Nilotpal and me

Nilotpal writes about Smart People.  I’ve been feeling that way about my
current job for months.  I don’t so much consider myself /Smart/ as I
consider many of the people with whom I work stupid.  Or as Nilopat says
far more PC “below par”.

All I ask that my team have a few things.  I’d like to score at least a
2 (but a 6 or more would really make me happy) on The Joel Test.  If I have to know anything about someone else’s
code, I’d also like them to have a distant clue about what Object Oriented
Programming and Design is.  Programmers please, heed my plea, stop using OO
Languages as procedural.  Classes are for classifying
objects.  Objects are for grouping similar things into classes
(polymorphism anyone?  WHAT IS THAT???)

If you don’t already know everything that uncle bob says about Object Oriented
Design
, then you aren’t an object-oriented anything and you shouldn’t be
programming with object oriented tools.  Like with most tools you are more
dangerous using them when you are untrained than you are simply not touching
them.  Get trained to use these tools first.  You would wave a razor
sharp katana around aimlessly would you?  You would?  Well, then you
get what you deserve.  I hope you loose a limb, or better yet, part of your
skull and your brain chops in half immediately saving the rest of the world from
you.

In the same vein of just deserts, you deserve what you
get by using programming tools which you don’t understand.  That shoe
string of classes which group unrelated data and methods into meaningless
modules WILL become unmanageable.  You WILL suffer compared to your skilled
competitors.  Your bosses and team leads get what they deserve when you
leave to torture someone else, because they allowed you to waste your time and
theirs by writing unmaintainable code.  Or less pessimistic, you deserve
what you get when you are let go by your boss when they and your team lead
realize that since you haven’t trained yourself to use these tools which you are
misusing, that you must be dumber than they had thought when hiring you. 
Have fun drifting from job to job, I’m sure you can find a group that doesn’t
realize that you are “below par” where the boss is also “below par” and you can
fit right in.  Fill business needs for 10 times the cost of a good
programmer.  I hope said company which you found is highly profitable.

I know there are many good programmers out there.  What is so hard about good design?  I’d like your input.  My only thought is
that much of the time no time is spent in thought
about design at all.  The “below par” programmer just sits down
and starts writing code.  Does anyone have any thoughts?


1 thought on “Nilotpal and me”

  1. Really, Nilotpal is just bitching that he can’t find problems that are stimulating for him to work on where he’s at. Boo fucking hoo. His entry is less about design than about whining “my job sucks”.

    If he really wanted to count himself “smart” he wouldn’t see the accumulation of “below par” programmers as just some mysterious osmosis of stupidity into his ivory tower. If he were truly wise, he’d understand the complete inadequacy of most hiring practices to be able to distinguish between the 90% of mediocre-to-poor programmers and the 10% that are worth their weight in gold. This is not an easy problem to address, and it’s hard for managers who’ve never heard of Brooks to understand that throwing more bodies at a project doesn’t necessarily help. Has he ever tried to remedy it? I doubt it. Perhaps he thinks of it as “nonintellectual” work that might make him more “stupid”.

    It seems clear to me that Nilotpal is just bitter that he isn’t being promoted into the positions where he is entrusted with design. The fact that he can’t figure out how the “below par” people are being promoted before the “smart people” is proof to me that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.

    BTW, “smart people” do not always hate “non-intellectual” work. Many advances in science and technology would not have resulted were it not for truly smart people doggedly working on truly mundane issues. Well, mundane for programmers stuck in dead-end jobs, perhaps.

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