As many people and the Craftmanship idea talks about we need good mentorship / trainee models and practices. After learning the theory people need to train in real life environments before they become true developers. And the industry (management, customers, etc.) need to Listen to the experienced developers. And experienced developers needs to keep developing – not go over to management or vague architect positions.

Low quality can be fine in certain situations. Like if you need a website up and running, that will not live forever. But when creating systems that’s going to be maintained we need to let the experts rule.., developer who have proved that they can create maintainable solutions. Management often say they want quality, but they get affected by other conflicting concerns (or concerns that seam to be conflicting.., in the short term) – and this rubs off on the developers as well.

The young/new developers jump to implement the requirements quickly, disregarding long term quality. More experienced developers don’t want to look bad and are basically overruled by the young guns.

I’m currently moving from the young once to the old geezers. And I’m trying to find out how to make a difference, and make sure that as I’m slowing down and becoming more concerned about quality, the industry (or at least my company) moves with me. Time will tell how this goes…

-Mark

Education does not help either. The theory of computer science is not appreciated by either students or the industry. How many companies will reward you for knowing relational algebra and writing the right and efficient query -vs- knowing SQL syntax to just return results.

–> Shouldn’t education teach you what your responsibilities are as a developer or architect, what all of the different options are, instead of these low level knitty gritty details …

Education does not help either. The theory of computer science is not appreciated by either students or the industry. How many companies will reward you for knowing relational algebra and writing the right and efficient query -vs- knowing SQL syntax to just return results.

Once the demand moves towards better quality systems and not just “in time” and “on cost” system, things will change. No idea of when that will be ;-(

There was and still is an alternative: Smalltalk. It’s pure object oriented (it only has the concept of objects and messages). Most software technologies like refactoring browser, unit testing, UI programming in general was invented in Smalltalk. Eclipse was mainly developed by Smalltalkers, …

And the next revolution is again developed in Smalltalk: developing web applications on the server with full control on the workflow (including backtracking).
Have a look at http://www.seaside.st or search for “Seaside” and “continuations” if you are interested.

The interesting part is that Smalltalk is not a language – it’s a dynamic object oriented system. The language is implemented using messages and therefore easy to enhance. There are free MIT licensed development environments available like
Pharo http://www.pharo-project.org or Squeak for all major platforms and small devices. Even after 5 years Java and 2 years C# inbetween I have to say that Smalltalk is the most productive platform …

Commercial vendors include Cincom Smalltalk (VisualWorks) or Instantiations (VisualAge, formerly IBM), Dolphin Smalltalk for Windows, …

Since anything is based on objects and messages (with only 5 keywords to remember) my expericence from large insurance and automotive projects is that also people who are not developers are able to work with it. With true OO they can care about the problem to solve – and not on how to satisfy the compiler or remember stupid language features/notations, …

I would take Kilfour’s ‘basic economics’ argument one step further. As long as there are employers willing to hire programmers, ‘engineers’, etc simply because they are a wiz at the newest language or platform, without regard for their knowledge of the foundations of computer science, there will be substandard candidates lining up to fill these well compensated positions. It’s basic economics; if I can get a job that pays well and requires minimal education, why would I bother getting the education? Now there are obviously exceptions to this. Not all good engineers went to school and not all those who go to school become good engineers, but you can draw a straight line between those who have a solid understanding of the fundamentals of computer science and those who are or become good engineers.

This will resolve itself over time though. Currently the guys that are paying for the projects, learned about computers during their carreer and when something goes wrong, they assume it to be normal. There’s a generation coming for whom computers are a natural thing and they throw a program out the window for being slightly unresponsive (I’m thinking of my kids here ).

The next step will be the realization that it really should not take three weeks time and a huge budget to add sorting to a list control. Then budgets will get smaller and programmers will have to improve, or be out of a job.

If our industry were as strict as construction or medical …
It is if you’re developing a product for these areas. The SLA document for a medical piece of software is quite a chunk of bladibla. Acompanied by a zillion required documents that are supposed to increase quality. And they do… at the cost of time. There are less bugs when they go into production because they spend more time on testing in order to meet the SLA’s.
The quality of the code or coding however is not influenced. So certification is only partially usefull.

Education can be improved as it probably should be focusing more on Great Habits (K.Beck) than on languages, libraries, the current architectural hype of the moment, etc…, but I also think it is one of those subjects that don’t fit well into a classroom. Akin to music. You can learn how to play an instrument, but that’s not going to make you a good musician.
Personally, I never made it through the 4th year of secundary school, but I recon I can explain the Y combinator better than any of my university degree carrying co-workers.

Such an official entity never states how you should do your job, you can still follow any shool of thought imho. It just defines the minimal criteria that you should adhere to and will hold you personally accountable if you don’t reach them…

the way to achieve quality has always been a highly debated topic, who’s to say who’s right? and what if the people you happen to disagree with are the ones who get to enforce their viewpoints?

What I actually want to say is that the accountability factor, would force our industry in a different mindset and force everyone to pay more attention to the quality of the product they produce. The entire craftsman idea is nice, if everyone would be a craftsman… but the truth is that most people are only looking for easy money and nothing else…

Just simply a community that says it shouldn’t be that way, even though that community is right, will not change the way the majority of the people think… something official should be forced upon to our industry, through the governement probably, that forces everyone to create quality work…

as for having to study… some of the best developers i know do not have a degree in software development. some of the worst developers i know do have a fancy degree. drastic improvement in the level of quality of education in this field could improve things, but i would never really expect a developer to have a certain degree before i’d be willing to trust said developer.

also, keep in mind that many of the educational facilities are influenced _a lot_ by what the large vendors are pushing into the market. the vendors are most definitely a very guilty party in this.

I think the true cause of this is not the vendors, as selling stuff is what they do and should do.

In my opinion it’s the lack of real certification and good education. If our industry were as strict as construction or medical, where someone has to sign a building plan or give authorisation for a surgery etc… and is actually accountable for it. That would solve most of these problems. And.. you would actually have to study before you are allowed to sign. How many people in our industry did not even study anything IT related, it’s just outrageous…