Re:Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
by Bartweiss on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @09:59AM
(#12589603)
There's that XKCD about asking how novice users solve computer problems. "I save the video to iCloud, then copy the url into this video downloader, then put the download into this transcription site, then upload that to..."
I think this is a big chunk of explaining how bad programming goes, too. It's not "too incompetent to build a thing", it's "incompetent enough that everything runs on voodoo and evil".
I've worked with people in the past who know just enough to hack together a front end on top of a simple database, but who would completely fall apart when presented with anything more complex than that. These are the sort of people who when asked to build an internationalised website "solve" the problem by copying an entire PHP application into directories called "english" and "german" and then proceed to change the text in the German version.