I'm pretty sure it's not because I'm getting old ...
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OriginalGriff wrote:
I can't decide if he's unbelievably lazy, too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time, or a troll
Someone new to programming is, well, new to programming. Nothing is obvious when one has never programmed before. With decades of experience with multiple languages it becomes easier to guess at solutions and also much easier to know how to write a google search string that will produce a correct answer. Or any answer.
Jschell, well said about "new to programming". I can remember my early days were a grand exploration of logic. Got hooked. When I look back at old code its like looking into my mind from the past and thinking "what was I thinking?". Both good and bad code.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day" Badfinger
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At my level of experience I always expect that now. I will ask a colleague to look at the code with me knowing that as I explain the problem to them and show them the code that I will figure out the solution myself.
THis is, of course, the real benefit of pair programming. My (admittedly limited) experience of how pair programming works in large orgs is that it is competition, not collaboration. Which makes it less than helpful.
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THis is, of course, the real benefit of pair programming. My (admittedly limited) experience of how pair programming works in large orgs is that it is competition, not collaboration. Which makes it less than helpful.
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Soon to be followed by: "How to update record?"
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I made up a type of pair programming, where we share the screen over zoom, and I only watch / help whenever they have a question. Does the same thing, but I can get work done in the downtime, and we don't have to schedule stuff.
That sounds very sensible. I went to an job interview once at a big gov. - supposedly 'agile' - dev place. I was given a pair programming task to write a test for a function, using tools I was already very familiar with. As soon as I sat at the keyboard I could see a glaring error in the function I was supposedly testing (an uninitialised variable in a language that enforces initialisation), so not only would the test fail, the code wouldn't even compile. My pair stopped me correcting that error until I had written a test that showed the function failing - which of course couldn't be done because the code wouldn't compile. I wasn't offered the job, as I wasn't a good fit for their culture... 8)
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At my level of experience I always expect that now. I will ask a colleague to look at the code with me knowing that as I explain the problem to them and show them the code that I will figure out the solution myself.
You don't even need a human. I find explaining things to my cat can have the same effect.
<°}}}>«<
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I have a better one, the assignment includes the following:
Quote:
check if the key schoolHours is true, and if it is, set the key playtime to true
So I suggested he needs an
ifclause:Quote:
Thanks for your answer. Please what goes inside the if () {
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... but some of the QA questions just make me want to hit something / someone. No links, no names ... but he has code like this:
if(a>0) { MessageBox.Show("DATA SAVE SUCESSSFULLY"); }And he wants me to add this for him, because he can't work it out:
else
{
MessageBox.Show("RECORD ALREADY EXISTS");
}I can't decide if he's unbelievably lazy, too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time, or a troll ... :omg:
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
It's hard to tell from the lack of context, but it appears as if your user is asking for feedback that the operation is over and that they should not repeatedly execute the event (such as push a button) to attempt to make your software work. Modern software is asynchronous and with the limited context, it seems like a very reasonable request to know when your operation has completed. I guess back in the day the UI thread would block while you were running your database update code on your UI thread and the fact that the application is now responsive again would tell you that the operation has completed and just didn't do anything.
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You don't even need a human. I find explaining things to my cat can have the same effect.
<°}}}>«<
Also known as Rubber Duck Debugging. One of the most useful programming techniques I've ever learned.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. - Douglas Adams
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... but some of the QA questions just make me want to hit something / someone. No links, no names ... but he has code like this:
if(a>0) { MessageBox.Show("DATA SAVE SUCESSSFULLY"); }And he wants me to add this for him, because he can't work it out:
else
{
MessageBox.Show("RECORD ALREADY EXISTS");
}I can't decide if he's unbelievably lazy, too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time, or a troll ... :omg:
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
People with two years of high school classes who have done some "HTML programming" and have Google are professionals now. So interviewing a candidate I sketch out some simple thing, usually on a white board, to write. It would take you and I less than a minute thought, take longer to write out than think out. New programmer should get it. You know, "sort three integers" or "which of three is greatest", etc. Don't worry about coding, I really want to hear how they think it out. So I had one guy say to me "I can do this if I am hired - I don't really want to give my labor away". Then he was puzzled when I immediately stood up and thanked him for coming in and said "I'll consider you for the position" and he was OK with that... I considered him till I got him just past the front desk. Arrogant 25 year old "professional". No, not because we are getting old.
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dandy72 wrote:
the world's population is going up, while the average IQ is a constant.
It's actually the total IQ that is constant; the average is therefore going down! :-\
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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I have a better one, the assignment includes the following:
Quote:
check if the key schoolHours is true, and if it is, set the key playtime to true
So I suggested he needs an
ifclause:Quote:
Thanks for your answer. Please what goes inside the if () {
Back in my Fortran days, I found this. (I don't remember the variable names.)
IF FLAG1 .EQ. .TRUE. THEN
FLAG1 = .FALSE.
FLAG2 = .TRUE.
ELSE
FLAG2 = .FALSE.
END IFI replaced it with two lines that I thought were obvious:
FLAG2 = FLAG1
FLAG1 = .FALSE.I made plenty of other changes, and the manager in charge of the codebase thanked me for "cleaning it up." (This happened almost forty years ago when 10 MHz processors had only been around a few years.)
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It's hard to tell from the lack of context, but it appears as if your user is asking for feedback that the operation is over and that they should not repeatedly execute the event (such as push a button) to attempt to make your software work. Modern software is asynchronous and with the limited context, it seems like a very reasonable request to know when your operation has completed. I guess back in the day the UI thread would block while you were running your database update code on your UI thread and the fact that the application is now responsive again would tell you that the operation has completed and just didn't do anything.
Nope, this is just a "INSERT to DB" followed by a test to see if it worked. Retries haven't occurred to him yet ... and I suspect Console rather than UI given his skill level.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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People with two years of high school classes who have done some "HTML programming" and have Google are professionals now. So interviewing a candidate I sketch out some simple thing, usually on a white board, to write. It would take you and I less than a minute thought, take longer to write out than think out. New programmer should get it. You know, "sort three integers" or "which of three is greatest", etc. Don't worry about coding, I really want to hear how they think it out. So I had one guy say to me "I can do this if I am hired - I don't really want to give my labor away". Then he was puzzled when I immediately stood up and thanked him for coming in and said "I'll consider you for the position" and he was OK with that... I considered him till I got him just past the front desk. Arrogant 25 year old "professional". No, not because we are getting old.
WPerkins wrote:
I can do this if I am hired - I don't really want to give my labor away
This is because we all sit around writing apps to calculate factorials, or do bubble sorts on ten items and get paid for it ... :laugh:
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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That sounds very sensible. I went to an job interview once at a big gov. - supposedly 'agile' - dev place. I was given a pair programming task to write a test for a function, using tools I was already very familiar with. As soon as I sat at the keyboard I could see a glaring error in the function I was supposedly testing (an uninitialised variable in a language that enforces initialisation), so not only would the test fail, the code wouldn't even compile. My pair stopped me correcting that error until I had written a test that showed the function failing - which of course couldn't be done because the code wouldn't compile. I wasn't offered the job, as I wasn't a good fit for their culture... 8)
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... but some of the QA questions just make me want to hit something / someone. No links, no names ... but he has code like this:
if(a>0) { MessageBox.Show("DATA SAVE SUCESSSFULLY"); }And he wants me to add this for him, because he can't work it out:
else
{
MessageBox.Show("RECORD ALREADY EXISTS");
}I can't decide if he's unbelievably lazy, too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time, or a troll ... :omg:
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
I'll add debug logging for ELSE conditions so I explicitly know which way an IF statement resolved when I look at the logs. When messaging, not so much. But then again, we just had a QA today that created 4 order number templates that were exact duplicates and then was wondering why a duplicate order number message was appearing when he created orders while switching back and forth between the templates. I don't think anything beats the junior Dev that thought their Unicode issue was caused by the font being used.
Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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... but some of the QA questions just make me want to hit something / someone. No links, no names ... but he has code like this:
if(a>0) { MessageBox.Show("DATA SAVE SUCESSSFULLY"); }And he wants me to add this for him, because he can't work it out:
else
{
MessageBox.Show("RECORD ALREADY EXISTS");
}I can't decide if he's unbelievably lazy, too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time, or a troll ... :omg:
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Lazy and dumb are not mutually exclusive... ;) but given it is one of those unlikely to be a troll. You should see what I get in my Data Structures college course. I emphasize to them it is not their fault up to now because prior professors have not required even minimal standards, but it IS their fault from this moment forward because now I have explained to them how the real world will look at their efforts.
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... but some of the QA questions just make me want to hit something / someone. No links, no names ... but he has code like this:
if(a>0) { MessageBox.Show("DATA SAVE SUCESSSFULLY"); }And he wants me to add this for him, because he can't work it out:
else
{
MessageBox.Show("RECORD ALREADY EXISTS");
}I can't decide if he's unbelievably lazy, too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time, or a troll ... :omg:
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Griff, My first response was lazy, but I'd have to go with dumb. Lazy was based on it being easier to ask someone to do it for you, but dumb because posting the question takes longer than a quick search on how to write an if statement. Nothing wrong with not knowing how to do something, but asking something that would be found on your first search engine query is pathetic. Then again, the premise of the conditional is completely wrong. "Record Exists" is not an "else" to a successful DB insert.
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I chalk this up to those moments when something is so obvious but I can't see it. I remember one time having to bang my head against a wall. Gave up and asked team for advice. setup in conference room to review where I was having issues. as soon as I looked at it in the conference room. I could then "see" the issue and fixed it in moments. I think these users are sometimes having that sort of well brain fart moment.
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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WPerkins wrote:
I can do this if I am hired - I don't really want to give my labor away
This is because we all sit around writing apps to calculate factorials, or do bubble sorts on ten items and get paid for it ... :laugh:
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
I have just written a utility in C (not C++, not C#, etc.). Created my own link list to build a dynamic "array", add by key, accumulate duplicates by key, sort by key, display accumulated summary. Some of the younger guys were amazed one could do that in C from scratch... not a single "new", no framework. Total size around 40K bytes.
