twanvl comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alicorn 09 July 2010 06:54AM

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Comment author: twanvl 09 July 2010 12:20:20PM 11 points [-]

I have no numbers for this, but the idea is that after interviewing for a job, competent people get hired, while incompetent people do not. These incompetents then have to interview for other jobs, so they will be seen more often, and complained about a lot. So perhaps the perceived prevalence of incompetent programmers is a result of availability bias (?).

This theory does not explain why this problem occurs in programming but not in other fields. I don't even know whether that is true. Maybe the situation is the same elsewhere, and I am biased here because I am a programmer.

Comment author: Emile 09 July 2010 08:13:31PM *  6 points [-]

Joel Spolsky gave a similar explanation.

That means, in this horribly simplified universe, that the entire world could consist of 1,000,000 programmers, of whom the worst 199 keep applying for every job and never getting them, but the best 999,801 always get jobs as soon as they apply for one. So every time a job is listed the 199 losers apply, as usual, and one guy from the pool of 999,801 applies, and he gets the job, of course, because he's the best, and now, in this contrived example, every employer thinks they're getting the top 0.5% when they're actually getting the top 99.9801%.

Makes sense.

I'm a programmer, and haven't noticed that many horribly incompetent programmers (which could count as evidence that I'm one myself!).

Comment author: sketerpot 10 July 2010 08:36:52PM *  2 points [-]

Do you consider fizzbuzz trivial? Could you write an interpreter for a simple Forth-like language, if you wanted to? If the answers to these questions are "yes", then that's strong evidence that you're not a horribly incompetent programmer.

Is this reassuring?

Comment author: Emile 10 July 2010 09:05:33PM 2 points [-]

Do you consider fizzbuzz trivial?

Yes

Could you write an interpreter for a simple Forth-like language, if you wanted to?

Probably; I made a simple lambda-calculus interpret once and started working on a Lisp parser (I don't think I got much further than the 'parsing' bit). Forth looks relatively simple, though correctly parsing quotes and comments is always a bit tricky.

Of course, I don't think I'm a horribly incompetent programmer -- like most humans, I have a high opinion of myself :D

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