Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On the other hand, there certainly *are* some really awful programmers 
> who outwardly appear to "get the job done faster" by writing really 
> terrible code. Measuring programmer performance by how quickly they 
> "deliver" a "solution" is almost as stupid as measuring it my LoC.

> In short, I think both points of view are valid. As to which one 
> predominates... well, I personally am in *no* position to make an 
> authoritative statement about that! ;-) But judging by some of the guys 
> I graduated with... hmm, I think incompetent is probably more prevalent. :-S

  Having heard second-hand accounts about real production-level commercial
software from very reliable sources, the common trend in the software and
web development industry is that code is usually an absolutely awful pile
of ugly hacks over older hacks, and that it's usually a miracle that it
works in the first place.
  In other words, clearly the work of people without proper programming
expertise.

  It's considered *normal* in many companies that implementing a feature
takes several months, and if a competent programmer implements it in a
week it causes a jaw-dropping effect. Bosses usually don't have the
slightest idea about how long a specific features should really take
to implement. (Often it goes both ways: Features which are small and
can be cleanly and efficiently implemented in a few days may be implemented
by incompetent programmers in several months, and no boss even wonders
about it. Yet some features which truely require many months to fully
implement even by a team of competent expert programmers might have
completely insane deadline requirements.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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