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Originally Posted by murg
My experience is that a programmer's education level has absolutely no relation on their ability to program, nor the quality of the resulting code.
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In that case, your experience is different to mine.
I've seen a lot of code, especially with self-taught web developers, that I was able to crash within minutes. Sometimes that could be done just by requesting a file called "FILE" instead of "file". File not found, big fat PHP error.
"Shit. I didn't know Linux/Unix was case sensitive." (Development on Windows does not catch these errors, and then your software falls apart when uploaded to a Linux/Unix webhost.)
Hey, the site puts parameters in the URL. Seems to work... but what happens when I change "?param=0" to "param=-1"? Crash. Cool, I can now see a huge amount of parameter info about the site. Look at that. "?login=0". Can I login by making it "?login=1" by hand, even without providing a username or password? Yes!
"Oops..."
Believe it or not, but these simple things often get overlooked by self-taught programmers/software engineers, especially when just starting out. While stuff like this is self-evident for people who know it, this is not the case for everyone. In your education, you get taught stuff like that.
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Emergency fixes of the sort you describe have nothing to do with well designed code. You find out where the broken bit is, figure out the fix, and apply it, regardless of the underlying quality of the system.
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Not true. Some of those systems are so extremely interconnected and interdependent due to bad design that changing something in one module will break another module.