Mort Revisited
Today I attended an interview for a prospective VB6 candidate. Are there serious developers out there who actually want to develop in VB6 going forward, without a prospect of perhaps moving onto a newer platform? Apparently there are.
Asks I: Can you tell me what polymorphism is?
Says prospect: [paraphrased] It’s when you have a method that takes two parameters, say x and y and another method with the same name that takes three parameters, x, y and z.
Asks I: Say for instance you have an array of strings … a bunch of names of people … but they’re all jumbled up, how would you get them into alphabetical order?
Says prospect: I would do an “order by”.
Asks I: Can you tell me what COM is all about?
Says prospect: It has to do with objects and DLL’s (waves hands in air for effect).
Asks I: Can you tell me what a hash table is?
Says prospect: No [pause] … [a "go-on-give-it-a-go" nod from me]
Says ex-prospect: Aren’t you going to tell me?
Evidently Mort and his cohorts are alive and well and being paid real shekels for propping up those critical business systems. Afterwards a colleague called me out for asking irrelevant questions like … well, who in the world is expected to know what polymorphism is? Especially in the VB world (puh!).
This just re-affirms my (reluctant) assertion that it doesn’t really take rocket scientists to keep critical business systems running. It doesn’t even take people who are mildly interested in furthering their career of choice. When the proverbial hits the fan, folks may end up running around screaming blue murder for a while, but the problem will be fixed, and more than likely it’ll be fixed with a little duct tape. Until of course the tape peels off, and a patch over a patch is required.
Let’s say that again–the system will be fixed. It might be expensive, it might be inelegant, it might take a couple of days off someones life, but things will carry on, and in a year or two the cross will be borne by a new eager victim, one who may even have been lucky enough to have had a mere brush with a computer science text book (we can only hope).
Sadly I have no wise rebuttal right now, because the numbers just aren’t there. And that is, simply put, why some people can play pied piper to the development masses and lead them into dubious territory. Our industry is a young one, too young still for the toll of poor practice to be quantified. My most effective contribution right now then is to continue playing disciple to the way of Uncle Bob and hope that one day, all will be converted.
