Re:Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
by graphtrader on Sunday June 06, 2021 @09:14AM
(#27412935)
I have always assumed many programmers are terrible at sports in general so they turn programming into this weird sport of who can be the Cristiano Ronaldo of programming.
Re:Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
by Zababa on Sunday June 06, 2021 @09:34AM
(#27413037)
That's a pretty unfair way to put it. People that do "too much" to try to impress their collegues or themselves exist everywhere. You can see it in some people's code, you can see it in the way some people dress, you can see it in some powerpoint presentations, you can see it in sports.
I don't think this part is useful. If you're writing directly code for an application you don't usually need to be the best, and your errors can be handled by layers of supervision/QA. If you're writing internal libraries and tools, you need to be a better programmer. If you're in one of the let's say Rust compiler groups, you will need to really know your stuff. But even the Rust compiler has issues for newcommers that aren't too hard.
I don't think comparing software engineering to bus drivers and bridge architects leads to useful insight. I do agree with the rest of your post though. A part of my day job is to develop and maintain applications made by people that didn't/couldn't program "properly" (shadow IT). Everything more or less work and the end users are satisfied, but I often fear that one day something will depend on one of those applications. On the other hand taking the time to do everything "properly" would lead to a lot less experimentations and/or use a lot more resources. It's hard to find a good balance.