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Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

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Re: Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

#11

Post by venomsnake »

> Is one discipline better than the other? Is a front-end developer not a “real” developer if she can’t describe what a bubble sort is or does?

In that case - objectively yes - one of the disciplines is better than the other. If you know C and Haskell everything else is trivial in the language world. Also anyone that demands of you knowing about O(n^2) sorting algorithm is not a person you want to work on any serious task with. So she of case given should run away as fast as possible from that company.

From an old joel spolsky post:

I have never met anyone who can do Scheme, Haskell, and C pointers who can't pick up Java in two days, and create better Java code than people with five years of experience in Java

The coding ability is the least valuable you have. We live in the real world - there are no spherical cows in vacuum here. You must know what blocking script are and how to avoid them, you must know how the data gets from your server to the browser - (I had a case once where the connection was closed prematurely due to overwriting HTTP 1.1 header with HTTP 1.0 from one of the servers - ngnix I think - so content encoding chunked was ignored so the file was half read), you must be ready for lag spikes in any of the scripts you load, you must know how the VM manages memory, how the DOM behaves, some of the dark corners of javascript where the unindentified behaviors lurks. Or the counter-intuitive ones.

Elitism is saying - "you are not capable of learning that". Saying "you must learn that so I can give you my recognition" is not elitism. What the folks given in the article are saying is "Kid, you must know a lot more to be able to do your job properly".

Graduating coding academy teaches you how to code. It does not teach you how to be engineer or developer.

Edit: Just to be elitist jerk - If I want to torture someone on sorting I will say - i have a file with 1000000000 int16, sort it in O(n) while using less than 512K of RAM.

Re: Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

#12

Post by Amezarak »

> But they’re solving a very real and important problem, and they’ll get better at it.

Yes. The "very real and important problem" is not what we're supposed to think it is - diversity - but it is real nonetheless. The "very real and important problem" is that capital hates high labor costs, and needs to find a way to slow or stop the rise in developer salaries.

All these articles about the terrible, terrible shortage of developers, about the importance of diversity in tech, about the necessity of lifting immigration restrictions, about how we need need need more developers in software engineering programs right now, about how actually screw it, just more developers in boot camps would be good enough - it's fundamentally not about any of those things, it's about how capital can control labor costs. It's about how to make software developers a) cheap b) plentiful and c) interchangeable.

And now you understand why articles breathless about developer elitism and coding academies and articles that discuss ageism in tech are almost without exception disparate sets. Older developers ask (or are expected to ask) for more money.

This is no surprise; this kind of behavior was well-known and documented even as far back as Adam Smith. But it is always disappointing to see how much of the apologia is supported by tech workers themselves. Or at best, we accept the framing of the problem and then argue about whether developers are actually elitist or not, and about whether people who graduate from code academies are good developers.

Re: Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

#13

Post by varelse »

mycroft-holmes wrote: post #2

> According to a recent study by Course Report, 36 percent of academy attendees are female, and women who graduate from academies actually earn higher average salaries than men. Can we please put to rest that women can't make it in this industry?

Project this a decade into the future and I envision all sorts of talk-radioish belly-aching from middle-aged GamerGaters who pretty much did it to themselves by sticking strictly to the easy bits and building MVPs without ever diving deep and building something great.

I'm not quite sure why this is happening, but I have noticed the trend. Future Shock maybe?

Re: Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

#15

Post by dpweb »

Part of the elitism is just immaturity and childishness. It's a field dominated by younger people and with that comes some childish benavior. Not all young people, but overall you get more of it.

However, people do need to respect the craft.

The demand for skills is massive, and so now everyone should learn to code. You don't become an expert from taking a 6-week bootcamp. It's a profession. You study the field. It takes years to master.

For those who actually care about the craft, there's no condescension toward someone starting out - but let's not pretend the bootcamp grad is already deeply skilled.

Re: Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

#16

Post by lumberjack »

>Is a front-end developer not a “real” developer if she can’t describe what a bubble sort is or does?

Yes.

Being able to accomplish one specific thing in a field, does not make you skilled in that trade. It makes you skilled at doing that specific thing.

A farrier is not a blacksmith. A blacksmith would probably know how to forge a horseshoe but find it difficult to actually shoe the horse. They are not really in the same profession though their professions are related.

And software development is not my profession but if it were I'd be equally protective of it and I would not welcome any mass influx of newcomers to the labour pool. Why would I?

Re: Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

#17

Post by alextgordon »

> I remember being laughed at when I told more experienced colleagues in 2004 that the only programming language I knew was JavaScript. I wasn’t a “real” programmer yet, according to them, because I hadn’t learned how to write assembly code.

And they'd be right. You're not a real programmer until you understand how the machine functions. This is usually achieved by learning a low-level language like C, Pascal, Fortran, etc. Although I guess you could read a book on computer architecture instead.

Elitism is not the same as having basic standards. I wouldn't trust a doctor who didn't know where my elbow is, and I wouldn't trust a programmer who doesn't know what malloc() is.

Re: Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

#18

Post by HillaryBriss »

When a technical interview happens, two (of many) competing motivations arise within the programmer who interviews a candidate:

1. I don't want my company to hire someone smarter than I am -- eventually they'll make me look bad and I'll be relegated to uninteresting work or made redundant. (Also, that person will end up condescending to me and that's simply not allowed; I'm the only genius in the village...)

2. I don't want my company to hire someone dumber than I am -- we cannot work with some half-productive person whose work needs constant fixes/rewriting/maintenance -- don't waste this brilliant team's time. (Plus, what would we talk about at lunch with this kind of person -- old episodes of Little Britain? You must be joking.)

Now, maybe this is wrong, but it seems that situation #2 arises a lot more often than situation #1. It only looks like a "growing elitism problem" to some observers, but maybe the level of elitism is the same as always. Maybe what's happening is that a lot more applicants are encountering situation #2 than in previous years.

Re: Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

#19

Post by paulddraper »

This isn't unique to software. You'll find similar criticism of education institutions that offer quasi-substitutes for four years of education in a few weeks, with almost universally lower standards. E.g. Phoenix.

In the US there are stringent and often legally enforced requirements for doctors, lawyers, and engineers, that programmers do not have.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that there will be informal restraints to counteract the lack of formal ones. Hence, "elitism".

The problem with code academies is that they offer an experience at almost the cost of a formal education, but with a fraction of the benefit (necessarily so, due to their duration).

Next time you receive services from a professional (tax accountant, architect, dentist, auto mechanic, attorney, electrician), consider whether you would be comfortable if the duration of their training was one tenth of the industry norm.

Re: Software Developers’ Growing Elitism Problem

#20

Post by akiselev »

What a clickbait, provocative article with nothing beyond a single anecdote, not even a second one other than the generic "you've never written assembly so you're not a programmer" comment. Seriously has anyone heard a programmer say this in the last 10 years?

Elitism exists everywhere and I don't see how software development is any better or worse than the rest. We have an arrogant vocal minority just like everyone else, it just so happens they are the people for whom blogging and displaying their arrogance has a lower barrier to entry than for other groups.

》 Coding academies have opened new doors for people with a variety of backgrounds, many who couldn’t afford a more traditional four-year computer science degree, or may have been steered clear of a technical degree in college (or younger) due to societal pressures or family culture, just to name a couple.

BAM. 'nuff said. Why bring elitism into this?

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