Re: New-Gen "IT" People ... Think DISASTER

Loosely(?) related:

Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc) Preventing the Collapse of Civilization /

I have renamed IT to DIT. DisInformation technology.

-- If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joseph Goebbels

I work in a very small team, but I'll supply another counterexample. There's a new guy on the team I work in. He was hired right out of college. I think it has been less than two years that he has been on the team. He was sharp to begin with, but at this point his skills have sharpened to the point that if the two of us were interviewing for the same job, I'd give him better than even odds.

I know there are still many "real programmers". The ISSUE is that they're no longer in the biz/service ranks. This has been taken over by M$/Apple/Goog supplicants who don't know much beyond how to spend more $$$ with those corps for their wunnerful (now mostly cloud/pay-per-byte) offerings.

But ... how COMMON is this ???

Most biz/etc these days want 'cloud app' experts who are only good at finding/negotiating licenses with a few Big Tech entities.

This is what I'VE seen.

And they don't know DICK about computers, only about those rip-off 'services'.

Oh well, won't be long before China/Russia/etc make that 'cloud' seriously unreliable. THEN what ? Backup plans ? NONE !

S*it, three recent applicants didn't even know what DHCP was for/did ... and yet ALMOST made the cut ....

'Dilbert' was prophecy.

And I retired at JUST the right time .....

There are programmers/system-people who are MUCH better than I am - the geeks who burn a gram+ of caffeine and 2000 cals of sugar doughnuts every day. In my time IT was mostly self-taught. You started with PETSs/VICs/Atari's/C64s and found it all out on your own. College-level was WAY too abstract for most practical uses beyond mainframes at NASA. HATED punch-cards.

Some of the Linux mags of the past had articles by Linus's kernel guys - showed how DEEP it gets. Also showed how Linus would fight to keep things sane and consistent.

HOW many today have EVER done assembler-level programming ? Know ANYTHING about how cpu's memory, peripherials, talk to each other ? S*it, how many know what an OS actually DOES ? They exist, fer sure, but they're mostly no longer where they're most NEEDED - out in the pubic ranks, innovating, keeping it sane.

Well, that's become a significant part of it :-)

But not the whole thing.

I'm more worried about the private/corp/govt shops where nobody seems to KNOW anything about computers or programming or much of ANYTHING anymore beyond how to spend big $$$ with M$ or Goog or Apple for some neo metered client/server model from the 60s/70s.

ENEMIES, real enemies, are keen to - and likely now CAN - take that s*it DOWN in an instant if the poop ever hits the proverbial propeller. Too many of the New Guys have NO contingency plans other than to blame M$ and friends.

"Not MY fault !"

Yes, it IS your fault ... and that of the pointy- haired bosses who hired you ...........

Agreed, we’ve had some excellent graduate hires over the last couple of years. If anything it’s been harder to hire good people into the more senior roles than junior.

Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones, oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize it’s all hot air.

Nah I'm sticking around for a few more years yet, it's still fun.

That went out of fashion some time ago, when people finally realised that you don't get more done that way. The BASIC for the Camputers Lynx was written by someone like that 16K of Z80 Assembler and *NO* meaningful comments. It worked but it was completely unmaintainable.

Sounds like your time was a little after mine, but not much.

The computer science I learned at college has stood me in good stead ever since.

There are surviving complaints about the deficiencies of the youth of today from Roman times.

Yes, but the Romans were probably right when complaining about the youth being bad programmers.

Same here. Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!), went straight into a one of ICL's computer bureaus (ICL 1902 mainframe where I was taught assembler and wrote that for 2-3 years before we switched to COBOL and using the George 3 OS in the late '60s. Mostly wrote that on 1900s and 2900s until I joined Logica in the mid 80s (so got into using fault-tolerant kit: Tandem, Stratus, as well as minicomputers NCR Unix and IBM AS/400s until Logica imploded in 2001.

Learning Algol 60 followed by COBOL as my first programming languages almost certainly gave me a better grounding in designing, writing and implementing systems in well-structured code than learning BASIC as my first language would have. I'm certain that it also helped me get into database design and implementation to have done that in a 2900 with IDMSX.

Snap.

Agreed. If you fail to adequately deal with any aspect of application design and documentation, system architecture, performance, error detection and recovery, software design, including adequate error detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have the client build and USE adequate acceptance tests, then you and your management have failed and deserve all the grief that comes your way.

The prime example of how not to do all of the above correctly is the UK Post Office Horizon screw-up.

and yours sounds a little earlier still.

Good start! I learned BASIC at school, then taught myself FORTRAN and IBM 1130 Assembler then learned COBOL in an A level course before going to college and getting taught Algol-W, BCPL and a heap of a lot of other languages. I really liked BCPL.

I went straight into a startup producing a CP/M machine based on the Beebon and my own Z80 card (Acorn's would have been too late).

Very much so - I had a lot of unlearning to do. OTOH I really appreciated how much help proper structure was.

Not all hot air. I remember hiring you and you were absolutely exceptional. Far too many other people simply were 'Ok-ish' and could fiddle with Windows and eventually make it work, but had no real clue beyond that. The problem is that in any generation there are a few exceptionals and a thousand 'ok, with the right training' . But if they don't get the right training, they are to put it bluntly, a f****ng liability.

It boils down to how to you take a bunch of people who are intelligent, but not exceptional, and get productive work out of them. And the answer is things like WordPress, or Visual Basic, Python or whatever the latests 'framework' is that allows them to build stuff *without really understanding what they are doing*. And create an industrial *system* of quality control that tests everything they do until their 'random monkey' approach - I think you called it 'cargo culting' - produces something that actually works.

I recall getting a lot of push back on that from an internal customer - right up until a misunderstanding of the requirements resulted in a production disaster - *then* they got the point and got all enthusiastic about acceptance testing.

That was a very well run project - we designed APIs first as a group and then one engineer went off to write tests and another to write the implementation (the competitive aspect of this was really helpful, you really pay attention when you know someone good is trying to break your code). When test met code we found the places where the design was insufficiently clear.

I've advocated this approach ever since but there's a modern mantra that the developer should write the tests - IMHO this is wrong because then tester and writer share blind spots.

Right, I don’t think the balance between the exceptional and the adequate has substantially changed, certainly not since the 1990s and probably not since the 1590s.

Look at the annual intake of, I dunno, a Tudor-era shipyard and I’d expect to find a handful people who take to the work like they were born to it, and a much larger number of people who could knock together some planks with a bit of supervision and inspection.

The thing that’s hot air is the claim that there’s some kind of generational difference involved.

Sounds like good practise.

The approach that Logica used, at least in its finance divison, and for large financial networks, such as CHAPS, was that, once the requirements and detailed specifications had been agreed and signed off by both the development team and the client, the development team got on with writing the detailed specs, development, and the system tests prior to delivery. Meanwhile, the client specified and then implemented their acceptance test suite without reference to the developers - unless of course, their work discovered cases not covered in the system specs.

The system was delivered to the client after we'd got clean runs through our system tests. At this point the client ran it their acceptance test suite: it wasn't signed off as complete and ready for live operation until it had passed all their acceptance tests.

Agreed. But I think that there is a difference, though I am not sure that I would call it generational. Its more just an 'autre temps, autre moeurs'

Viz I grew up in the shadow of WWII. Barnes Wallis lived down the road, and the Vickers aircraft company was a big employer. Overhead V bombers were a daily occurrence and the village boasted a house that used to belong to Tommy Sopwith, of Camel fame and was in fact later bought by Harry Hawker, of Hawker aircraft, Down the road was where Willian of Occam was born (as well as Eric Clapton) and the Tyrell formula one racing team.

Britain was the second nation in the world to have developed the atomic bomb, and the jet engine the first to have developed the magnetron radar, cracked the Enigma code etc etc etc.

These were not despised as the product of 'white male science', nor yet were they dismissed as irrelevant or socially dangerous. They were seen as triumphs of traditional education and bloody hard work.

In short, Boffins had won the bloody war and were held in some kind of awe, and they in turn felt a deep sense of responsibility to make sure that the promised better lives that people had been promised, happened. The BBC was staffed with many people who had been through hell and emerged the other side humbler older and wiser.

All that has now gone. My Ex BIL and I had a conversation a few months ago. He is a German. 'In Germany we have two professors of nuclear physics and 102 professors of gender studies'.

I am constantly informed that all my science and engineering knowledge is 'just my opinion' and that what is true is 'what 98% of people believe to be true', and my critique of *renewable energy* makes me a 'climate denier' and an 'oil company shill'

Meanwhile the police won't listen to me unless I am a 'victim' . Or an 'oppressed minority' of some sort.

In short all the respect for traditional things that helped bind and construct the post war society have ben shredded by - well its easy to say 'socialists' - but its close enough.

We are feeding the laziness, the stupidity, the egotism, the banality, and cancelling anyone who tries to make a serious point. And that has lead to a generation that are not innately any more stupid than they always were, but where the best way to get ahead is to behave like an utter d*****ad. To not learn mathematics and science, but to become a fuckwitted Celebrity, and marry a Prince.

To go to Uni and get a Degree, based neither on native genius, nor on hard work absorbing some useful skill, but rather on the regurgitation of what some chippy left wing self styled intellectual has decreed to be 'how things ought to be' and the rewriting of the historical narrative to justify it.

And then because you haven't a qualification worth a s*it, to complain that you are being 'discriminated' against in favour of someone who actually shows some competence and skill.

If that's what people want, all well and good, but they should not then complain when nothing works anymore.

When they get sold lipstick for pigs, cant afford a house, and are seeing their standard of living eroding in real terms back to the sort of standards it was in the 1950s.

This crappy software is simply another symptom of that. Born and brought up to not have to work that hard for the basics of life, they take it all for granted and urinate on anyone 'boring' enough to think it important enough to make a career in.

In short todays world IS different from the 1950s, in that people do not settle for nice houses, a steady productive job and a family, because they didn't spend the last decade having the crap bombed out of them. They do nor respect boffins and scientists as the people who stopped the crap being bombed out of them, but call them geeks and borderline autistics and laugh at them despise them and socially cancel them for 'not being where it's at'.

And because people have been successful at that ploy, the inevitable result is that the world that we built in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, is falling apart at the seams, and everyone is rushing around blaming everyone else and no one is rolling up their sleeves to fix it.

Its probably simply part of a sociological cycle. The success of the feudal system and mass employment in agriculture and the rising tide of globalism lead to the Black Death, the death of huge numbers of people, a widespread deepening of distrust, if not in God, at least in priests, and the [partial] emancipation of the peasant.

The onset of the industrial revolution and its comcomitant rise in per capita energy use, led to the rise of enormous population levels and unheard of standards of living, and well as more silliness than the world had ever seen. The rise of globalism is now accompanied by the rapid spread of pandemics, just as in the 14th century, and in mass migration of the unskilled and uncivilised, , which creates an unsustainable strain on the living standards of the indigenous populations.

The past was Empire, common wealth, democracy and trade, the Future is the EU, Putin, Oppression and Slavery.

Because people have simply forgotten how s*it life can be, when someone comes along with a gun and cant stand the sound of yiur whining about 'Yuman Rites' and 'fairness' and decides the pragmatic solution is to put a .22 round between your eyes.

The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?