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Date:      Mon, 2 Sep 1996 13:29:36 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        kpneal@pobox.com (Kevin P. Neal)
Cc:        terry@lambert.org, nate@mt.sri.com, richmond@cronus.oanet.com, sos@freebsd.org, durham@phaeton.artisoft.com, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Specs on a Hitachi CM2085me monitor anybody ??
Message-ID:  <199609022029.NAA02949@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <1.5.4.32.19960901180245.006975f8@mindspring.com> from "Kevin P. Neal" at Sep 1, 96 02:02:45 pm

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> Worse: There are a BUNCH of "A" students here at NCSU in CSC. They make
> A's in all or most of their classes. Yet if you question them, they don't
> know their head from a hole in the ground. 

[ ... horror story #1 ... ]

[ ... horror story #2 ... ]

> You want professionals? Heh. Don't move down to this area then, our "best"
> students suck by and large. I really need to graduate and get the heck out
> of here. 

As long as they teach them how to say "would you like fries with that?",
I have no problem with otherwise low academic standards.

People who do what you describe are getting their degrees in the same
way that one gets a union card: as a means to an (unrelated) end.  They
go through the motions in order to elicit the desired result; if they
achieve any understanding of what the motions mean, it's accidental.

These people have wonderful potential for employment in the food service
industry.


> We live in the era of "good enough" software. It doesn't have to be great,
> and bug-free, it just has to be enough for most people. Sucks, huh?

I refuse to lower my standards for anyone.  The big joke about software
engineering is you ask a software engineer "can you do this?", and if
you wait long enough for your answer, it will always be "yes".  But if
you examine the joke, the roots of the humor are in the asker ignoring
the qualifications implied on the "yes".  Unless you have comedic intent,
there are time when you must take your listener into account and answer
"no", because you know the listener will not hear the qualifications.

When I go into projects today, and it is clear that the time constraints
may be arbitrarily changed on me, I intentionally architect the soloution
to be disassembled on component boundries.  This lets the time table
change, and instead of compromising the overall architecture, I compromise
the feature set.  This is something I can undo, if given more time; on the
other hand, I would have a hell of a time undoing a compromise on the
architecture at a later time without a total rewrite.  It's a hell of a
lot easier to add a spellchecking component back into a word processor
at a later date than it is to "add back in" internationalization hooks
that were compromised out of the first rev.

> Besides, increasing code reusability doesn't help much in *this* project,
> it's the *next* project that it helps in. Who thinks long term? (sarcasm)

People who want their stock options to have value when they mature?
Money is a great lever to use to force people to do what they should
do the first time around.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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