Title: A Personal View

I was reviewing a programmer's performance recently. I asked him what he had done over the last year to develop his programming skills. He looked completely bewildered, and asked me what was wrong with his programming. I mildly (yes I can be mild when I want to) suggested that he seemed to have a flat, unimaginative code style that did not seem to have matured since his employment five years earlier.

He asked me what had happened that his perfectly adequate programming of five years ago was now considered inadequate. Definitely he was on the defensive and feeling threatened. I slowly got him to explain his view that as he could program in C and had kept up to date over the changes that the ISO (he called it ANSI, but I won't quarrel too much with that) had introduced. I asked him about C++ but I won't embarrass you by repeating his vitriolic rejection of object-orientation as being totally useless to him. His view was that O-O had nothing to offer him because it did not fit his 'style'. I rapidly changed the subject lest we get into a forever loop.

So I asked him what changes in C might make his job easier. Basically his response was that any changes would only make things harder. He clearly had thought very little about the way in which the hardware was changing and how this might change programming needs.

In response to my question about what training he would like to receive over the next year, he came back to his theme that he was happy as a programmer and happy with his programming.

Can someone tell me how to break down this sense of complacency. This particular instance was rather extreme but I see a large number of milder cases. The reaction seems to be that development and change of one's skills indicate that earlier work was inadequate. You know that you are supposed to offer incompetent employees training before you despair and sack them - well some seem to think that any offer of training is an accusation of incompetence.

We hear a lot from those who feel that their employers should do more to provide them with training (and they are almost always right) but we also need to tackle this problem of employees who either resent training or who think training days are an excuse for a bit of celebration and not to be taken seriously. Of course everyone should go to the training day, but its really only for the newer, less experienced, members of the team.

The life pattern 'birth - educate - train - work - retire - death' is completely inappropriate to modern life. Taking birth and death as a pair of parentheses, the other items should be multiple threads to a modern life. Perhaps I should reterm 'retire' as 'leisure' but that is all. A life without continuing diet of education is a pretty thin gruel. Work without continued training will soon deteriorate to unemployment. Without some leisure it all becomes rather pointless.

I think I am trying to say that we have to continue to develop and mature. At each stage we do our best according to our current maturity, but we should expect that to change as we move on through life. Reading 'Peter and Jane' books may be pretty good going at five or six, but by the time you have been reading those for a couple of years you should have moved on to more demanding text. In the same way our code writing skills should develop beyond the 'school essay' level. Of course some talented individuals at the peak of their profession and do not appear to need further training. If you look carefully at these people you will almost always find that they continue to hone their writing skills informally. They are always on the look-out for new ways of writing, new expressions, new ideas etc.

We need the same attitude among programmers. Each should strive to be better than they were last year, not because they were incompetent but because there is always much more to achieve. Take a positive attitude and assume that you are ignorant, that way you will not be too proud to learn something new. Learn that 'your code is as good now as it was last year' is a studied insult, not a compliment. Resolve to learn to address coding problems with appropriate techniques. Always be ready to answer the question:

"What have you done in the last year to improve your programming skills?"

And know what you want when asked:

"What can we offer you to help develop your skills?"

If you think you do not need any improvement, go and find another job, because one day your employer will realise just how poor your work has become (even though it is no worse than it was five years ago).