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Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

LOL, yah right. No they don't earn more. AA does not pay well. Also most of the legacy systems are maintained by contractors.

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What do they earn?

I'm told, "well below market". I've talked to probably 40 programmers there. Only one of them knew what any of the SOLID principles were as I named them off.

I have every reason to believe you when you say AA has bad programmers/contractors, but SOLID is just some random software process marketing buzzspeak and not knowing those particular "principles" isn't a useful indicator of anything other than not being exposed to that particular brand of process marketing buzzspeak.

FWIW, I'm not attack any of the ideas of SOLID here, just the idea that knowing of or not knowing of any specific brand of process marketing buzzspeak is a useful indication of anyone's skill.

Why would knowing the SOLID principles have any real relevance when the systems in question are probably written in COBOL and date back at least 4 decades?

> Only one of them knew what any of the SOLID principles were as I named them off.

Here's to hoping I don't ever end up where you are. Let's just let programmers do programming instead of brushing up on their MBA/"Six Sigma" style time wasting.

It is very useful to know about the lessons of those that came before so that you don't end up making the same mistakes. I'm not the OP, but if you don't care about theory at all, then I'm the one hoping I never end up where you are. I don't want to waste thoughts on trying to figure out the same damn problem that was solved 20 years ago. Yet, this is exactly what many programmers spend most of their time on.

Right, because principals related to OOP would clearly be useful to COBOL running legacy systems and remembering marketing acronyms are indicative of how much a programmer is going to waste time.

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