Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html

  As I have commented previously somewhere, I have heard about this here
as well. What's worse, at least in the past companies actually hired people
for programming positions just on the basis that those people *claimed* to
be competent programmers even though they hadn't ever written a single line
of code.

  Why do people apply to programming jobs even though they have no experience
whatsoever? My guess is that their rationale goes like: "I need a job badly.
Programming is really easy; heck, even kids can do it, so how hard can it be?
I'll ensure the job first, and learn the programming part later. It'll
probably take just a week or two."

  On a side note, interviewers should, on the other hand, be careful with
what they consider "trivial" assignments. Sometimes a problem might sound
quite easy and trivial, when in fact it isn't.

  As an example, the basic principle between binary searching (searching an
element in a sorted array in O(log n) time) sounds quite trivial. However,
it's surprisingly difficult to implement correctly.

  Take 100 experienced, competent programmers and give them the task of
implementing binary search on paper in the programming language they are
most fluent with, and perhaps 5 of them will give you a correct
implementation. (The rest will fail in some cases mostly due to off-by-one
errors.) A correct implementation requires surprising amounts of attention
to detail, and a quick&dirty naive implementation will most probably be
incorrect. And this for a piece of program that requires maybe 10 lines of
code at most.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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