Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)

[alister]

On Wed, 27 Sep 2017 18:18:10 -0700, Larry Hudson wrote:

> On 09/27/2017 09:41 AM, leam hall wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 23, 2017 at 5:26 PM, Ned Batchelder <ned at nedbatchelder.com>
>> wrote:
> [snip]
>> 
>> The question is, what should a person "know" when hiring out as a
>> programmer? What is 'know" and what should be "known"? Specifically
>> with Python.
>> 
>> 
> Hopefully NOT like this person...
> (Source:  http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_misc.shtml There is no direct
> link to this item, it's about 2/3 the way down in a long web page...)
> 
> <quote>
> Since I teach nights at a local community college, I get a lot of
> professional programmers in my classes upgrading their education. One
> student, who was one such person, attended every lecture and smiled and
> nodded and took notes. But he only turned in his first assignment. The
> results of his first test were horrid. Out of curiosity, I asked my
> wife, who barely knew how to turn a computer on much less program one,
> to take the test (which was mostly true/false and multiple choice
> questions). My wife scored higher than this guy.
> 
> The semester's end came, and he flubbed his final, too. A few weeks
> later, I got a call from him complaining about his 'F'. I pointed out he
> hadn't turned in any of his assignments, and those counted 75% of the
> grade.
> 
> "Did you hear me say something besides what the other students heard?" I
> asked.
> 
> "Well, I thought my test grades would carry me," he replied.
> 
> It had turned out his company had paid for him to take the course. Since
> he failed, it suddenly came to the attention of his employer that he
> didn't know how to program, and now his job was in jeopardy. As I hung
> up the phone, I mused that his company shouldn't fire him. It was a
> perfect match: a programmer who couldn't program and a company that
> couldn't figure out sooner that he couldn't.
> </quote>

the whole page seems to be full of 
"look how dumb this user is because they do no automatically know things 
that I had to learn"



-- 
  After they got rid of capital punishment, they had to hang twice
  as many people as before.