Jeff Atwood, at Coding Horror is flabbergasted by the number of programmers who can't program. The post claims that a significant number of programming interviewees struggle to write tiny programs like:

.... a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".

Can this really be true? Where do these "programmers" come from, I wonder?

There's a related quote in Dreaming in Code where Joel Spolsky, commenting on formal software methodologies, says,

Anyway, the majority of developers don't read books about software development, they don't even read Slashdot. So they are never going to get this, no matter how much we keep writing about it.

Here we have 2 sources of anecdotal evidence suggesting that there are a large number of "programmers" who just don't care about programming. I suppose that any career that pays well attracts people who are more interested in the paycheck than the work, but programming is such a demanding task that I had assumed most practitioners gave a crap! I'm saddened to hear otherwise.

Link to story

Technorati tags for this post: programming