Warp wrote:

>   I have a theory: People with real talent (and experience) for programming
> are often very poor at politics and diplomacy, which is the reason why they
> seldom end up in high positions in a company. And vice-versa: People which
> are good at politics and diplomacy (read: good at speaking BS) are often
> not very talented nor experienced in programming.
> 
>   The typical "boss" is the latter type of person who, for some strange
> reason, thinks he is a talented programmer.

I agree. The current Director of IT is, IMHO, pretty rubbish with 
computers. But DAMN does he know exactly how to play the corporate 
politics game.

But hey, these people must get into management some how. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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scott wrote:

> Hehe yeh, but it's not like every company where things Just Work write 
> to the WTF and say "hey, here's one more company that's running fine 
> thanks". The boss of my department has a PhD and numerous papers 
> published on the exact subject we work on, and is usually involved 
> directly in some of the more important customer projects as the expert.

Oh thank God - you mean there *are* companies that work properly? I 
truly hope to end up working for one. Preferably soon!

> People don't just "end up in management", they either are promoted or 
> recruited.  I presume the sort of people you talk about are directly 
> recruited, so I guess that's a failing in the recruitment process if 
> they're not very good.

My thoughts precisely.

If the people doing recruitment don't know anything about computers, how 
the hell are they supposed to hire good people?

OTOH, some get there through promotion [or being the person who 
originally founded the company]. These people are typically rubbish with 
computers, but excellent at politics...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Thu, 15 May 2008 22:15:19 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>> Hehe yeh, but it's not like every company where things Just Work write
>> to the WTF and say "hey, here's one more company that's running fine
>> thanks". The boss of my department has a PhD and numerous papers
>> published on the exact subject we work on, and is usually involved
>> directly in some of the more important customer projects as the expert.
> 
> Oh thank God - you mean there *are* companies that work properly? I
> truly hope to end up working for one. Preferably soon!

Well, people have a tendency to complain rather than praise, so yeah. ;-)

Jim

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Invisible wrote:
> All I know is that The Daily WTF is *replete* with examples of companies
> where the MD or something wrote the original version of the company's
> product, but he can't actually code his way out of a paper bag, but he
> still likes to "show the beginners how a real expert does it" from time
> to time. And the real programmers end up going to extraordinary lengths
> to keep the bosses away from the build system.

I wonder if Bill Gates can code his way out of a paper bag nowadays?

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> I wonder if Bill Gates can code his way out of a paper bag nowadays?

You think he could originally??

As I understand it, every product his name has ever been associated with 
was actually stolen from somebody or other...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> > I wonder if Bill Gates can code his way out of a paper bag nowadays?

> You think he could originally??

  Bill Gates was a computer programmer in the 70's and participated in
developing, among other things, a BASIC interpreter.

  (However, how *competent* as a programmer he was is another question.)

> As I understand it, every product his name has ever been associated with 
> was actually stolen from somebody or other...

  Do you have any hard evidence of this? For example on that BASIC
interpreter.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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In article <482d4273@news.povray.org>, war### [at] tagpovrayorg says...
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 
> > > I wonder if Bill Gates can code his way out of a paper bag nowadays?
> 
> > You think he could originally??
> 
>   Bill Gates was a computer programmer in the 70's and participated in
> developing, among other things, a BASIC interpreter.
> 
>   (However, how *competent* as a programmer he was is another question.)
> 
> > As I understand it, every product his name has ever been associated wit
h 
> > was actually stolen from somebody or other...
> 
>   Do you have any hard evidence of this? For example on that BASIC
> interpreter.
> 
Not hard to write one of those really. I could manage it, and frankly, I 
am not that great a programmer. I know people at age 12-13 that managed 
to use Apple IIs to do stuff that blew my mind, and I thought at the 
time, while taking the same class, that I was a major hotshot (until I 
saw what they managed). But seriously, we do know, from the history of 
things, that their first OS was basically gotten from someone else, and 
while they had to write a "boot loader" for it at the last minute, its 
kind of unclear if Gate or him partner did that, and again, bootloaders 
are not that big a deal. I wrote something similar not long ago while 
trying to figure out how the hell the encoding worked on "protected" 
Apple II disks for a game. I managed to write something that could read 
normal disks fine, but never could figure out what differed in the code 
for the loader used by the game.

I haven't seen a lot to suggest Gates was extraordinary at all at 
programming, or, for that matter, that the people he hired where, for 
the most part, great programmers either, instead of just real good at 
adapting stuff other people already came up with. Evidence is hard to 
come by though, when such a great amount of time has passed, and the 
only people that "know" if he was good at it, or bad at it, have no 
reason to tell the truth (or even remember correctly). But, I am not 
going to give him credit for being a Linus Trivald, given that Gates 
didn't even *invent* the first OS he sold to IBM. Compared to even the 
stuff Apple II people had to do to crap their code onto a disk and run 
it, DOS and the rest didn't need to be well designed, efficient, 
complex, or even smart (the BIOS did most of the hard lifting, while on 
an Apple II you often had to *code* sections of what would be BIOS on a 
PC by hand, to "fit" in the memory you had available, thus the code I 
fiddled with to "load" data from disk and decode it.)

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> >   Do you have any hard evidence of this? For example on that BASIC
> > interpreter.
> > 
> Not hard to write one of those really.

  OTOH, it was the 70's. They didn't have fancy multimedia computers,
full-screen text editors with integrated compilers and such back then.

  I'm not saying Gates was a talented programmer. I was just doubting
the claim that he has *never* produced anything original.

> But seriously, we do know, from the history of 
> things, that their first OS was basically gotten from someone else

  DOS 1 may have been based on someone else's code which they bought,
but if I'm not completely mistaken all further improvements to it were
made in house. DOS 7 looks quite a lot different from DOS 1.

  Did MS buy Windows 1-3 from someone else, or did they develop it in
house? If I'm not completely mistaken, at least Win95 was purely MS
developed.
  (WinXP is probably a bit more complicated because the kernel of NT
was not originally developed by MS, and WinXP is at least partially
based on that old kernel, although probably hugely improved.)

>, and 
> while they had to write a "boot loader" for it at the last minute, its 
> kind of unclear if Gate or him partner did that, and again, bootloaders 
> are not that big a deal.

  Again, it's not a question of whether he was competent and talented,
but whether he produced anything original or "stole everything from
others".

> I haven't seen a lot to suggest Gates was extraordinary at all at 
> programming

  There are some accounts about his talents. For example I faintly
remember a story about a library indexing system he helped to develop
or something like that.

  He was definitely a programming nerd back in the 70's. I just am not
sure how competent and talented he really was.

  (Another tidbit says that he once has said that the best way to learn
programming is to take program source code which others have written and
study them. IMO this is approximately the *worst* possible way to learn
programming.)

> But, I am not 
> going to give him credit for being a Linus Trivald

  Torvalds.

> given that Gates 
> didn't even *invent* the first OS he sold to IBM.

  One could argue that Torvalds didn't "invent" linux because he based
its design on an existing OS: Unix. (Torvalds' original motivation was
that basically all usable OSes back then were commercial and he just
wanted to make a free alternative, which was more or less compatible
with Unix operating systems.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Fri, 16 May 2008 16:16:53 -0400, Warp wrote:

>   I'm not saying Gates was a talented programmer. I was just doubting
> the claim that he has *never* produced anything original.

According to the wikipedia article, Gates and Allen wrote an Altair 
emulator, and then implemented a BASIC interpreter on top of it.  That 
was in or around 1975.  BASIC itself first appeared in computing in 1964.

So Gates didn't invent BASIC, but rather just implemented it as part of a 
team.  The thing that it seems he was directly involved in at that stage 
that was significant was the construction of the emulator for the Altair 
8800.

According to the article, he reviewed every line of code written in the 
first 5 years of Microsoft's history, and rewrote what he saw fit to 
rewrite.  He also was responsible for overseeing the business details.

Jim

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> So Gates didn't invent BASIC

  I never said he did. I just said that he wrote a BASIC interpreter
(without "stealing" it from anywhere).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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