From: Eleanor McHugh Date: 2008-05-21T00:05:20+09:00 Subject: Re: Is Necessary for all rails employee know computer knowledge? On 20 May 2008, at 13:15, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: > Michel Thapa writes: >> Hi all Is Necessary for all rails employee know computer knowledge? >> Because for last 2 week i am visiting rails department, there i show >> some employee dos not know how to open the system, my way of saying >> is >> necessary for all employee should know it. > > It's not necessarily necessary for every rails programmer to know > anything about computers, or computer science. > > Read: > > http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsteve.yegge.googlepages.com%2Fage-racecar-driver&source=pagecreator&gsessionid=UAjfJNzLRMc It's a fascinating article, not least because I can see where both the author and the interviewee are coming from. Once you know a decent amount of computer science it's often difficult to take developers seriously who lack that background, but by doing so we miss the benefits that knowledge from other disciplines can offer in solving complex problems. I started out in physics and I've spent a fair amount of my professional career arguing with very capable CS experts over all kinds of problems which are elementary with my background but have them scuttling back to graph theory, and conversely I meet a lot of web developers who've come from a non-academic and despite being very good at their specialism have a complete lack of confidence about their abilities. So no, in my opinion a rails programmer doesn't have to be a whizz at computer science or even necessarily with computers - although what kind of masochist works all day with tools that they neither like or understand? On the other hand there are certain key abilities that any developer does need, and which I've found surprisingly lacking in many that I've worked with: a grasp of basic logic; ability to sequence and classify; a cool head when things aren't going well; intense curiosity. Unfortunately all of these are as likely to get you into trouble as they are to get your projects out the door... I must admit though that if I was dealing with a Rails team I would expect anyone who was a developer to know how to run up the application at least locally as that's a five minute google and falls under the 'intense curiosity' category ;) Ellie Eleanor McHugh Games With Brains http://slides.games-with-brains.net ---- raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason