Sunday, May 29, 2005
Incompetence Considered Harmful
Great post by Jeff Atwood on the competency paradox — the least competent people are the ones most likely to erroneously think they are competent. As Jeff points out, this certainly applies to software development. We're not talking about newbies. They lack training and experience. We're talking about software developers with many years of experience who grind out God-awful code — and have no idea that their code stinks. How did this happen? How is it allowed to continue? Posting samples of their bad code to The Daily WTF may be amusing to others but it doesn't help. Additional training or guidance often doesn't help either. As Jeff says in the comments:But this takes good technical management. It can be difficult to get managers to understand that there's a problem. To management, the person appears productive; possibly more productive than co-workers.
... the guys or gals writing Daily WTF code samples don't need to be trained to be better-- they need to be trained in order to recognize that they should probably find a new line of work
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