The code monkeys are invading!
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No, just lazy newbies that won't try to figure things out for themselves. :) I blame The Google. It's made people (me included) lazy. I used to spend days or weeks poking and prodding an API to get it to do what I wanted. Now I just google it, read for about 5 seconds, cut and paste and tweak, without really trying to understand. I have a feeling a lot of other people are doing the same. Are we becoming a nation of snippet tweakers? Arggggg, need to get back to C++, at least it made me disciplined.
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
Steve Echols wrote:
just lazy newbies that won't try to figure things out for themselves
Or just a bunch of Rent-a-coders trying to duct-tape something together by mooching off of others...
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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I read it and reread it :zzz: I haven't seen any change in programming forum questions since way back when I lived on Borland boards. I AM seeing a large increase in blogs containing nothing but useless banter, though. JMO. Mark
Mark "script kiddy" Salsbery Microsoft MVP - Visual C++ "Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn."
Sorry you feel that way...but then again, the blog is just my opinion as well. Looking at your CP profile, the majority of your posts are to the C/C++ forums here so you very well may not be seeing an increase in the types of posts I'm referring to. Look at any of the .NET related boards and you will see them. That being said, I don't see this as an issue restricted to one segment of the developer community.
----------------------------- In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.
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Judah Himango wrote:
are newbies taking over software development?
I was a newbie once. So yes. Always. Marc
Weren't we all newbies at one point? I'm guessing that one of the differences between you and the current batch of newbies was that you put forth the effort to learn your chosen programming language and the basic concepts of programming on your own rather than expecting people to give you the "magic bullet" answer to everything.
----------------------------- In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.
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So says this article[^], citing none other than our CP forums as an example. What do you guys think, are newbies taking over software development?
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Back From Vacation The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
that guy that wrote that article is like a military general who feels threatened by the 'hobbyist development community', which is like the 'A-Team', with their awesome ingenuity. The purpose of the article is to point out how come they're stupid.
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Steve Echols wrote:
just lazy newbies that won't try to figure things out for themselves
Or just a bunch of Rent-a-coders trying to duct-tape something together by mooching off of others...
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
That too. I liken this to the Gold Rush back in the 1890's(?). The money's there, and people will lie, cheat and steal to get it. OT: Anyone know why they canceled Deadwood on HBO? That show had some good insight into how people really think, IMHO.
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
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Some of the best applications I have ever seen were written by 'hobbyests' who were experts in some other field. I have always believed that anyone with a great deal of knowledge of a given field but limited programming knowledge can write a better application for their field of expertise than a well trained and experienced programmer can who has no similar intimate knowledge of that same field.
There is a difference between a hobbyst programmer and someone who doesnt' have a clue about what they are doing passing themselves off as a professional developer.
----------------------------- In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.
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Some of the best applications I have ever seen were written by 'hobbyests' who were experts in some other field. I have always believed that anyone with a great deal of knowledge of a given field but limited programming knowledge can write a better application for their field of expertise than a well trained and experienced programmer can who has no similar intimate knowledge of that same field.
Totally agree, except the UI's tend to suffer, at least the one's I've experienced are very VBish with multi-colored buttons. Combine someone with application knowledge and a decent UI programmer and you usually get a solid product.
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
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that guy that wrote that article is like a military general who feels threatened by the 'hobbyist development community', which is like the 'A-Team', with their awesome ingenuity. The purpose of the article is to point out how come they're stupid.
Hmmm...never realized I was stupid. I'm not threatened by the hobbyist development community in the least. In fact, some really excellent applications and ideas have come from that segment of the developer community. The purpose of the article is to point out what seems to be a general trend of people claiming to be developers (of any kind, but particularly professional developers) who don't know the first thing about how to write a program much less understand the syntax of their chosen programming language.
----------------------------- In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.
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Hmmm...never realized I was stupid. I'm not threatened by the hobbyist development community in the least. In fact, some really excellent applications and ideas have come from that segment of the developer community. The purpose of the article is to point out what seems to be a general trend of people claiming to be developers (of any kind, but particularly professional developers) who don't know the first thing about how to write a program much less understand the syntax of their chosen programming language.
----------------------------- In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.
i meant you wrote it to point out how the hobbyists were stupid, not that you were stupid. i apologize if you took it that way. i agree with the points that you made, i was just having some fun. i am kind of a code monkey myself, i switched my major to chemistry half way through. after not being happy with my career path, i kind of drove it into what i'm doing now, .net development.
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i meant you wrote it to point out how the hobbyists were stupid, not that you were stupid. i apologize if you took it that way. i agree with the points that you made, i was just having some fun. i am kind of a code monkey myself, i switched my major to chemistry half way through. after not being happy with my career path, i kind of drove it into what i'm doing now, .net development.
No need to apologize. I did interpret it that way (my wife said I was reading it wrong as well :) ). I re-read your original post and the sarcasm in it is much clearer now.
----------------------------- In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.
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Matthew Faithfull wrote:
Always have been and always will.
Very true. Everyone has to start somewhere. The point was that people claiming to be professional developers and using the forums to solve their problems without first having put forth effort of their own.
----------------------------- In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.
Scott Dorman wrote:
The point was that people claiming to be professional developers and using the forums to solve their problems without first having put forth effort of their own.
I tend to think the real point is that consumers are getting more and more greedy about price and they care less and less about quality. So decent companies that used to hire American laborers coming from skilled and well known institutions now have to hire off-shore workers to meet the fickle demand of the American consumer. This of course dilutes the quality of the product and makes the fickle consumer my finicky about price. The 'dog eating it's tail' problem is that more off-shoring comes from Americans being less concerned about quality and more concerned about price. It's a vicious cycle that is causing massive decay in American skilled laborers and the sub-societies they belong to. (This is not a statement against the code quality of foreign laborers. There are many seriously talented Indian and Chinese skilled laborers. The point is that so much work is going off-shore that the off-shore labor pools are emptying too quickly and they need to fill them from somewhere to meet the demand. I know many skilled Indian and Chinese developers and I'm not questioning their skill nor am I trying to dilute it.) If Americans would be more willing to spend less often and pay more for quality we'd be in much better shape. Instead Americans cast aside quality for quantity and they don't buy one cell phone that should last for 2+ years easily instead they buy a $39.99 flip-phone that might last 6 months before the next phone trinket comes along that they want more so they ditch the $39.99 phone they just got, sign a 2 year contract and get the next $39.99 phone. Americans have become hungry for 'stuff' but not quality stuff it's about having more and paying less for it but more is no longer synonymous with quality it now equates to quantity. America has a serious problem and you can see it in the posts you describe. The demand that used to feed American families is now 1000's of miles away and off-shore laborers are struggling to keep up with volume of work 'we' used to do. They are coming to American forums and other American online resources to tap into American talent and try and put a false shine of quality on a low quality product or byte of code. Instead of blogging to the world about diluted code and questions developers should be writing senators, congressman and other electe
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No, just lazy newbies that won't try to figure things out for themselves. :) I blame The Google. It's made people (me included) lazy. I used to spend days or weeks poking and prodding an API to get it to do what I wanted. Now I just google it, read for about 5 seconds, cut and paste and tweak, without really trying to understand. I have a feeling a lot of other people are doing the same. Are we becoming a nation of snippet tweakers? Arggggg, need to get back to C++, at least it made me disciplined.
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
I'd also concur that I am much more likely to google some code, cut and paste it, poke it with some tests and declare it done. When I first started I just plugged away and pestered colleagues until they handed over their knowledge. At the same time we all like to learn our craft, we all have to deliver results. So I don't see a big problem with the 'google generation'. If they learn to use Google in an intelligent way to find solutions, and quickly stitch those solutions, finally, we are seeing more commoditisation of code and the use of tried-and-true approaches, which should have a corresponding uplift in both productivity and quality. Why write and debug a sort algorithm when someone has posted a CP article on it? For years software developers have been preaching re-use and componentisation as the way forwards. It has arrived in the form of code snippets and freely downloadable libraries. They are not as pretty as an end-to-end planned and architectured system, but they generally work and get the product out the door. If you've got confidence that someone has put in the thought, done the unit testing and is happy enough with their code to put it on CP, then you may as well use it for your own needs. You could compare 1980's/90's monolithic, fully planned and fully custom systems to handbuilt motor vehicles in the early days. Only rich people (companies) had them, and while they worked a treat when they were going, it took a lot of blood sweat and tears to get them there. Maybe Google is the Henry Ford of software, allowing us to quickly assemble a product on a production line of progressively larger components and cutting down. I didn't RTA but I've got no gripe with people spending more time searching and less time writing. If that's the way software development is going so be it. Good people will always rise to the top, whether they are feeding in punch cards or writing code-finding bots to assemble a system from publicly avaialable code snippets.
Bruce Chapman iFinity.com.au - Websites and Software Development Plithy remark available in Beta 2
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Scott Dorman wrote:
The point was that people claiming to be professional developers and using the forums to solve their problems without first having put forth effort of their own.
I tend to think the real point is that consumers are getting more and more greedy about price and they care less and less about quality. So decent companies that used to hire American laborers coming from skilled and well known institutions now have to hire off-shore workers to meet the fickle demand of the American consumer. This of course dilutes the quality of the product and makes the fickle consumer my finicky about price. The 'dog eating it's tail' problem is that more off-shoring comes from Americans being less concerned about quality and more concerned about price. It's a vicious cycle that is causing massive decay in American skilled laborers and the sub-societies they belong to. (This is not a statement against the code quality of foreign laborers. There are many seriously talented Indian and Chinese skilled laborers. The point is that so much work is going off-shore that the off-shore labor pools are emptying too quickly and they need to fill them from somewhere to meet the demand. I know many skilled Indian and Chinese developers and I'm not questioning their skill nor am I trying to dilute it.) If Americans would be more willing to spend less often and pay more for quality we'd be in much better shape. Instead Americans cast aside quality for quantity and they don't buy one cell phone that should last for 2+ years easily instead they buy a $39.99 flip-phone that might last 6 months before the next phone trinket comes along that they want more so they ditch the $39.99 phone they just got, sign a 2 year contract and get the next $39.99 phone. Americans have become hungry for 'stuff' but not quality stuff it's about having more and paying less for it but more is no longer synonymous with quality it now equates to quantity. America has a serious problem and you can see it in the posts you describe. The demand that used to feed American families is now 1000's of miles away and off-shore laborers are struggling to keep up with volume of work 'we' used to do. They are coming to American forums and other American online resources to tap into American talent and try and put a false shine of quality on a low quality product or byte of code. Instead of blogging to the world about diluted code and questions developers should be writing senators, congressman and other electe
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Aside from the problem of developers who don't know what they are doing, there is an enormous problem of elitism and snobbery amongst geek types. Almost by definition, a geek is someone who is very insecure on the inside. This naturally explains why it is part of geek culture to prove that you are better than the next guy. A hacker is not truly happy unless he can point to someone less knowledgeable and call him a "script kiddy." Someone with a Computer Science degree will find ways to put down those who are self-taught, and those who are self-taught will find ways to put down those with degrees. There is nothing new about one geek putting down other geeks in order to make himself feel better.
-------------------------------- "All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing" -- Edmund Burke
Richie308 wrote:
there is an enormous problem of elitism and snobbery amongst geek types.
In all honesty it's about a quarter or less a problem than it was in the '80s and early '90s. Back in those days you could be the biggest asshole in the world, but if you ran a network or wrote software you were untouchable. These days I'm pretty sure most software shops would not think twice to throw an uncivilized nerdy asshole out the door in a heartbeat.
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
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My sig kinda sums it up:
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
I lament the fact now that every written PC of software or every new piece of hardware cannot be trusted on first release. Nobody trusts RTM 1.0 anymore for software or hardware. Heck even SP1 is now doubtful...:~
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I'd also concur that I am much more likely to google some code, cut and paste it, poke it with some tests and declare it done. When I first started I just plugged away and pestered colleagues until they handed over their knowledge. At the same time we all like to learn our craft, we all have to deliver results. So I don't see a big problem with the 'google generation'. If they learn to use Google in an intelligent way to find solutions, and quickly stitch those solutions, finally, we are seeing more commoditisation of code and the use of tried-and-true approaches, which should have a corresponding uplift in both productivity and quality. Why write and debug a sort algorithm when someone has posted a CP article on it? For years software developers have been preaching re-use and componentisation as the way forwards. It has arrived in the form of code snippets and freely downloadable libraries. They are not as pretty as an end-to-end planned and architectured system, but they generally work and get the product out the door. If you've got confidence that someone has put in the thought, done the unit testing and is happy enough with their code to put it on CP, then you may as well use it for your own needs. You could compare 1980's/90's monolithic, fully planned and fully custom systems to handbuilt motor vehicles in the early days. Only rich people (companies) had them, and while they worked a treat when they were going, it took a lot of blood sweat and tears to get them there. Maybe Google is the Henry Ford of software, allowing us to quickly assemble a product on a production line of progressively larger components and cutting down. I didn't RTA but I've got no gripe with people spending more time searching and less time writing. If that's the way software development is going so be it. Good people will always rise to the top, whether they are feeding in punch cards or writing code-finding bots to assemble a system from publicly avaialable code snippets.
Bruce Chapman iFinity.com.au - Websites and Software Development Plithy remark available in Beta 2
Well thought out post -- I also agree. I feel sort of bad, because it seems like I'm being grouped with the code monkeys, but it all depends on what I'm doing. If it's work related, I will spend more of my personal time solving the problem. If it's something I'm doing on my own that I've fiddled around with for an hour but can't get it working and have exhausted my personal list of ideas to try, then I will ask on the forums while trying to provide what information I think is necessary, and in a clear way, without simply saying "I've got a problem. How to solve it?" As for the googling code snippets and not actually understanding it, again, it depends on what I'm doing. If it's work-related, I will do more reading than I would usually do. If I just want to get something done real quick, then I may just briefly read some documentation (brief), takes a few educated guesses at the inner workings, and continue on. When I actually have to deal with more of it later, I will already have a little understanding of what I'm working with -- then I can go deeper. Oftentimes, you just have to continue on without being able to claim that you're an expert at what you're doing. On my own time, I'm working on an OpenGL project which has a lot of calls to the API that I best understand from other people's examples, and from using it over and over again in different situations. It's not always a bad idea to try something, that you think might work, and figure it out later. -- modified at 1:40 Wednesday 4th July, 2007
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Aside from the problem of developers who don't know what they are doing, there is an enormous problem of elitism and snobbery amongst geek types. Almost by definition, a geek is someone who is very insecure on the inside. This naturally explains why it is part of geek culture to prove that you are better than the next guy. A hacker is not truly happy unless he can point to someone less knowledgeable and call him a "script kiddy." Someone with a Computer Science degree will find ways to put down those who are self-taught, and those who are self-taught will find ways to put down those with degrees. There is nothing new about one geek putting down other geeks in order to make himself feel better.
-------------------------------- "All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing" -- Edmund Burke
Well, IMO there is only so much mentoring one can do. I recently resigned from a nice big corporate development shop where I was a Sr. Developer / Tech Lead. When I first got to the company, I worked with peers that were just as skilled as I was. They all moved to "other" roles on via promotions to other departments and moving to other organizations. After 2 years of being a Sr. Developer / Tech Lead, I found that I was being offered the same positions that my original set of peers had been offered. I did have the opportunity to move up the corporate ladder. However, finding myself to be more of a leader than a manager (and yes there is a difference), I looked at my current work situation and realized that my current set of peers consisted mostly of full time jr. developers fresh out of college, and consultants making more hourly rate than I was being paid on a salary basis. At that point I also realized that I was spending 80% of my time mentoring the jr. developers, the teams in India, and many of the contractors. This was fun for a while until I realized that my development skills were slipping. My skills were slipping because I wasnt being challenged by my peers. So, I decided to find a job where I felt like I would be challenged by my peers. I searched for a few months, being very picky regarding the company and the project, and finally landed a hot job with a new team, a new project, and a new direction for the company. I do agree that there is a bit of snobbery and eleiteism out there in the development world. I also agree that there are a lot of code monkeys out there as well. Personally, I choose to work with teams that will challenge me and for companies that enable my team to cut the crap and get some work done! As for the snobs I just ignore the egos and move along, and for the code monkeys, I try to help them where I can until they ask the same mundane questions again and again.
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Scott Dorman wrote:
The point was that people claiming to be professional developers and using the forums to solve their problems without first having put forth effort of their own.
I tend to think the real point is that consumers are getting more and more greedy about price and they care less and less about quality. So decent companies that used to hire American laborers coming from skilled and well known institutions now have to hire off-shore workers to meet the fickle demand of the American consumer. This of course dilutes the quality of the product and makes the fickle consumer my finicky about price. The 'dog eating it's tail' problem is that more off-shoring comes from Americans being less concerned about quality and more concerned about price. It's a vicious cycle that is causing massive decay in American skilled laborers and the sub-societies they belong to. (This is not a statement against the code quality of foreign laborers. There are many seriously talented Indian and Chinese skilled laborers. The point is that so much work is going off-shore that the off-shore labor pools are emptying too quickly and they need to fill them from somewhere to meet the demand. I know many skilled Indian and Chinese developers and I'm not questioning their skill nor am I trying to dilute it.) If Americans would be more willing to spend less often and pay more for quality we'd be in much better shape. Instead Americans cast aside quality for quantity and they don't buy one cell phone that should last for 2+ years easily instead they buy a $39.99 flip-phone that might last 6 months before the next phone trinket comes along that they want more so they ditch the $39.99 phone they just got, sign a 2 year contract and get the next $39.99 phone. Americans have become hungry for 'stuff' but not quality stuff it's about having more and paying less for it but more is no longer synonymous with quality it now equates to quantity. America has a serious problem and you can see it in the posts you describe. The demand that used to feed American families is now 1000's of miles away and off-shore laborers are struggling to keep up with volume of work 'we' used to do. They are coming to American forums and other American online resources to tap into American talent and try and put a false shine of quality on a low quality product or byte of code. Instead of blogging to the world about diluted code and questions developers should be writing senators, congressman and other electe
code-frog wrote:
I tend to think the real point is that consumers are getting more and more greedy about price and they care less and less about quality. So decent companies that used to hire American laborers coming from skilled and well known institutions now have to hire off-shore workers to meet the fickle demand of the American consumer. This of course dilutes the quality of the product and makes the fickle consumer my finicky about price.
I think the American corporation is as much the source of this problem as the consumer themselves. Take your cell phone example - a perfect area of planned obsolescence for the cell phone manufacturers. They don't BUILD your phones to last 2 years - if it does, that's because you take really, REALLY good care of it. They WANT it to fall apart after 6 months so that they can sell you another one, and if you're really lucky, you get to sign another 2 year contract so that your phone is actually affordable. Oh, but remember, you're going to get a phone that is severely disabled compared to the Asian or European model. No, Americans don't want those features, but they do want to pay a 30% premium on the price of the phone. Much of what we see and so much of the "finnicky-ness" of the American Consumer is purely an invention of companies attempting to guarantee their income stream.
code-frog wrote:
If Americans would be more willing to spend less often
You'd have companies shrieking and screaming about the imminent end of freedom and democracy as we know it. Seriously, you'd think that the idea of actually NOT BUYING the latest, greatest product was some sort of sin, talking to most of the "Joneses", and to your average consumer. "You're NOT going to buy the latest ___________? What's wrong with you?" Listen, really listen, to the next 10 commercials you see or hear. Listen to what they tell you. They don't tell you how wonderful their product is - they tell you how much you NEED it. These advertisements are created by people who spend whole careers studying brainwashing. They know the best way to make you buy something you really, really don't want to buy. And it works, better than most people suspect. The age of the honest buck is long past. Talking about honest software development is almost a contradiction in terms. But I digress into soapbox material. The problem is, the more "
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So says this article[^], citing none other than our CP forums as an example. What do you guys think, are newbies taking over software development?
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Back From Vacation The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
Trouble is CP is helping them, like Scott said just look at questions being posed in CP and people are answering them, yes I'll be happy to answer a question, but when the question begins "How to you assign an array in c#", well that deserves ridicule. One good thing is the technologies are sweeping that fast the code gimp don't have a chance to learn anything.
P Think of the environment; please don't print this message unless you really need to.
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Scott Dorman wrote:
The point was that people claiming to be professional developers and using the forums to solve their problems without first having put forth effort of their own.
I tend to think the real point is that consumers are getting more and more greedy about price and they care less and less about quality. So decent companies that used to hire American laborers coming from skilled and well known institutions now have to hire off-shore workers to meet the fickle demand of the American consumer. This of course dilutes the quality of the product and makes the fickle consumer my finicky about price. The 'dog eating it's tail' problem is that more off-shoring comes from Americans being less concerned about quality and more concerned about price. It's a vicious cycle that is causing massive decay in American skilled laborers and the sub-societies they belong to. (This is not a statement against the code quality of foreign laborers. There are many seriously talented Indian and Chinese skilled laborers. The point is that so much work is going off-shore that the off-shore labor pools are emptying too quickly and they need to fill them from somewhere to meet the demand. I know many skilled Indian and Chinese developers and I'm not questioning their skill nor am I trying to dilute it.) If Americans would be more willing to spend less often and pay more for quality we'd be in much better shape. Instead Americans cast aside quality for quantity and they don't buy one cell phone that should last for 2+ years easily instead they buy a $39.99 flip-phone that might last 6 months before the next phone trinket comes along that they want more so they ditch the $39.99 phone they just got, sign a 2 year contract and get the next $39.99 phone. Americans have become hungry for 'stuff' but not quality stuff it's about having more and paying less for it but more is no longer synonymous with quality it now equates to quantity. America has a serious problem and you can see it in the posts you describe. The demand that used to feed American families is now 1000's of miles away and off-shore laborers are struggling to keep up with volume of work 'we' used to do. They are coming to American forums and other American online resources to tap into American talent and try and put a false shine of quality on a low quality product or byte of code. Instead of blogging to the world about diluted code and questions developers should be writing senators, congressman and other electe
code-frog wrote:
If Americans would be more willing to [...] pay more for quality we'd be in much better shape.
Bingo. You have to hunt to find good milk, fruit, cheese, or meat. Good luck getting your car repaired by someone who actually knows how the thing works. Forget taking care of your possessions, just buy new ones. It comes down to attitude, and sure, there's plenty of blame to share with the ad-men, but snake-oil salesmen are nothing new - we've just made them our kings...
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Yes, but can you blame them for doing so if that's the only legal way they can hire programmers they want at the rate they can afford?
-- Nish on sketchy hiring practices
