[PRL] The latest from Joel

[Felix S Klock II]

Mitch-

[RANT #1:]

Joel is a lazy interviewer.

If Joel want to test the ability of his interviewee, asking them to  
implement a Hashtable in Java won't cut it.

So Joel needs to adjust his problem space appropriately.  Instead of  
asking for a Hashtable, perhaps he should ask for a persistent map,  
providing the students with an appropriate (functional) interface (or  
without the interface, if he wants to test their vocabulary skills).  
Perhaps he should ask for a bitstring-based set representation.

[RANT #2a:]

Joel correctly identifies the real goal here: programmers need a  
"certain ability to reason, to think in abstractions, and, most  
importantly, to view a problem at several levels of abstraction  
simultaneously."  But then he makes the conclusion that because an  
all-Java degree leaves out pointers and recursion, it has left out  
those other capabilities as well.  That is totally ridiculous; the  
school, not the language, is to blame for this.

It is the fault of the college teachers that are not adjusting their  
curriculums with more difficult programming assignments to force the  
students to do the bit-packing, or to share state between data  
structures, or to come up with clever data representations.  I can't  
help with getting segfaults back into the curriculum though (a shame  
about those darn safe languages).

[RANT #2b:]

And Joel says that he's wrestling with this because he "can't tell if  
they're struggling with these problems because they are undereducated  
or if they're struggling with these problems because they don't  
actually have that special part of the brain that they're going to  
need to do great programming work."  Umm, what's the big problem with  
not hiring the student either way?  I mean, it is sad that the  
student didn't get the education that he paid for, but that is not  
Joel's problem to solve.  He's going to have to choose between cheap  
labor from untrusted sources or expensive scare labor from  
elsewhere.  Okay, maybe I just answered my own question.

-Felix