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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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What's the deal with programming, as a careeer? It seems like the lower levels at least should be readily accessible even to people of thoroughly average intelligence but I've read a lot that leads me to believe the average professional programmer is borderline incompetent.
E.g., Fizzbuzz. Apparently most people who come into an interview won't be able to do it. Now, I can't code or anything but computers do only and exactly what you tell them (assuming you're not dealing with a thicket of code so dense it has emergent properties) but here's what I'd tell the computer to do
# Proceed from 0 to x, in increments of 1, (where x =whatever) If divisible by 3, remainder 0, associate fizz with number If divisible by 5, remainder 0, associate buzz with number, Make ordered list from o to x, of numbers associated with fizz OR buzz For numbers associated with fizz NOT buzz, append fizz For numbers associated with buzz NOT fizz, append fizz For numbers associated with fizz AND buzz, append fizzbuzz #
I ask out of interest in acquiring money, on elance, rentacoder, odesk etc. I'm starting from a position of total ignorance but y'know it doesn't seem like learning C, and understanding Conrete Mathematics and TAOCP in a useful or even deep way would be the work of more than a year, while it would place one well above average in some domains of this activiteity.
Or have I missed something really obvious and important?
Programming as a field exhibits a weird bimodal distribution of talent. Some people are just in it for the paycheck, but others think of it as a true intellectual and creative challenge. Not only does the latter group spend extra hours perfecting their art, they also tend to be higher-IQ. Most of them could make better money in the law/medicine/MBA path. So obviously the "programming is an art" group is going to have a low opinion of the "programming is a paycheck" group.
Do we have any refs for this? I know there's "The Camel Has Two Humps" (Alan Kay on it, the PDF), but anything else?
And going by his other papers, though, it looks like the effect isn't nearly so strong as was originally claimed. (Though that's wrt whether his "consistency test" works, didn't check about whether bimodalness still holds.)
No, just personal experience and observation backed up by stories and blog posts from other people. See also Joel Spolsky on Hitting the High Notes. Spolsky's line is that some people are just never going to be that good at programming. I'd rephrase it as: some people are just never going to be motivated to spend long hours programming for the sheer fun and challenge of it, and so they're never going to be that good at programming.
This is a good null hypothesis for skill variation in many cases, but not one supported by the research in the paper gwern linked.
Fixed that for you. :) (I'm a current law student.)
In addition to this, if you're a good bricklayer, you might do, at most, twice the work of a bad bricklayer. It's quite common for an excellent programmer (a hacker) to do more work than ten average programmers--and that's conservative. The difference is more apparent. My guess might be that you hear this complaint from good programmers, Barry?
Although, I can guarantee that everyone I've met can do at least FizzBuzz. We have average programmers, not downright bad ones.