Indeed. The cheapness comes from inexperience, though. These fresh graduates have also not learned the dangers of overworking themselves (both to themselves and their employers), so everyone is very willing to continue this grand delusion.
As someone who developed a mild anxiety disorder after ~6-8 months of starting work as a SWE, this hits home pretty hard. Luckily I've been able to overcome with help from my family, friends, and coworkers, but whenever I try to warn others I fear I come off only as a doomsayer and immediately bounce off the "That won't happen to me" shield.
Seriously. If you bet on one company with a dozen kids writing in whatever framework has the most blog posts this week, vs three seasoned lispers, I'm betting on the lispers every time.
With experience, you also learn better ways to express your intent in the languages and frameworks you know well. Inexperienced, high energy devs will just be fast at writing boilerplate.
Exactly! Or even people who just haven't learned a whole lot in terms of engineering practices. This seems to be especially true in Ruby, where "it works" is good enough to go out into production.
There is no programming, reliability, stability, or scale. Most greener engineers program mostly for the sunny day scenario, which is the crux of the problem.
They can't see race conditions and timing problems like someone how have spent years doing that. I see other people's code and quickly understand that they're doing really cost prohibitive queries while others who are green will never notice it.
For some definition of cheap. If you look at $/hour, no question they are cheaper. If you look at $/amount of value created (which is far harder to capture, but worth it), I don't think it is a slam dunk.
The difficulty is the financiers; they want visual bang for their buck, and they want to be told "yes, I'll make it happen" even if the person talking doesn't yet know how. If that means a bunch of young people looking busy and working themselves into the ground, versus a small team of professionals that will calmly and realistically tell the financiers what can't be done in a given time frame and budget... Realistic with older professional is boring; fantasy with young people is exciting! Guess what happens every time?
zamalek|10 years ago
jonesb6|10 years ago
lallysingh|10 years ago
With experience, you also learn better ways to express your intent in the languages and frameworks you know well. Inexperienced, high energy devs will just be fast at writing boilerplate.
hobs|10 years ago
tankerdude|10 years ago
There is no programming, reliability, stability, or scale. Most greener engineers program mostly for the sunny day scenario, which is the crux of the problem.
They can't see race conditions and timing problems like someone how have spent years doing that. I see other people's code and quickly understand that they're doing really cost prohibitive queries while others who are green will never notice it.
collyw|10 years ago
mooreds|10 years ago
For some definition of cheap. If you look at $/hour, no question they are cheaper. If you look at $/amount of value created (which is far harder to capture, but worth it), I don't think it is a slam dunk.
bsenftner|10 years ago
Retric|10 years ago
unknown|10 years ago
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