In addition to certification, which requires ongoing educational credits to maintain, there ought to be a process for revoking one's certification, requiring them to pass their exams again.
Here's three strikes against two clods who wasted hours on -- perhaps -- the dumbest things possible.
Strike 1. Counting From Zero
I then ponited out that the Microsoft doco is weird because the highestnumber allowed by ulong is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 which ends in an oddsnumberI remineded him that 2**64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
Apparently, this was the first time anyone realized how counting from zero works. If they had actually thought about this, they could have tried a smaller example. For example three bits. 2**3 = 8. When you enumerate the values you get 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The highest value is 2**3-1. It's not "weird". It's a trivially obvious mathematical fact.
It works like this: n values have numbers from 0 to n-1. Didn't know that? Consider your certification revoked. Even hobbyists know this.
Strike 2. Wrong Tools and Wrong Approach
This is more subtle and involves two strikes. We'll look at just one of them.
Then he wanted a spreadsheet of 2 raised to nth power.I put it together and the numbers just looked weird. I then realized thatwhen you type a number that contains more than 15 digits in a cell,Microsoft Excel changes any digits past the fifteenth place to zeroesWhat I felt like saying is that Python has built in this concept of "longintegers" which has unlimited precision and it automatically switches tothem
One of the clods knew Python. Instead of writing a trivial loop in Python, apparently, clod #1 proceeded to type numbers into a spreadsheet. The clod didn't compute them -- with formulas or software -- the clod typed the numbers. Typed. Have Python. Elected to type. How did they do the calculations? On a pocket calculator? Oh the shame.
Also, additional penalties for exhaustive enumeration. They sent me the spreadsheet as if it was somehow important that they could enumerate values between 2**0 and 2**135. No summary or rule. Just a mountain of useless numbers.
Strike 3. Floating Point
This is not news. Nor should it be. Indeed, this should be the first set of questions on the certification exam. If you can't figure out floating point, you can't write software. Period. Please find another job in an industry where you won't waste time on this.
Floating point is not simple, and everyone should study it before they are allowed to charge money for creating software. Running random experiments and exhaustively enumerating values is not studying. That's not even hobbyist stuff. Try actually reading. Starting with the standard. And David Goldberg's "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic".
contains more than 15 digits in a cell,Microsoft Excel changes any digits past the fifteenth place to zeroes
This is not "news". The link provided in the email ("Last digits are changed to zeroes when you type long numbers in cells of Excel") indicates a profound lack of understanding.
They could not have noticed that this is near 2**50. They never looked up the IEEE floating point representation that -- pretty clearly -- says that there are only 52 bits of useful information. Wikipedia reminds us that this is about 15 decimal digits. Rather than look this up, they chose to be astonished.
These clods were astonished that floating-point numbers have a finite mantissa. Astonished that -- empirically -- they had stumbled on the fact that the mantissa is about 50 bits.
How much time did they waste on this? More importantly, how can they consider their activities to be "professional"? Unable to count from zero? Using the wrong tools and exhaustively enumerating the obvious? Not realizing the floating-point values have limited precision?
I find it appalling. Their escapades sound like two home hobbyists with their fist ever copy of C#. Not like professionals.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteYour rant* reminds me of the possibly allied case of the state of maths awareness in the UK, where it is quite acceptable to admit to bad maths skills whatever your other skills may be. You could be paid six-figures in some industry, but have trouble working-out 17.5% of a number.
I guess the problem in your examples is that presumably these people are calling themselves programmers without base knowledge that you think is important.
I see the problem, but am not sure that certification, like microsoft certification, is what we should be looking for. If someone has a degree in programming or a degree in an allied subject such as a science or engineering and computing was part of that course, then maybe all of what you have mentioned should be covered by the course, and employers should pay more for the degree qualified programmer. But programming can still be self-taught and if you employ a self-taught programmer then you should expect a much wider range of capabilities.
*I meant rant in that you seemed to be letting off steam on an issue rather than being excessively abusive.
When I started my current job, the company soon hired someone officially as a systems administrator, but also as another PHP programmer. The guy spent a full two weeks (between taking phone calls about his side job) editing a set of CSV files exported from Access tables, replacing the commas with pipe characters, removing the in-field newlines (thereby destroying vital information), replacing the end-of row newlines with bare carriage returns (because that's "the Unix convention" despite being completely ignored by Subversion), and stripping the quotation marks.
ReplyDeleteBy hand.
Because regular expressions were out of his league, and he hadn't spent enough time on Google to learn about fgetcsv().