patrick.net

Proof that if you give a million monkeys a million keyboards, they will NOT eventually produce anything at all of value, let alone the works of Shakespeare.

Dan8267 says

25 to 50 million lines of code? It would not take even 1 million if done right. A million lines of code is a hell of a lot in today's programming platforms.

Not if every class has to be inherited from a bloated base class, that uses third party components and has 5 to 10 List collections, and also every class implements 4 or 5 Interfaces.
The IT shops today can blow right past that 50 millions lines of code, and god forbid you write a lambda expression to accomplish a task rather than writing a new Interface and a class to implement that interface, with virtual methods then override it in a third class. why you'll just blow the Junior programmer's mind and the CTO wont be able to follow you're code review.

CaptainShuddup says

and god forbid you write a lambda expression to accomplish a task rather than writing a new Interface and a class to implement that interface, with virtual methods then override it in a third class. why you'll just blow the Junior programmer's mind and the CTO wont be able to follow you're code review.

Lambda expressions have become more popular again with the renaissance of functional programming, so there's hope ;)

Big picture people:

Software development is something that 99% of the human population couldn't do to save their lives. Out the remaining 1%, 99% cannot do software development at a level acceptable for commercial use. Only about 700,000 people in the world can do software development at a commercially acceptable level. And only about a tenth of them, 70,000, are truly good at it.

And that's why good software developers are worth much more than their weight in gold.

*Statistics derived from empirical observation.

Dan8267 says

And that's why good software developers are worth much more than their weight in gold.

Unfortunately, they don't work for Microsoft.*

*obvious to everyone

This software project has the look and feel of a minority contractor.

Dan8267 says

Big picture people:

Software development is something that 99% of the human population couldn't do to save their lives. Out the remaining 1%, 99% cannot do software development at a level acceptable for commercial use. Only about 700,000 people in the world can do software development at a commercially acceptable level. And only about a tenth of them, 70,000, are truly good at it.

And that's why good software developers are worth much more than their weight in gold.

*Statistics derived from empirical observation.

Thank you.

Dan8267 says

Out the remaining 1%, 99% cannot do software development at a level acceptable for commercial use. Only about 700,000 people in the world can do software development at a commercially acceptable level

Dan, do you not believe that our scientists and engineers, many of whom, underemployed as lab assistants, postdocs, adjunct profs, paper pushers at Dow/DuPont, etc, can become good software developers?

Or is there some special talent, aside of dissecting and solving technical problems which scientists & engineers have been doing for decades?

Dan8267 says

And only about a tenth of them, 70,000, are truly good at it.

And that's why good software developers are worth much more than their weight in gold.

Not sure about the statistics but I find software development is generally easy to do. Many are doing it as kids. Big US companies rely massively on minimally trained engineers from populous countries to do most of their developments - granted with mediocre results software-wise, but good enough money-wise. Generally all it takes is a good architect to organize things upfront and a lot of QA testing to eliminates loads of bugs. Unfortunately the software professions have become commoditized in that way. Most software products nowadays are poorly coded but generally get the job done regardless.

The argument "there are only so many of these guys" applies to pretty much any profession. You could say there are only so many good bakers therefore they are worth their weight in gold. Well maybe they are, bakers.