Comments on: Programmer Efficiency: Test Your Might! http://www.softwarebloat.com/2008/11/30/programmer-efficiency-test-your-might/ Simple software project management. Sun, 14 Feb 2010 03:01:14 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Hostile Fork http://www.softwarebloat.com/2008/11/30/programmer-efficiency-test-your-might/comment-page-1/#comment-16 Hostile Fork Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:44:38 +0000 http://softwarebloat.wordpress.com/?p=124#comment-16 <p>Efficiency might look like laziness to the untrained eye. Yet the reverse must be about equally true! So I feel it's counterproductive to suggest a novice programmer would know the difference well enough to be coaching using such poisonous terms.</p> <p>What's wrong with saying "A good programmer acts with clarity, and knows how to make the best use of their time and the time of others, choosing approaches that balance current needs with future?" Studying good industrial or product design serves the mind much better than platitudes about intentionally seeking paths of least resistance:</p> <p>http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0385267746</p> <p>Then again, I'm not too surprised Larry Wall would be promoting "laziness, impatience, and hubris". Those do seem to me the founding premises of many people building large systems out of the likes of Perl and PHP! :P</p> <p>FizzBuzz strikes me as a bad in-person interview question for anyone you have in front of you at a white board in your office. If someone cannot solve this (and you put out feelers for a programmer with claimed proficiency in <em>any</em> programming language) then <i>your HR process is fundamentally broken</i>. As this post prescribes, you should take the long-term "lazy" view and figure out how to screen better, e.g. with Brainbench:</p> <p>http://www.brainbench.com/xml/bb/common/testcenter/freetests.xml</p> <p>...I'll now leave the disproof of how # of characters needed to solve a problem this <i>pathologically trivial</i> indicate programming language viability on the whole as an exercise to the reader. :) If I want to print the sum of two numbers, a calculator watch doesn't even require me to say "print()", but good luck writing a device driver in its dialect!</p> <p>Regards, Fork</p> Efficiency might look like laziness to the untrained eye. Yet the reverse must be about equally true! So I feel it’s counterproductive to suggest a novice programmer would know the difference well enough to be coaching using such poisonous terms.

What’s wrong with saying “A good programmer acts with clarity, and knows how to make the best use of their time and the time of others, choosing approaches that balance current needs with future?” Studying good industrial or product design serves the mind much better than platitudes about intentionally seeking paths of least resistance:

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0385267746

Then again, I’m not too surprised Larry Wall would be promoting “laziness, impatience, and hubris”. Those do seem to me the founding premises of many people building large systems out of the likes of Perl and PHP! :P

FizzBuzz strikes me as a bad in-person interview question for anyone you have in front of you at a white board in your office. If someone cannot solve this (and you put out feelers for a programmer with claimed proficiency in any programming language) then your HR process is fundamentally broken. As this post prescribes, you should take the long-term “lazy” view and figure out how to screen better, e.g. with Brainbench:

http://www.brainbench.com/xml/bb/common/testcenter/freetests.xml

…I’ll now leave the disproof of how # of characters needed to solve a problem this pathologically trivial indicate programming language viability on the whole as an exercise to the reader. :) If I want to print the sum of two numbers, a calculator watch doesn’t even require me to say “print()”, but good luck writing a device driver in its dialect!

Regards, Fork

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