TDD is BS?

[John Colvin]

On Friday, 21 June 2013 at 20:25:28 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 09:49:21PM +0200, John Colvin wrote:
>> On Friday, 21 June 2013 at 19:14:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> >On 6/20/2013 8:50 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> >>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.
>> >
>> >He'd have missed out on Andrei, then.
>> 
>> And a lot of other people who are driven towards new ideas.
>> 
>> There's a fair amount of inverted snobbery about academia here.
>> 
>> Ultimately, a PhD shows the ability to conduct original 
>> research and
>> present it. It doesn't make you a great programmer, but then 
>> again
>> *it never purports to*. Nor does a computer science degree.
>
> According to my ex-supervisor (and I'm not saying I agree with 
> him), it
> indicates that one is opinionated enough to originate ideas, and
> stubborn enough to successfully defend said ideas, which can be
> detrimental in a team setting if the idea wasn't a good one.  
> (And since
> a PhD doesn't purport to make you a great programmer, and he 
> was looking
> for great programmers rather than researchers, that could be a 
> reason
> for his views on the matter.)
>
>
>> If you want a normal programming job, you need to show more 
>> real
>> world experience than a PhD, but just throwing out people who 
>> have
>> proved their originality and in depth understanding of a topic
>> through a PhD is nothing short of absurd.
>
> Well, my ex-supervisor *did* have a reputation of having many
> "interesting" (i.e. extreme) ideas about many things. :) I 
> can't say I
> subscribe to his views on this matter, but what I was trying to 
> get at
> was the prevalent fallacious fixation on academic achievement 
> (i.e.
> equating "he has good grades / a degree / a PhD" with "he is a 
> good
> programmer").  Too many potential employers can't see beyond 
> that, or
> are not willing / don't have the time and energy to do so, thus
> resulting in the situation where people are being hired because 
> of their
> academic achievement, but are expected to have skills not 
> necessarily
> implied by said achievement. Then when such hires consistently 
> produce
> sub-par work, some people get provoked to equate "PhD" with 
> "poor
> programming skills".
>
> This situation wouldn't have developed if employers evaluated 
> candidates
> based on their *skills* rather than by the credentials on 
> paper.  But in
> this day and age where time is never enough, it's all too 
> convenient to
> dismiss a candidate because he has no academic credentials 
> rather than
> to spend the time / energy to review unlikely candidates on the
> off-chance that perhaps they might turn out to be hidden 
> programming
> prodigies. Or to blindly hire a candidate *with* said 
> credentials
> because someone of high academic standing is likely to be 
> skillful
> enough to do the job, rather than to spend to time / energy to 
> check if
> this is actually the case. (Not to mention that all too often, 
> the ones
> with hiring powers may not necessarily have the ability to 
> discern real
> skills from a smooth talker.)
>
>
> T

Agreed on all points.

As an aside: what defines a "good programmer"  is of course 
dependant on the task. Many academics do write effective code, 
quite quickly, and get a lot of quite convoluted work done by 
coding.

E.g. I would (entirely hypothetically) happily hire a physics PhD 
to write high-level data-analysis routines in python, but i'd be 
wary of getting them to work on a high security web-app. On the 
flip side, I would be wary of hiring an enthusiastic college 
dropout to write an accurate fluid simulation, but they might 
easily fit the definition of "good programmer" for extending a 
web framework.