"Compare our industry to Medicine and Law. It's actually illegal for people who aren't doctors or lawyer to dispense medical advice or legal advice."
Dispensing bad medical advice can result in serious injury or death. Dispensing bad legal advice can result in long prison sentences. Writing bad software wastes time and costs money. Industries where software CAN kill people are more stringent with their development and hiring practices because of their liabilities.
"Oh, I know lots will cringe at the thought of that. I know the thought is that stuff like this subsidizes crappy coders through artificial scarcity."
We all know that good programmers are scarce. The reason we cringe is because no one knows of a good method to draw the line between good programmer, and not-good-enough programmer, in a world where programmers do so many different domain-specific things.
"I see so many people without a background in programming write poorly architected code that performs like a dog and just breaks... it breaks because some wanabe hacker just jumped in and started hacking without knowing wtf (s)he was doing and it ends up costing the company paying for the work more money later on."
This is how people get their background in programming, by writing poorly architected code, watching it perform like a dog and break, and then fixing those issues. That is what gaining experience looks like. Companies that hire inexperienced junior level programmers and trust them with large architectural decisions have made a managerial mistake, do not blame the novice programmer for this.
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And on open source
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Much of open source revolves around building and maintaining tools that support people in our trade. Having open libraries, operating systems, servers, text editors, compilers, etc, helps everyone out there be more a more productive software developer. Other professionals also look out for each other and work collectively to advance their profession generally. We are no different, it just happens that due to the nature of our field, we have much more powerful mechanisms to do so at our disposal.
Comments
Just some quick responses:
"Compare our industry to Medicine and Law. It's actually illegal for people who aren't doctors or lawyer to dispense medical advice or legal advice."
Dispensing bad medical advice can result in serious injury or death. Dispensing bad legal advice can result in long prison sentences. Writing bad software wastes time and costs money. Industries where software CAN kill people are more stringent with their development and hiring practices because of their liabilities.
"Oh, I know lots will cringe at the thought of that. I know the thought is that stuff like this subsidizes crappy coders through artificial scarcity."
We all know that good programmers are scarce. The reason we cringe is because no one knows of a good method to draw the line between good programmer, and not-good-enough programmer, in a world where programmers do so many different domain-specific things.
"I see so many people without a background in programming write poorly architected code that performs like a dog and just breaks... it breaks because some wanabe hacker just jumped in and started hacking without knowing wtf (s)he was doing and it ends up costing the company paying for the work more money later on."
This is how people get their background in programming, by writing poorly architected code, watching it perform like a dog and break, and then fixing those issues. That is what gaining experience looks like. Companies that hire inexperienced junior level programmers and trust them with large architectural decisions have made a managerial mistake, do not blame the novice programmer for this.
--- And on open source ---
Much of open source revolves around building and maintaining tools that support people in our trade. Having open libraries, operating systems, servers, text editors, compilers, etc, helps everyone out there be more a more productive software developer. Other professionals also look out for each other and work collectively to advance their profession generally. We are no different, it just happens that due to the nature of our field, we have much more powerful mechanisms to do so at our disposal.