A street not far from me was under major reconstruction, 6 months into the project they hit a water line that shouldn’t have been there, they then proceeded to tear up everything they had done up to that point and redo it.
“Security problems in a transmission?”
Sure: Bridgestone/Firestone Announces Voluntary Recall of 3.85 million RADIAL ATX and RADIAL ATX II Tires, and 2.7 million Wilderness AT Tires.
I had to replace the shifter belt in my car, I found out afterwards that my model car made in that year very often has that problem.
“Ever had some of your appliances quit working because the power company upgraded their generators?”
Not long ago a backup generator caused a power outage where I work, because it had a design flaw, the power would not have gone out at that time if there had not been a backup generator.
Many procedures in the medical field don’t ever leave beta, they just give you a estimated percentage chance that it will work for you, or not, or kill you.
Pharmaceutical companies release products to limited user beta testing all the time: Clinical Trials.
Okay… that article is egocentric, again blogging about blogging, but most annoyingly very Toll like.
“Hey - why not insult an entire profession? That’s sure to get lots more comments and comments = visits, and visists = $$$”
Umm… Trolling much???
I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the argument that it’s not blatant trolling because there is self-deprecation involved.
No… it’s still trolling because it’s a broad stroked insult against an entire community who are very likely to be emotive about the point raised.
Most importantly – I’ve only come here to keep informed about broader IT issues. That hasn’t happened in a long while, so I’ll check out for now, delete the entry from my bookmarks and come back once in a blue moon to see if anything changed.
It was good while it lasted… well… not bad anyway.
Fun new game – see how long a path of Coding Horror links you can make before coming to a dead-end or cycle. For example, starting with this post, we get:
1.That Means it’s Working (August 24, 2009): “everything they write sucks” ->
2.On The Meaning of “Coding Horror” (December 15, 2007): “everything you write sucks” ->
3.Sucking Less Every Year (March 3, 2006): “We all write shitty software” ->
4.We Make Shitty Software… With Bug! (October 6, 2004): “the best programmer in the world” ->
5.Why I’m The Best Programmer In The World* (August 14, 2004): “better than we were a year ago” ->
6.Sucking Less Every Year (March 3, 2006)
I once saw that engineering is a process of doing something moor poorly the first time and doing it less poorly the second, it’s not much different for other related industries either. Companies shouldn’t be looking for people with degrees if experience is really all you need to get the job (college does cost money after all and time). Although the huge amount of sarcasm within some of these articles isn’t really all that helpful to me, not sure how long I’ll be subscribed. lol
Jeff, this may be a little OT, but I saw in the September issue of WIRED that you once wrote a Craigslist app that Craig Newmark shot down–perhaps it didn’t suck enough?
Jeff:
“In fact, that’s the tipping point between amateurs and professionals in our industry: the professionals realize everything they write sucks.”
Phenwoods:
“If that were true then it would be a very sad reflection on our industry. I cannot think of any other industry that would regard knowingly being incompetent as a definition of professionalism.”
Actually, from what I have read (a number of different studies, including one IIRC on neurosurgeons who had a high incidence of malpractice?), one of the distinguishing characteristics between the competent and incompetent professionals in any domain is that the competent pros know they don’t know everything and consider that there is a lot of room for improvement in their work, and strive for that improvement.
Indeed, I seem to recall at least one ‘scientific journal’ article about this being a major distinguishing characteristic of intelligence in general. Most people wouldn’t word it that way, but most of us are intelligent enough to know what Jeff meant.
I know that I look at code I wrote years ago and cringe. I look at code I wrote last year and notice what I did wrong. I look at code I wrote last month and see where it can be improved. That is what I love about my profession; is that I am learning something new almost every day and improving my skills and understanding. A major part of that is looking back on past work and noting just how much it sucked. Some of it didn’t, but much of it did.
But then if you think everything you did smells of roses, well that says something too - doesn’t it?
“Real engineers” don’t always get it right the first time. That’s why there’s prototyping and modeling. They also work with physical things and set parameters that don’t change. The hardness of a piece of a certain steel alloy will be the same 100 years from now as it will today. The ability of a piece of copper wire to conduct electricity will remain the same 1000 years from now as it is today. Additionally, feature creep in engineering means raising the cost of the project both in terms of manpower and materials, and that cost remains with the product for the duration in which it is produced or maintained.
“Real engineers” get it right because they have it easy. The physical world has been documented for thousands of years. That means its thousands of years too early to complain about programmers and the seeming lack of ability to get it right the first time.
“is it really so hard to understand the use of sarcasm, hyperbole, and self-deprecating humor? these are pretty low level literary devices.”
Quite so. It should be obvious by now that all Jeff’s output is intended to be a satire on bad practice. Calling the blog “Coding Horror” should be enough of a give away.
The problem is that as satire it simply isn’t very funny, which may be why so many people fail to get it.
Some very wise greek guy said something like, “the more I know, the less I know”. Something like that. It’s in the same spirit, and seems to be something common among all self-aware professionals in all professions.
