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Comment by rsyring | Hacker News Reader

I had a guy work for me that was very academic minded regarding programming. He had a hard time letting go of the "pure" way of doing things and taking a good/practical approach to just getting stuff done. It can definitely be, but won't always be, a detriment in my experience.

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I've worked at places where well-meaning 'just get stuff done' people created mountains of technical debt that hobbled the project in the long term. Made them look great, though.

Great programmers should hopefully recognize and implement a proper balance between practicality and rigor, as necessary. They should also exhibit self-awareness and self-restraint, which sounds like the real problem for the guy you mention.

>I've worked at places where well-meaning 'just get stuff done' people created mountains of technical debt that hobbled the project in the long term. Made them look great, though.

Those people were just getting a bit better at building things. They were building experience. It just so happens you found their bad code that they'll realize was terrible a few years from now.

We can't simultaneously hate our own previous code and expect everyone else to delivery perfectly when they first start (or even at mid-level).

That's a mindset flaw, not one that can be attributed to having CS knowledge, or enjoying talking about academic CS.

This is exactly true. There are certain things about which you absolutely need to be anal about being pure, such as scientific experiments and theoretical deductions/proofs. And there are others where you need to be more practical. This one person seems to have been applying the same mentality to both, which is a personal flaw, not solely a result of having more academic credentials/experience.

What you've described is someone who follow some practices religiously. I don't see any correlation between people like that and ones with academic background.

I'm afraid academia may produce religion. After all, it's a place where they show you a bunch of tricks, you practice them in simplified applications and then risk leaving with a belief that you actually understand shit.

A recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14267555

anecdotally, I see a higher-than-normal correlation between those who are "more theoretical" and those who cannot adapt to change or differing situations.

There's also an immense cost to not having CS fundamentals in terms of performance and wasted time; I don't want to pay someone to try and solve a version of the halting problem, or matching opening and closing delimiters with regexes.

I like how you discriminate against CS knowledge in general because a single person couldn't get stuff done.

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