There are some _really_ bad programmers out there. Many are stuck in IT departments in non-technical companies, pounding out RPG, COBOL, BASIC, and other "maintenance" work that consists of writing reports. They take weeks doing it. It's a 9-5 job that they don't have to think about when they go home.
I sat in a kickoff meeting with a client's development staff. The staff had an average of eleven years of employment in the department. They were starting to define an SDLC for their organization and the topic of code reviews came up. One of the major points of contention for the day was the use of GOSUB over GOTO. (The pro-GOTO people were talking about a bug that smashed the stack, but didn't know it.)
It's safe to say these people are not reading "Hacker News", even in its current form, at 10pm. They read ESPN.com at work.
Even within this sort of environment, individual effectiveness follows the 1/10 to 10x distribution. There are developers who change one line of code, with a clear specification, and take entire facilities out of production for days. Others get in at 7am, leave at 7pm, and work on ripping out as much code as possible to create reusable modules of...BASIC. Most plod along in the middle.
There are some _really_ bad programmers out there. Many are stuck in IT departments in non-technical companies, pounding out RPG, COBOL, BASIC, and other "maintenance" work that consists of writing reports. They take weeks doing it. It's a 9-5 job that they don't have to think about when they go home.
I sat in a kickoff meeting with a client's development staff. The staff had an average of eleven years of employment in the department. They were starting to define an SDLC for their organization and the topic of code reviews came up. One of the major points of contention for the day was the use of GOSUB over GOTO. (The pro-GOTO people were talking about a bug that smashed the stack, but didn't know it.)
It's safe to say these people are not reading "Hacker News", even in its current form, at 10pm. They read ESPN.com at work.
Even within this sort of environment, individual effectiveness follows the 1/10 to 10x distribution. There are developers who change one line of code, with a clear specification, and take entire facilities out of production for days. Others get in at 7am, leave at 7pm, and work on ripping out as much code as possible to create reusable modules of...BASIC. Most plod along in the middle.