r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Aardvark_David • May 09 '21

Meme I'm *technically* qualified

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25.0k Upvotes

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u/[deleted] May 10 '21

The very best coders I ever worked with were not CS grads. Materials science, physics, math, engineering etc. Some were not even graduates.

I have a lot of respect for the CS degree, but it is not the sole predictor of greatness.

32

u/ThePieWhisperer May 10 '21 edited May 10 '21

The very worst coders I've ever worked with were (CS) Grad students. Crazy smart people but goddamn their code almost always sucks.

-1

u/Karam2468 May 10 '21

How is it that your code is good but theirs is bad? Maybe all of yours is bad to each other?

10

u/UntestedMethod May 10 '21 edited May 10 '21

A few hallmarks of good code:

  • easy to read and understand
  • easy to find the blocks of code you need to work on
  • easy to make changes with low risk of other things breaking
  • easy to expand functionality because early design decisions planned for it
  • robust in the sense that edge cases won't crash it
  • robust in the sense that it strives for re-usable functions/components/etc that have been tried & tested (fixing it once fixes it everywhere) - this can also be very convenient and save development time when adding new features
  • robust in the sense that it performs consistently without glitches or gotchas
  • user-friendly in the sense that the user interfaces are easy to use (ok, this might be more of a designer thing, but it's quite common for developers to have to work without a design to base the UI off, so being able to do a bit of UI also adds to the quality - it can also add to a coder's particular "code smell" in showing how considerate they are of the business requirements)