RE: What is the most absurd error message a program you have made was outputting?
June 13, 2023 at 2:23 pm
(June 12, 2023 at 10:12 pm)Jackalope Wrote: Wake me up when someone is willing to pay for your work on an ongoing basis.
I am quite sure the vast majority of the 3rd-year computer science students at my university (maybe including me) would, if hired, generate negative value to the team. Not zero, negative. Universities teach zilch soft skills and they teach almost no hard skills that are actually relevant to what an average programmer actually does.
I have read somewhere, and accepted it as a valid thought, that the worst types of programmers in a team are those who, when their team runs into a technical problem, say "We have this technical problem only because we did not follow the academic standards of programming, that are object-oriented and/or functional programming. Had we followed the academic rules of programming, we would not have this problem.". Saying that is very insulting and also usually false. Yet, universities create exactly this type of programmers.
Programmers need to understand that software engineers are, while not quite in the position of medieval physicians, not very far from it. The fact that you have a basic idea of how software works (and nobody fully understands the software running on modern computers) in no way means you know how to fix it. Any more than doctors at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic knew how to treat COVID-19 patients: it was evidence-free zone, in spite of all the knowledge we today have about human body and about virology. And suggesting technical problems would disappear if only we rigorously followed academic rules of programming is only slightly less absurd than suggesting that George Washington would have survived bacterial epiglottitis had only few more drops of blood been taken from his body.
