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The Most Intelligent Comment About IT I've Ever Read

Ovid on 2007-11-20T09:45:45

The Daily WTF is, as most of us know, a very funny site. However, sometimes there's brilliance there, too, such as this comment about developers. It's probably better if you read the thread, first. I read through it with a growing sense of irritation and dismay and that comment really hammered things home.

So true...

sigzero on 2007-11-20T12:30:41

In IT, if you have more than 1 person involved you are going to have more than 1 opinion on how something must be done.

Disdain

petdance on 2007-11-20T17:00:08

Mostly I'm bothered by the disdain for others that developers seem to revel in anyway. Exposing bad code is one thing (see also http://xoa.petdance.com/Coding_horrors), but DailyWTF also ignores that there are humans involved.

comments on "worsethanfailure"

slanning on 2007-11-20T17:02:04

I used to read the comments on that site, but I haven't read them for months now because they ended up being even more moronic than Slashdot comments. They've gotten really immature.

Not limited to IT

cbrandtbuffalo on 2007-11-20T17:39:25

While I agree the comment is accurate, I don't think the phenomena is limited to IT. It's just as easy to get wildly different opinions from practitioners in fields as varied as medicine and auto repair. And you can often get some pretty serious attitude from a doctor or mechanic if you mention that you're getting a second opinion.

I think the nature of the response to second opinions depends on the professionalism (or ego) of the person involved. A professional can offer an opinion, back it up with sound reasoning, and respectfully and factually comment on the opinions of others. The issue with sites like WTF and Slashdot is that many IT people seem to enjoy flaunting their lack of professionalism.

Does it comfort you to think...

btilly on 2007-11-20T22:16:16

that the programmers commenting were ones who use .NET?

Re:Does it comfort you to think...

Ovid on 2007-11-21T00:21:59

Not terribly. My housemate is a .net programmer and he's one of the sharpest programmers I know :)

Re:Does it comfort you to think...

btilly on 2007-11-21T00:48:26

That was meant as a joke.

And yes, I know that there are some very, very good .NET programmers. However there are a lot of very bad ones.

Re:Does it comfort you to think...

runrig on 2007-11-21T06:40:53

Well, (I'm sure you know) there are a lot of very bad Perl programmers also. I wish there was a (valid) study of not only how popular languages are, but also the percentage of good/bad programmers in each. The only thing I can say about .NET is that I (and I believe you) don't care to program in it.

Re:Does it comfort you to think...

Ovid on 2007-11-21T08:59:54

I really think the results of that study would scare me.

Re:Does it comfort you to think...

slanning on 2007-11-21T09:07:38

How would you define "good programmers"? Ones that don't pee in their cubicle?

Re:Does it comfort you to think...

runrig on 2007-11-21T19:25:14

Heh. I didn't say that I would want to be the one to conduct or even define the parameters of the study. Or that such a study could even be done :-)

But it would be interesting to correlate that factor with good vs. bad (after defining what good/bad is, of course).