Friday rant

First time for this but needs to be out there as we as a community can do better to educate novice coders who might someday be tomorrow's developers.

Novice coders (note I will be call them developers), many times will ask “what is wrong with my code”, I tell them, provide a better solution and they come back with “but that’s over my head, can you explain that in detail?” or “can you make my code work?”

Well in the first case “over my head”, I wonder why they don’t read Microsoft documentation? Then in the second case “make my code work”, well if it was decent code that would be me telling them how and if stuck come back and explain. Just yesterday I provided a solid solution but the asker refused to use it because I would not fix their code. I said, it’s going to be a while until you get someone to fix your code and I was right, going on 20 hours and generally speaking less answers are done on weekends.

How can this and similar situations be remedied?

Have them read the documentation, not likely from my experiences answering forum questions for 20 plus years.

Take an online computer science course or use Pluralsight, some will say “I just do this for fun” yet their projects are far from what someone does for fun and/or “I can’t afford that” which can run parallel with refusing to use open source or paid libraries.

All of the above can apply to just about any programming language from C#, VB.NET, JavaScript to even SQL.

How do we change this behavior? Better more thought out free lessons are needed or simply let those coders always be bad coders. The reason for letting them be bad coders is not wise but when they refuse to invest in being developers there really is no hope for them.

Now for those who will follow direction we as a community need to invest in better lessons that always include source code else it’s all academic.


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