TDD is BS?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 20:50:08 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 11:32:56PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 10:04:54 -0700
> > "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> > > 
> > > That's terrible. It encourages the kind of sloppy coding that
> > > makes so much "enterprise" code look nastier than what a
> > > highschool dropout writes in his sleep.
> > > 
> > 
> > I realize you're just using that as an illustrative example, but:
> [...]
> > Bottom line is, schools are absolute garbage, and academic
> > achievement is *at best* completely meaningless.
> [...]
> 
> I hit a nerve, didn't I? ;-)
> 

Heh ;)

> One of my previous supervisors told me that when he gets resumés, as
> soon as he sees "Ph.D" he chucks it straight into the trash.

Classic ;) I'd be likely to do the same.

And I have a friend who's moved up to a management position on a
University's IT dept and he's had similar experiences: When they hire,
they're expected to get their candidates via the HR dept (heh,
yea, right there you know things are gonna go wrong ;) ). And their
HR dept, as with most, makes their selections by blindly grepping for
the biggest degrees (they don't know any better - they're HR people!).
He's told me horror stories about how nearly all of the
big-degree candidates they send him turn out during interview to be
flat-out 100% incompetent.

> I have an
> MSc, and he almost did the same with my resumé until he saw that I
> did a lot of personal coding projects on the side, and contributed to
> open source projects. His reasons: (1) most CS grad students know too
> much theory but can't write any real code; (2) they're too
> opinionated to be able to work in a team.

I'm too opinionated *and* anti-social to be able to work in a team ;)

> He may have been a bit
> extreme, but then I've personally met CS grad students who knew more
> about uncomputable problems than computable ones... :-P  and the
> sight of their code makes me wanna wash my hands with detergent.
> 

When I was a freshman undergrad (at BGSU, near Toledo), I tinkered
around on the side with some PalmOS development. (PalmOS was still
around back then.) A couple years or so later, shortly after I'd
transferred out IIRC, I noticed on BGSU's Computer Science dept's
website that they were bragging - and I mean genuinely bragging - that
their genius *graduate* CS students had (*gasp!*) made software that ran
on a PalmOS device!

Which of course leads to the following lightbulb joke: How many
academic weenies does it take to install an off-the-shelf compiler, read
an API reference, and not be shown-up by the two year old shadow of a
degreeless freshman?