Developer Competence Debate

"Half of all developers have below-average diligence" - a lot of this is also not developer choice, but environmental. So much software is developed and maintained in very constrained economic environments, often by solo devs who also have other responsibilities. The choice here often is trading some "diligence" for "meeting business requirements in the time / budget constraints" imposed by your employer.

I think one of things that is a key de-motivator for devs is having to work with other engineers that don't really care about the quality of code they write, as they don't perceive software as an art-form or craftsmanship, but more as something that pays their bills. A lot of dev orgs don't spend enough resource/time evaluating dev work on a technical levels, leading to lots of bad code and frustrating the hell out of the good devs. The places who do instill passion and draw great devs, much lik

Alternate translation: Bad devs are worse than no devs and all your competent devs will spend most of their time dealing with the former's crappy code until they quit. (my code is of course perfect and free of all technical debt)

What I've seen in the past two years, a lot of people who have seemingly no fit to a life of a programmer have joined software industry. In my experience the best devs were the people who self-taught programming for pure joy of building a software, making a glimpse of imaging to something real through writing code. The others who were on this job because the compensation was hefty - they were likely to opt out to a manager. I am not saying that hobby-devs are better people or co-worker. Eve

In all fields there is a minority who are not very good at what they do. I think, though, that in programming that minority might actually be a majority. The thing is, if you are a poor plumber who causes floods in peoples houses you are not going to be in business for a very long time. In programming there seems no such discipline because it actually takes somebody good at programming to perceive the difference between good and bad programming. And if the programming project is a disaster right

Apple, Google, and Microsoft all employ very many competent programmers. But they share the problem that they need to hire many more programmers than are both competent and eager to work for them, and so must make do for the rest. It is a much easier task to select a place to work with competent colleagues. Thus, there is no inconsistency.Perfection is not needed. Ordinary good code suffices. Good code using modern C++, or current Rust, is easier than in older languages (among which count old

As a junior software developer, it's sad to hear this point of view. Many of us put an extraordinary amount of time towards improving our craft.On the other hand I've worked with many people who have very similar opinions as yours and they suffered from reality distortion. Their code was poorly implemented and poorly tested, despite what they say, and caused many headaches.Are you actually a top performer in the software world?

"Basic programmer competence" is not something you can consistently expect from people in the industry. Be it a bad day, general carelessness, or business pressures - there are many reasons to cut corners.

Let us know how hiring mediocre programmers works out for your startup.

"the real issue is that they just dont really do software development. "No offense, that kind of seems to be your issue, not theirs.In large orgs if there are 10 'technical but not really dev roles' for ever 2 devs ... that's the reality of the world we live in.It's maybe 'sad' that we call can't write code, but that's maybe not quite an 'industry' problem.On the other hand, using giant fragile stacks with a million dependen