From: David Masover Date: 2009-10-02T03:15:07+09:00 Subject: Re: Exceptional Rails Developer On Thursday 01 October 2009 08:20:26 am Eleanor McHugh wrote: > On 1 Oct 2009, at 01:32, David Masover wrote: [snip] > > I'm > > talking > > about best practices versus "I tried stuff until it worked." > > I'm more likely to hire based on "I tried stuff until it worked" than > "I've been taught best practices". Best practices get stale pretty > fast whereas curiosity and persistence are the gifts that keep on > giving :) I'm mostly self-taught, so I understand where you're coming from. I suppose I don't mean "established best practices", so much as "I want to do it the right way, not necessarily the easiest way." So, as a trivial example, when I see people using for instead of each in Ruby, I cringe a little -- but that's more a matter of taste, custom, even fad. But when I see people read an entire table from the database several times during the course of generating a single report that needed a total of maybe ten records... Sure, they "tried stuff until it worked", but that's not curiosity, that's just plain persistence. And while I like to think I'm a fast learner, I'd still want to have the basic concept of "don't slurp the ENTIRE DATABASE" down before I applied for the job. Probably the best example is the one that I'm not going to be able to be modest with... My local community college is teaching me BAL -- that's right, Mainframe Assembler -- as a first language. Many people in this class will simply punch in the example code the professor gave us, and change things until it does what they want. These are the same people who will come to me or the professor when their program doesn't work, without bothering to actually read the error message -- whereas I actually found the system log and started to debug my program. Some of these people are the people who will grow up to use Visual Basic, and enable "on error resume next". That's what I'm talking about. Not knowing is fine, if you're curious about learning. But when I jump into others' code, it's sometimes painfully obvious that they're not particularly curious -- all they care about is closing the ticket, collecting a paycheck, and moving on.