My Favorite Reader Comments – #1

The Baglady has collected over 450 reader comments and there are some comments that are so entertaining and thoughtful that I have to share them in case you missed them. So today I shall highlight some comments from my article about my generation in the workplace.

Some background on these commenters: qmc is my classmate from school and Alex is an ex-coworker and friend. We do know each other in real life and they’re both interesting and intelligent guys.

This thread starts off with a comment from an anonymous guy:

30-something on 11.28.07 at 1:04 pm

This reeks of sense of entitlement. At 24 you can not have as much experience as someone who has been doing a job for 10 or 20 years. You will see, when you are older and 20 year olds come in and think they know more than you, just wait you will see.

Then qmc and Alex chimed in, and I have to say Alex’s comment is absolutely priceless and the incidents he mentioned are hilarious.

qmc on 11.29.07 at 6:31 pm

30-something,Just because someone’s been doing something “longer” doesn’t mean they’re doing it “better.” Some of them have been doing it “longer,” but not “better.” Incidentally, from doing some interviewing for my employer, I’ve met some “Business Intelligence Engineers” with 5+ years of experience that supposedly work with databases all day, don’t necessarily know either (a) how to code or (b) how to write efficient SQL (strange union query with aggregates instead of a simple outer join?)That being said, I realize I don’t know everything, but I expect some learning to go both ways.

Alex on 11.30.07 at 10:35 pm

I agree with qmc. Age may, but does not necessarily, confer experience. There are definitely people who have been in the software industry for a long time and who are very experienced and whom I respect greatly.But then there are those who make be wonder, “How did you ever get this job?” I knew one guy who had been a programmer for years, but didn’t know DeMorgan’s Law. Several times he made changes to someone else’s code by pushing the NOTs into or pulling them out of a boolean expression without changing the ANDs to ORs and vice versa. What motivated him to make those changes I do not know; perhaps, he just didn’t like the way it looked. The first time he made that error, I dismissed it as a momentary lapse; but after seeing him make the same error multiple times, I realized that he didn’t know what he was doing. I tried explaining DeMorgan’s Law to him, but he wouldn’t listen. He tried to determine whether the code after his changes was logically equivalent to the original code by testing different cases in his head in an ad hoc fashion. I stared at him nonplussed; it was like watching an accountant try to add without knowing how to carry. Somehow he managed to survive many years as a programmer without knowing the basic tools of his trade.

Then, there was an incident with another coworker at Oracle OpenWorld; I’m not sure which story is more damning. We were given a free pass to OpenWorld as Oracle employees. For a couple of hours, we were allowed to walk around and tour the booths. At one booth, there was a slightly anthropomorphic robot. It would roll up to people and ask, “What is your name?” If you ignored it, it would ask, “What is your name?” over and over gain. So at first, I thought it was stuck in an infinite loop. But then, it said, “HEY YOU! What’s your name?” After a few minutes’ conversation, it became apparent (at least to me, and I think, to most of the audience) that there was a man behind the machine. It could recognize that a California state driver’s license was upside down and could recognize that a set of car keys had the Honda logo. Someone asked it to compute the square root of 3; it initially could not do it, but later it responded with an answer, after, I assume, the human operator plugged it into a calculator. I asked it what would happen if I put it inside a Faraday cage. It didn’t know what that was at first, but later it responded with a definition that the human operator probably found with Google. In any case, as we walked away from the booth, my coworker said to me, with all sincerity, “Technology these days is really amazing. I had not imagined that they could build a robot like that.” I stared at him incredulously and thought, “How can you be a programmer for so many years and remain ignorant of the state of our art? There is no way that AI is that advanced.”I do not know how some people managed to get by for so many years and remain so ignorant. Perhaps, it is an after-effect of the boom, when many people were hired indiscriminately without having their qualifications rigorously checked.

Alex’s comment is probably more appreciated by a nerd, but it is pretty awesome.

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