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Comment by cranberryturkey | Hacker News Reader

I've worked with hundreds of CS grads, the worst programmer I ever came across (as far as readibility of his code) had a master's degree in CS from stanford.

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Similar experience here, too. Virtually every time I have worked with, trained, or reported to someone with a CS degree from Stanford or Harvard, they have approached their work with a narrow mind and little empathy for others. This has been true in the military, public sector, and the private sector. I don’t know what it is about these places.

I read something a while back that did color my understanding of folks somewhat, and that was that there are a lot of people who come into the technology field for the money, not necessarily because of their lifelong interest in tinkering with computers. That to me is nuts, but I guess it’s to be expected. Maybe the sample size of my experience with these folks is overrepresented with people who are in it for the money and not curiosity and creativity. I don’t know.

Some people have been told "you are better than anyone else" for their whole life. So that's their base line. Guess what

I would look more at their undergrad, a masters doesn’t really mean much. It’s a short program and mostly focused on more advanced topics, not standard coding skills.

(Full disclosure: I have a masters)

It could be they are working at a level higher than you understand.

Not being snarky, but the elite schools are significantly advanced.

Imagine learning algorithms from Knuth (yes, I know he hasn't taught undergraduates in 50 years). Looking at the results after being taught by Dr. Smith at Generic State University, you might be unable to recognize the genius.

In a professional setting, your primary concern is generally to produce work that's understandable to your coworkers, whatever that means. Just getting the computer to do what you want is generally not that hard. In that regard, "genius" in programming is more like Feynman turning complicated calculations into simple pictures, and less like von Neumann instantly calculating the infinite series in the fly and train puzzle.

You can't be serious. This is a bad joke.

Are you trying to defend a software engineer who is bad at writing readable code by... bringing Knuth to the table?

The same Knuth who published "Literate Programming"? "Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do"?

I have worked with people that have a command of a given programming language, and algorithms such that it appears to be magic to me. (C++ is common for this problem).

The readability problems may be the reader.

So we share personal experiences now; okay, let me share mine.

Once, one of my teammates committed an extremely complex piece of code that I wasn't able to understand. As I expected, we soon started to start bug reports. Finally, the original author couldn't fix it properly, so I threw away the code and rewrote it from scratch. I made it simple, readable, and, what's more important - debuggable. And it was correct.

So what? Your personal experience says that you are not the smartest person in the world, and my personal experience says that magic is magic — it doesn't work properly in the real world.

It's easy to build "magic" code that's hard to understand. You can just run any readable piece of code through an obfuscator. Still, no one believes that an obfuscator is genius. If you see "magic" code that, for some reason, truly works, it means that the author did a ton of research and forgot to put that into comments — i.e., obfuscated a code. If, even with comments, it still looks like magic, then the author avoided doing a self-review & simplification of the code. And well, sometimes, even after that, code can still be magic... if we have chosen the wrong tool for doing the job (does it sound like a depiction of genius?).

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