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Cowboy Engineers in the Software Industry

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 02 2014, @07:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the was-it-much-harder-in-my-day? dept.

shabadoo writes:

"Will software engineering always be a cowboy's game? Or is it just a case of when you're a passionate expert the pimples stand out more clearly. This guy has clearly had enough. His vents are amusing, but also raise some good points about the state of the industry."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 03 2014, @07:37AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) on Monday March 03 2014, @07:37AM (#9984) Homepage

    -ng out of my Physics degree.

    I only completed my Physics BA at UC Santa Cruz because I grew weary of being asked in job interviews why I never graduated.

    I was SQL for Apple MacTCP back in the day. MacTCP was written by a brilliant assembly coder by the name of John Veizades. Really he's a good guy but he could have a bit of an attitude:

    "John there's a bug in MacTCP. It crashed when I did $SOMETHING."

    "That's your test tool, Mike. You fix it."

    Admittedly the test tool strm_echo was quite buggy but I did know how to use MacsBug to debug it.

    The next day...

    "John could you step down to the lab for a moment? I want to show you something." ... shortly after ....

    "See that there? That's where you unlock a Handle, then fail to lock it again before memory moves."

    It was completely cool to unlock Handles, but you had to lock them again before the Classic Mac OS would do a heap compaction. It was rather like defragmenting your hard drive. That's how Apple got GUI on a 128k Mac for that superbowl ad - a relocatable memory manager could be made to run your code with a far smaller heap, but you had to follow some very strict - and WELL-DOCUMENTED rules, or you would corrupt the heap, or else your memory block would be overwritten by some other data, even if the heap was not corrupted.

    My resume [warplife.com] is now seven pages. I am no longer flogging myself as a software engineer but as a Process Architect.

    However I do have to agree with that guy's blog, if you don't know what referential integrity is as well as why you need it, you have no business coming anywhere near a database.

    A physics degree - or even dropping out of a physics degree - is a real good way to develop a deep intuition as to how things work.

    Perhaps a good interview question would be "are you handy with tools?" I mean like wrenches and screwdrivers. "Yeah? Can you give me some specific examples of what you've done with tools."

    --
    I have a major product announcement [warplife.com] coming 5:01 PM 2014-03-21 EST.
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