> hiring random "programmers" who have history or psychology degrees and think they can program because they made a form in PHP.
That's pretty unfair to people coming from history or psychology who actually can write good code. Just because you don't have a degree in CS doesn't mean your code is shit. This is purely anecdotal, but my predecessor at my current job was a CS graduate and wrote code like in the OP.
One of the real issues has to do with the mentality of coding. There are people regardless of background who approach coding as a job, and those who approach it as a craft. You want the latter, not the former.
Here's my rule:
If you don't look back at code you wrote a decade ago with some degree of horror, you are either an extraordinarily good coder, or you aren't a good coder at all.
I tend to spend a lot of time planning (almost as much as coding). I do tend to notice big changes over a period of 2-3 years but areas where I can notice improvements in say six months.
I think I spend too much time planning and not enough time just getting shit done. It's one of the things that I feel like I have to work on this year.
I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing. I spend a lot of time planning because I find my coding productivity is higher. Often it's better to let problems sit for a bit than to code then first, or if one does a mock-up it is an exploration that is part of the planning, to be discarded and done right a second time.
But what this means is I rarely come in the next week and wonder what I was thinking (it does happen, but rarely). More often I look at things, over a few months figure out better solutions to coding problems and my style changes accordingly.
I became an English major because I'd been coding since I was six years old and preferred to learn how to become a better writer.
At the time, the majority of incoming CS freshman did not even harbor the most basic ideas or curiosity about how a computer functioned. They had all heard they could make mounds of money. When I took elective CS classes in college, I had graduate CS students attempting to copy off of me.
It's possible CS students and programs have changed since the 90s, but based upon the CS graduates I encounter, I expect they haven't improved that much.
I knew a music major who was a better coder than most of the CompSci grads.
At one job, I judged coding ability by the number of times your SQL woke me up due to huge I/O usage[1]. Many a CS graduate cannot read a query plan.
1) if it looked like a reasonable query and it was just Sybase's crap optimizer, I gave them a pass. Although, after a while, you learned to force the indexes.
Yeah, I didn't mean to sound so derogatory, but out of non-formally-trained developer co-workers I've ever had only a handful didn't create work for everyone.
The two most common issues are inability to create sanely defined and decomposed schemas and clearly written queries, and poor ability to structure code in an organized way.
That said, I have known a couple very good coders without any kind of formal education. They just seem to be outliers.
When dealing with formally trained developers I've certainly encountered the incompetent also, but I'd say at an easy majority of trained coders I've worked with are competent enough to not be hard to work with.
Mind I you I do not claim to be a "superstar developer" or anything. The state of the art tends to change just a bit faster than I can keep up with these days.
Conversely, I'd hazard a guess that <10% of my outgoing CS class were competent in the way you describe... I'm fairly certain that the "ability to create sanely defined and decomposed schemas and clearly written queries, and structure code in an organized way" is the outlier here.
Speaking as a former history major, thanks! :-) Code like that is written by people who don't really understand how their code works and there are plenty of CS majors in that category. With any luck, they are swiftly promoted to management where they can do less harm.
I know it's unfair to generalize, but seriously if we'd had to put numbers on it and perform statistics on it (something most psychology degrees are pretty capable of even though the way they do it might raise questions) I'm rather sure the outcome would be close to: sorry, but 90% cannot write good code. Why I think this? Because I've seen and fixed code written in multiple laguages by psychology degrees (about 20 in total, from more than one institution) for the last ten years. And there are just no words for how awful it was. Hell, I've seen matlab scripts in which I would use the same dataset for both dataset arguments and still the result was there was a statistically relevant (p < 0.01) difference between the two.
That's pretty unfair to people coming from history or psychology who actually can write good code. Just because you don't have a degree in CS doesn't mean your code is shit. This is purely anecdotal, but my predecessor at my current job was a CS graduate and wrote code like in the OP.