Facepalm Vol 1: Joel Spolsky and Leah Culver

Hurrah it’s Monday. Time for some Facepalmin!
Inside Volume 1 we have Joel Spolsky, and as an added bonus, Leah Culver jacks up some more code.

So Joel Spolsky has a fancy new design on his site, and an article begging people not to leave the programming industry.

Naturally, at reddit philoj calls him out in the comments:
philoj

Hmmm… over the years Joel has written articles saying:

if you didn’t get a BSCS from a top five CS program, he doesn’t want anything to do with you
He thinks most developers are idiots
So many companies are run by morons
etc.

Yeah, can’t imagine why people want to leave.

Joel, surprisingly, responds:

spolsky

Can you show me where I said I only want a “BSCS from a top five CS program?” That would be pretty interesting news to a lot of people I’ve hired who don’t.

philoj finds the reference and posts it, which I have it quoted in the top of my reply below:

akinder

As per philoj, quoting one of your articles:

These students would never survive 6.001 at MIT, or CS 323 at Yale, and frankly, that is one reason why, as an employer, a CS degree from MIT or Yale carries more weight than a CS degree from Duke, which recently went All-Java, or U. Penn, which replaced Scheme and ML with Java in trying to teach the class that nearly killed me and my friends, CSE121. Not that I don’t want to hire smart kids from Duke and Penn — I do — it’s just a lot harder for me to figure out who they are.

I have yet to meet a CS grad that I couldn’t keep up with or exceed in terms of development and productivity. This coming from a guy that left college after 3 years of a Business Admin degree and has only 8 credits of formal CS classes under his belt. I have several friends who hold CS degrees from, in your eyes, “lesser” college programs and I would much rather work along side any one of them than some kid from Yale who spent $130,000 to get a damn piece of paper.

What you are essentially saying is that money makes the developer, which we all know is complete bullshit. I got where I am today as a result of a few thousand dollars in computers, a few hundred bucks in books and a lot of support from my immediate family, not from spending four years in an expensive day-care facility.

At the end of the day, I’d rather have a “poor” CS grad or college drop-out working for me than Leah “lolpython” Culver, who just made another facepalm mistake in her code.

Come on Joel, seriously? I don’t expect him to reply to my comment, but I’ve laid out one of the biggest complaints about Joel Spolsky ( and on occasion and by extension, Jeff Atwood ): He has thrown together some “best” practices without considering the effects or the worth of the practice. Jeff, for instance, completely brainfucked the NP-Complete issue on his blog, and wouldn’t retract it. This isn’t just bad taste, it’s dangerous practice. You are basically writing information on a subject that you don’t understand, which leads your readers to get incorrect information about a subject that they don’t yet understand. They go on to Pass the Retarded Buck™ and create a god awful pattern. Etc, ad infinitum, yada yada.

But, back to Joel. He’s pushing the idea that the only programmer/developer worth an employer’s time is one with an expensive degree from an Ivy league school, and nothing to show for it but a mountain of debt.

In one aspect, he is correct. These kids are so weighed down with debt that you can guarantee that they will be too terrified to jump ship from your company until the debt has been reduced. Does this make a better employee? In my opinion it doesn’t. I have friends that graduated from what Joel would consider “poor” schools and do have sizeable debt, but the big difference is that they didn’t bring on the debt and then expect to be given a six figure salary right out of college just because of the name on their degree. I for one would much rather graduate from XYZ College with $40,000 in debt and snag my first job at $35k a year than hop out of Yale with $130,000 in debt for the same degree, and get $45k a year. $10k difference being the Yale “premium”.

And, it wouldn’t be a programming article without the oblig. Leah bashing. I have gotten some complaints and criticism regarding my Leah Culver bashing, so I want to post a Preface to this rant: I really don’t have anything against Leah Culver. I don’t even know her. She posted once on Kinderism telling me to “Get over it”, which I found intensely funny, and I do make a bit of traffic off her bad fortunes. One of the most popular articles on Kinderism today is the “So where are Leah Culver and Pownce now?” article, which even has a link coming in from Techcrunch on it. Remember, I don’t know her, and I’m a huge jerk in person so I am an even bigger jerk online. Since I have been pretty hard on Leah, I will do a modified “Compliment Sandwich”, which I will call “Jerk and Compliment sandwich”.

In this shining example, Leah screwed the pooch using CouchDB by using exec() calls in Python ( a big, BIG no-no ) instead of getattr() and setattr(). She later corrected the post with better code and blamed it on “coding at 2am”, which we have all used many times.

Let’s see.. something nice.. something nice.. There is one big difference between a programmer like Leah Culver and a programmer like Jeff Atwood. Leah has humility. She fucked up the code, fixed it, and said that she fucked up:

It’s good to be wrong sometimes. We all make mistakes. So now I’m declaring, yes, I wrote some stupid code and it’s okay. It’s okay for us all to write stupid code sometimes.

Yes, she did mess up one of the very basic concepts of Python code, and she is useful ammunition in the CS Grad v/s Drop-out wars, but she is right. We all write stupid code, sometimes really stupid code, and it’s ok. This is why I respect her more than a Jeff Atwood, who wrote stupid code and allowed it to influence other’s stupid code.

So, there is your 1000+ word Monday morning diarrhea. In summary: Joel has a very tall Ivory tower for someone whose only noteworthy accomplishment was working at Microsoft in the 1990’s; Jeff Atwood took NP-Complete and made a whole new god awful problem; Leah Culver messed up but at least she owns up to it; And I actually have no idea when it is proper to use the semi-colon.