Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1054 - Why are some programmers still unemployed?

https://medium.com/swlh/best-10-programming-languages-to-learn-in-2018-2d6cbc5ffc2a

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1054 - Why are some programmers still unemployed?

Hi Mom,

The answer is maintainability.

As I am writing my résumé for programming jobs, this is a key idea to emphasize. The audience for our programs is really future humans who must maintain the programs. Inscrutability will not be appreciated.

from - https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-programmers-unemployed

Why are some programmers unemployed?

Eric Wadsworth, Senior Software Engineer at Ancestry.com (2016-present)

Answered Sep 29, 2017 · Upvoted by Stephen M. Bear, Writing software and getting paid for it for over 50 years. and Gideon Shavit, Professional Software Engineer for 25 years

Most companies don’t actually want “Computer Programmers”. It doesn’t take a ton of skill or expertise to hack out some code to automate a task or provide a feature.

What companies usually actually want are “Software Engineers”. There’s a huge difference between code that works, and code that works and is also maintainable.

I conducted an interview yesterday, and the candidate and I did a pair programming exercise, working through a trivial problem. He solved the problem easily, and his solution was fast and simple, but I still rejected him. Why did I do that?

It was apparent that he considered the audience of his code to be the machine that executes it. While that particular reader is important, it’s also vital that a software professional realize that people will be reading their code, possibly for years to come. And those people will need to make changes to it.

Want details? The candidate failed to extract identical lines of logic into a method, and call the method multiple times. Yes, it was only a few lines of code, but he just copied and pasted it in the editor. In addition, some of the variable names were just single letters, not descriptive at all. And when I asked him to show me that it worked, he just hand-entered test values, instead of taking a couple of seconds to make a simple test method that can be called with different inputs.

In short, he was a programmer, not an engineer.

Jacob Landon Santos

Dec 4 · 57 upvotes

I feel an interview is not the best time to get a clear indication of whether someone creates maintainable code. There are many times when I give a truncated answer, where they expected a more involved one. I am not going to spend 20 minutes explaining what I know on a topic. I am also not going to spend a lot of time on a whiteboard making sure the code follows everything I would write while on the job.

Likewise, some interviews don't want full documentation and coding practices. They want clean, but they don't want professional. I give the minimum or ask how far they want me to go. If they are unclear. I will do my best to show how I would code while on the job. But I have had interviews where they were disappointed I used interfaces on a codebase that was horribly small. “Why did you create an interface when only one class uses it?”

Being disappointed with the interviewers is perhaps not as bad as being disappointed the interviewee. It is up to those giving the interview to choose someone that will work with the company and its people. With that, I would rather not work at a place where the leaders would rather insult rather than question or not try to understand the intent of a codebase when giving a code review.

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Eric Wadsworth: It’s critical to communicate. I’ve had candidates who hardly say a word, and it’s really hard for...

Rick Notman

Sep 29, 2017 · 27 upvotes including Eric Wadsworth

I like this answer. It's not really testing for style as much as an understanding on the part of the candidate that if you create a mess, it costs more down the line.

Someone who knew about working on code over time or in large groups would have understood this. It's one thing to create a mess, knowing full well that you are doing it (some times you have to move fast and are willing to accept or are forced to accept the consequences) It's another to not even know what the consequences are down the line.

I probably would have cut some slack if the person had said, “I should really put this in a method” and/or “I normally use more descriptive variable names”. At least that would have shown they understand.

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Eric Wadsworth

Sep 29, 2017 · 8 upvotes including Rick Notman

Yep. About the refactor to use a method, I gave him several big hints, hoping he’d get the clue and say something like that. Nope, no clue. >_>

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Jacob Waters: What was the question? Im just out of java II in community college and I could do better than tha...

David Benefield

Sep 29, 2017 · 5 upvotes

I think it was response by Paulina Jonušaitė to a question asking something about what made a good programmer. Her response was basically realizing that code was for humans, not computers. Her point was that you needed to write code so people could understand it. That and having to struggle with my own f-ed up letter and operand soup really helped realize the importance of writing neat code.

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Barry Blessing

Sep 29, 2017 · 8 upvotes

Wadsworth’s answer is my futile and eternal swansong, but very few “programmers” listen. An industry aquaintance of mine with a fresh M.S. CompSci is fascinated with making their methods as short as possible, with no whitespace or statement chunking, and all algorithms reduced to one-line LINQ statements where possible. No XMLdoc or unit test coverage either.

This is when you know you’re working with a “programmer” and not a software development professional.

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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 1056 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1805.25 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.