Freshly minted programmers today have a staggering range of skills and knowledge, but at the same time they lack expertise that earlier generations possessed. While some of the dying expertise is no longer necessary, there are a few old-time lessons that companies may wish their new coders understood, writes Daniel P. Dern at ITWorld.

The performance range of different components is something a lot of new coders have little understanding of, according to Bernard Hayes, PMP, CSM, CSPO. "In a world in which most folks have never intuited systems operations from studying console lights (or more often now, correlating events with signal analyzers), engineers are losing a strong mental model for processor/IO & systems interactions," he said.

Hardware issues and the problems they cause down the line are another area in which there appears to be fading knowledge, said Suford Lewis, a developer and project leader for more than 35 years. "When your company builds specialty hardware, you need to be able to learn how each new thing works--and write some hardware test routines to figure out whether it was built to spec and which bits do what!" she said.

There are two broad categories in which new coders lack skills, in Lewis's view: careful design and thorough specification. "So many times I have seen software from single programs to large systems developed with insufficient attention to what was requested--and what the requestor actually meant by it!" she said. "At the single program level, this takes the form of dashing off the code and fixing it at random until it seems to execute okay. Modern tools make this so easy that few software engineers actually spend much effort trying to figure out what the problems are, let alone thinking about it in detail before starting."

Knowing how to debug software without an integrated debugger also seems to be a dying art, according to Kris Rudin, senior developer and associate partner at the digital marketing agency Ascentium. "Today, there are occasionally times with you can't use the integrated debugger in your IDE (usually with some weird web application frameworks and server configurations), and younger programmers are at a loss as to what to do, and resort to hack-and-slash coding to try to randomly fix a bug, using guesswork," she said.

For more:
- see Daniel P. Dern's post at ITWorld

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