Re: [tlug] New programming revision site - by a TLUG'er

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

黒鉄章 writes:

 > Having discussed this many times I think that we all share this
 > idea, that it's not worth taxing your memory with minor
 > details. That's what I said.  That's what all my friends and
 > colleagues said.

Did you attend a Japanese high school and college?

But social commentary aside, well, no.  Humans have the same general
architecture that modern CPUs do, a multilevel cache.  You really want
to have your frequently used tools in your on-chip cache.  While
you're perfectly correct about the long-run fate of one-trick ponies,
you also don't want to end up as a jack-of-all-trades -- master of
none.

 > Then, I went to job interviews. And you know what, interviewers
 > nearly never think that. They really believe that if you can't
 > remember the trivial differences, e.g. SQL's substring function's
 > start pos parameter is 1-indexed rather 0-indexed, that you were
 > clearly lying about having built data warehouses.

I don't think that's true (based on a *very* small sample of technical
approaches I've received in the past ten years).  In all cases, I got
cut on the grounds that they wanted somebody who could hit the ground
running, and I didn't have the skills in the languages being used.
And they were right, given the tasks my potential bosses said needed
to be done first.  I could have done them, eventually, and in the long
run I might be a real asset (at least, that's what the people who
recommended me thought :-).  But they needed results in the short run.
There's also the aspect that somebody who isn't familiar is likely to
be bugging other people a lot: Yo, Angela, how do I do this?

So (to some degree, anyway) it's not that you can't have done it, but
that they can find somebody who will be more productive than you in
the very near future, I think.  The point is not to cover up for dumb
managers/engineers; I'm sure they're out there.  But there's also a
strong rationale for a demand for people who know how to code
accurately in the language du jour at the employer on the first day on
the job.

 > Since I began this, however, I've also began to notice how many
 > times I pull down my reference book. That's not healthy for my
 > programming, taking a minute in the middle of one line to recall
 > the correct function/directive/setting/etc. name.

Exactly the point.  Employers don't like that either.