Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
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.
|
Sadly, this isn't a university vs self-taught issue. This is an individual programmer issue.
Some of the worst code I've seen has been from a university educated programmer that considered himself to be smarter than the rest of us, and had to prove it (he listened to lectures while programming). Had no idea how to do complex SQL right. So abstracted the non-SQL code that it took half a day to go through and remove the transaction he had the process running in to preserve the data if something went wrong (yes, if anything went wrong, all evidence disappeared) (he had a boolean transaction parameter in the whole chain of functions, but was always hard coded to true). And if I went into how he structured the where clause to return a single batch of data or all the batches (completely bypassing the sql optimiser), you'd be gobsmacked (not that there was ever a chance we would ever want to return all the batches).
The problem isn't one of university vs self-taught. It's one of experience and talent. There are people getting out of medical school that shouldn't be let within a mile of a person, dead or alive.
Yes, computer programming is a very easy profession to get into without a university degree. But there are schools out there that only teach Java.
And few schools teach things like programming for production support and auditability.