When I first got started programming I was shocked by the cluelessness of some of the Comp Sci grads that trickled through as interns and entry level coders. A couple were really brilliant, but some never really got up to speed. How could it be that I, with no real training, was coding circles around these guys on the job– even with only my very small amount of experience? Well, one answer to that is that the smart Comp Sci grads were probably all somewhere else doing much more interesting work (and making more money) than what I got stuck with in doing crappy business apps. Another answer is that I was learning a single tool 24/7 and using it to accomplish the sort of things my corporate masters wanted me to do. But Computer Science classes are not vocational training for that kind of work, so don’t make the mistake of assuming that it should prepare people for it.

David Chisnell spells this out for us in a recent article:

“A lot of dissatisfaction with computer science comes from the misplaced expectation that a computer science graduate will be a good programmer. Such a graduate should have been exposed to at least half a dozen languages, but won’t necessarily have done anything particularly complicated with those languages. She almost certainly won’t have any kind of deep understanding of the standard library available for a given platform. This kind of comprehension comes only with experience. She may have picked it up from other jobs or open source work, but not from her degree.”

“Computer science and software engineering are very different disciplines, and a lot of people seem to confuse the two. Software engineering teaches the process of developing software, in terms of both tools and processes. A computer science course briefly touches on these topics, in the same way that a materials physicist may learn something of mechanical engineering. This doesn’t make a computer scientist a software engineer, any more than it makes a physicist the best candidate for building a bridge.”

For all the time and money you spend getting your degree, I sure hope you bypass the kind of creeps us “street programmers” run into when we’re first getting our start. You know… the sort of people that think the answer to everything is to waltz through the internet picking up pirated copies of somebody else’s gigantic business application…. Once you get established, you are still stuck with the terror of out-of-control development way too often. At best you’ll be stuck working with people that refuse to make tools to help them do their jobs– they’re just always under the gun. “The shoemaker’s children have no shoes,” they blithely say. Bob Warfield reiterates what’s going on in these kinds of companies:

“Many times what has happened is a company started out with a great idea and some knowledge of the domain. They built a piece of software that is a very literal embodiment of their view of the domain. So long as the whole domain and all the customers fit their view, life is good. However, for most non-trivial (i.e. interesting market size) domains, nobody knows the whole domain. You learn as you go. Customers throw curve balls. If the only way to adapt to that is to either keep adding tons of features to the software, or do expensive custom work on each deal, that’s way too much friction to scale. A domain specific language makes it possible to maneuver a bit at low cost and give customers what they want.”

There are many ways to kill projects. Easily, the number one killer is going to be scope creep. (The most depressing sort is going to be scope creep caused by management that want a completely new system and then incrementally force you to make it just like their old system.) Well… scope creep wouldn’t be that bad. It’s unanticipated shifts of scope that occur in a direction that’s orthogonal to anything you ever anticipated. Teams will implement awful hacks to keep a client happy enough to keep the money coming in. Then, boom! Their money dries up and you’re suddenly dealing with people in a different region that have subtly different industries that they focus on. And your team can’t adapt to the new needs fast enough to either swing the sale or keep them happy enough to stay with you.

There are few things more depressing than the pain of failure. One of those things is– surprisingly– the pain of success…. What do you do when you’ve got lots of clients running your software– but they’ve all got different versions and different modifications done to it? Untrained “street programmers” can get this far with luck and hard work, but they (and their companies) cannot grow beyond this point without developing tools to help them write their tools. To do that, they need some serious Computer Science know-how. And that’s the bitter irony: the hell of real world development has, on the surface, little to do with what goes on in the Computer Science classroom. But, to solve the problems we face here, we need the help of people that understand the implications of what gets taught there.

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