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Hordes Of Novices

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Re: Hordes Of Novices

#51

Post by tedks »

shittyanalogy wrote: post #45
noonespecial wrote: post #24

If one doctor can transplant a heart in ten hours, can ten nurses transplant that heart in one hour? Can a hundred nursing assistants transplant that heart in six minutes? Can six hundred hospital receptionists transplant that heart in one minute? The real question is: Could the doctor do the transplant without any nurses? Could the nurses help the doctor without the receptionists?

Ironically your argument fails as it depends entirely on skill level. A highly skilled surgeon could perform emergency surgery without standard resources, and you could run an emergency hospital without receptionists. Let's not get distracted by shitty analogys.

Would a hospital staffed only by highly skilled surgeons constantly performing unassisted emergency surgery economically out-compete a hospital with nurses and receptionists?

Re: Hordes Of Novices

#52

Post by strommen »

robin2 wrote: post #35
noonespecial wrote: post #24

If one doctor can transplant a heart in ten hours, can ten nurses transplant that heart in one hour? Can a hundred nursing assistants transplant that heart in six minutes? Can six hundred hospital receptionists transplant that heart in one minute? The real question is: Could the doctor do the transplant without any nurses? Could the nurses help the doctor without the receptionists?

If I wanted to be pedantic I'd say that you'd really want a heart transplant done by a surgeon, not a doctor... That said, I think the real questions is: who is Robert Martin, self-described uber-hacker, that his opinions should be taken so seriously? What has he written?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=robert+martin

Re: Hordes Of Novices

#53

Post by shittyanalogy »

tedks wrote: post #51
shittyanalogy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically your argument fails as it depends entirely on skill level. A highly skilled surgeon could perform emergency surgery without standard resources, and you could run an emergency hospital without receptionists. Let's not get distracted by shitty analogys.

Would a hospital staffed only by highly skilled surgeons constantly performing unassisted emergency surgery economically out-compete a hospital with nurses and receptionists?

I'm more commenting on the effectiveness of arguing through shitty analogy. There's no logical reason to imagine any of this let alone compare it to the programming industry. It breeds disagreement, distraction, and useless side-discussion that treads water and makes people angry at each other.

And if you want to keep taking this to an extreme, using the shitty analogys provided:

Would a hospital with 5 highly trained surgeons and no receptionists or nurses complete more surgery than a hospital with no surgeons and 100 nurses and 600 receptionists? Yes. But now we're saying absolutely nothing about the programming industry or what's we think is wrong with it.

Re: Hordes Of Novices

#54

Post by Cthulhu_ »

shittyanalogy wrote: post #45
noonespecial wrote: post #24

If one doctor can transplant a heart in ten hours, can ten nurses transplant that heart in one hour? Can a hundred nursing assistants transplant that heart in six minutes? Can six hundred hospital receptionists transplant that heart in one minute? The real question is: Could the doctor do the transplant without any nurses? Could the nurses help the doctor without the receptionists?

Ironically your argument fails as it depends entirely on skill level. A highly skilled surgeon could perform emergency surgery without standard resources, and you could run an emergency hospital without receptionists. Let's not get distracted by shitty analogys.

To pull the analogy through to the extremes, even a highly skilled surgeon might not be able to do it because he doesn't know how to improvise, refuses to operate in a non-hospital environment, or insert a billion other reasons in here.

tl;dr, T-shaped skillsets are good, specialists are good.

Re: Hordes Of Novices

#55

Post by agsamek »

aestra wrote: post #46
dbecker wrote: post #20

Is our industry doing the equivalent of offering free rides to hopeful software developers, calling them pilots, and throwing them by the thousands into airplanes just to watch them crash and burn? With some exceptions, it's less dangerous when a novice programmer writes ugly code than when a pilot crashes a plane. So we shouldn't require as much caution around letting people program as we do in letting them fly an a…

http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2005/11/69355?cu... 1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline. Operatives working for the Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out abou…

Yes. Software is important and I like your examples. What training would prevent them, yet still make all the advances possible? People die and it is OK as long as we keep the number low. I am leaving for an orienteering run right now. I may be injuried or die due to it but I'm glad I can take the (low) risk.

Re: Hordes Of Novices

#56

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mathattack wrote: post #28

IMHO... You can't get a crew of experienced software engineers without starting with hordes of novices. It's just not a field where you can say, "Pass the entrance exam, get some mentoring, and come back in 6 years with experience." It's a field that you need to explore and find if you have the passion. (And I hate the word passion) So it might take 20 novices coming out of these feeders to find 10 who become decent…

> And what's the alternative?

I think the author gives an alternative in the form of his pilot training; intense training before being allowed to write code (= a proper and full education, instead of a course), and pair programming (= co-pilot) with an experienced or non-novice pilot (developer).

The big corporate world doesn't tend to agree with this though, two people doing one job seems like a waste of money and time to a lot of managers that don't know any better.

Re: Hordes Of Novices

#57

Post by Cthulhu_ »

programminggeek wrote: post #44

It is probably worth noting that Uncle Bob doesn't seem to be implying that the pilot training model is exactly the model that we should use. His point if you read a bunch of his stuff is that as a profession, we should look beyond our own borders to learn lessons from doctors, accountants, lawyers, pilots, engineers, architects, etc. to advance the level of professionalism in our profession. If software is going to…

And yet, go our own way too. Software is (or used to be built) like other engineering professions; big design up front, then build (and often have the actual construction done by relatively low-wage workers). Software's much more complicated though.

Re: Hordes Of Novices

#58

Post by memracom »

azurelogic wrote: post #19

While I enjoyed and partly agreed with Uncle Bob's equivalent of "Get off my lawn", it would be excellent if he also proposed something that resembled a solution to the problem. I struggled at my first dev job because school only taught me the basics, not modern full-stack agile software engineering. I worked with a team that had everything from testing to deployment polished and near perfect. However, some of them g…

One of the problems with software engineering training is that few schools take the "engineering" part seriously. Instead they train programmers or software developers. If engineering was taken more seriously then they would teach SWEBOK and SEMAT along with coding. Of course, many schools would argue that software engineering is a young profession and that SWEBOK and SEMAT are not yet fully formed. But nevertheless we do have people that are trying to apply some engineering rigor to the process of developing software and there is something there for all of us to learn, even if these things take another decade or two to become fully formed.

Re: Hordes Of Novices

#59

Post by asgard1024 »

I think he is basically arguing for a professional organization of programmers, which would give out certifications and (wink, wink) make sure their salaries won't get too low by limiting competition. (I don't necessarily disagree, just saying.)

Re: Hordes Of Novices

#60

Post by asgard1024 »

onion2k wrote: post #5

The overwhelming majority of bespoke software is a CRUD app in disguise (to a lesser or greater extent). You don't need to be an expert to develop things like that - a basic knowledge data structures, connecting to a database, and some UI and off you go. That isn't going to change. So I would argue that yes, we need the horde. We need more of the people at the "bottom" doing the boring stuff than we need at the top d…

> We need more of the people at the "bottom" doing the boring stuff than we need at the top doing the hard stuff.

I disagree with that premise. In software, it's all virtual. It can be copied easily. So why there should be boring work at all? I mean, in building houses, sure, one has to go out and actually lay the bricks. But in software?

So why we can't write the CRUD app just once (or twice perhaps, so we wouldn't have a monoculture) and be done with it, work on something more interesting?

In my view, if you're in software doing boring work, you're doing something wrong. Doesn't mean you cannot get a nice paycheck for that, though. :-)

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