This blog contains reflections and thoughts on my work as a software engineer

mandag den 3. august 2009

The most overlooked risk in software engineering

 

5 weeks of vacation has ended – while browsing through the posts written during those weeks on Coding Horror I stumbled across a quote by David Parnas from the post Nobody Hates Software More Than Software Developers - quite a catching title, don’t you think?

Q: What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering?

A: Incompetent programmers. There are estimates that the number of programmers needed in the U.S. exceeds 200,000. This is entirely misleading. It is not a quantity problem; we have a quality problem. One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.

Click here to get a transcript of the entire interview