 100 years. In America, the last 40-50 years have are especially noticeable. Most Americans, educated in America or not, know only a tiny subset of English.
However, the critical ramification of educational deficiency is that people cannot think anymore. Obviously without strong thinking skills, mastery of software development will be next to impossible.
In a sea of ignorance and non-thinkers, one would think that smart people would be in demand, but they are not. The network effects of ignorance and mental incapacity are powerful (think Metcalfe’s Law). So powerful that they will prevent most smart people from being hired. So when you are in a place that is populated with hordes of bad programmers, don’t be surprised. That is the wave of the future.
The basic fact of today’s software world is that dumb ignorant people hire dumb ignorant people. If you want a job, remember that in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man… pretends he is blind too.
Which brings me to the point of this ramble about dumb people and jobs. If you are smart, Darwin is against you today. You have to use your intelligence to adapt, meaning learn how to pretend you are dumb. Otherwise you, the smart programmer, have no future.
Comment by info — March 10, 2007 @ 2:37 pm
response to comment #22:
Have you heard the old joke that goes something like “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t all out to get me” ?
One of my problems is that I usually *am* the best in the room. And that’s sad, because I’m really not that great. It’s a burden, mostly because there’s nobody to challenge me, to ask questions of, to look up to. Thank goodness for the Internet!
If you live in an area (like I do) that has a high dropout rate, a low college rate, a high poverty rate, the company you work for will probably take any programmer they can find (because not that many live around here). I’m glad for the opportunity to work here, because it’s better than teaching high school, and it has given me good experience in refactoring and redesigning poor code, and handling customers. But I’m equally glad I’m moving to a better place in a few months. Maybe then, when I look around the room, I’ll actually have people I can learn from.
My solution: go back to school (so recruiters will notice me), and get hired by a company where I will find people better than me to work with.
Something (average) people tend to forget, is that being “smart” (however you define it) can be a disadvantage, or even an outright disability.
Comment by swan — March 13, 2007 @ 4:34 pm
@ swan // comment #35
Great response, swan. That’s so darn true. I also used to be the best in the room, so I moved to a better place with better people, from whom I have a lot to learn. And guess what? I’m getting better too, of course.
Comment by Salvatore Iovene — March 14, 2007 @ 11:53 am
1. It also depends on what you want to do: I know a lot of programmers who consider programming just a step in their careers. So, for example, they program from 25 to 32, then the same company they work for take them to a “higher” career level for which programming skills are not directly required, they pay more for this job (project management or so) and their lives get (maybe) less complicated or complicated in a different way;
2. Code, after all, is not really art and very often it gets transformed in very repetitive tasks: you have “design patterns” because there are things you do a lot of times. Here we’re talking about “vision” too and some companies maybe believe a programmer is just like a factory worker;
3. Programming -after the wide spread of the Internet- is not only a matter of computer scientists but many other fields have been reached: communication, advertising, etc. So, today you can find people with no degree or with “humanities” degree speaking of data structures they met thanks to a computer passion (we live in a post-commodore64 era, not at the first mainframe time): I’m sure they don’t compare themselves to c++ developers but very few c++ developers with pedigree [
] would like to program balls moving on users’s screen, avatar chats, simple PHP/MySQL websites, things where “robustness” is not required and so on. This is to say that not all programming is about low level, bits, security, etc. Programming is today many things and you can meet an engineer totally uninterested in programming (but very interested in show its title and in making money by saying he is an engineer) and a curious person coming from other experiences totally attracted by programming things.
Comment by briga — February 15, 2008 @ 1:20 pm
2. Young people study Computer Science because they wouldn’t know what else to do. — This is the reason why I studied computer science but I am good at my job (I think!). On the other hand, most of the guys at my company, love writing code but they suck at it.
3. Young people study Computer Science because they think it’s a sure way of getting a job. — To my detriment, I found that it took me almost a year to find my first real programming job. (I live in the UK).
——
The reason why programmers suck has very little to do with the eight points listed above.
The programmers at my company seem to greatly enjoy programming but they get their satisfaction from seeing the results rather than writing concise, elegant code.
I, on the other hand, take pride in writing concise code, refactor other’s crap code, give obvious variable names, make it fast etc.
——
A crap programmer wants to see the results fast; that gives him a buzz. In contrast, a good programmer cares about the beauty and conciseness of the code.
A good programmer is a bit like a mathematician in that he cares about the beauty of the ideas not about finding a solution quickly.
Comment by Rafeeq Jamal — November 21, 2008 @ 12:06 am