Article View: alt.folklore.computers
Article #624784Re: The Peter Principle
From: Joe Pfeiffer
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2018 17:59
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2018 17:59
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Dan Espen <dan1...@gmail.com> writes: > Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes: > >> On 2018-07-06, Gareth's Downstairs Computer >> <headstone255.but.n...@yahoo.com> wrote: >> >>> Do incompetent computer programmers become technical authors? >> >> Nah, they go straight into management. > > Some do, some aren't so good at kissing up. > > I'm not going to condemn every Tech Writer that way, but > that's one of many escape routes for failed computer > programmers. Personally, I don't hold it against them. > If they can do an okay job at writing and were only > creating a mess at their attempts to code, more power to them. > > I can't remember any Tech Writers that I thought were doing > a great job, but I was a pretty rare breed of programmer that > enjoyed doing my own documentation. (And I think I did it well.) I actually knew a couple of students along the way who were hopelessly incompetent programmers, but were able to either coordinate programmers (so a future good manager) or document other people's code well. One of the latter went ahead and got a CS/English double major to be a tech writer.
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X-Received: by 2002:a24:9d0d:: with SMTP id f13-v6mr4702533itd.10.1530899996378; Fri, 06 Jul 2018 10:59:56 -0700 (PDT) X-BeenThere: alt.folklore.computers@googlegroups.com Received: by 2002:a6b:a255:: with SMTP id l82-v6ls1070514ioe.15.gmail; Fri, 06 Jul 2018 10:59:55 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 2002:a6b:a112:: with SMTP id k18-v6mr4732060ioe.138.1530899995718; Fri, 06 Jul 2018 10:59:55 -0700 (PDT) Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!l67-v6ni4111itl.0!nntp.google.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!weretis.net!feeder6.news.weretis.net!feeder.usenetexpress.com!feeder1.iad1.usenetexpress.com!aioe.org!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Joe Pfeiffer <pfei...@cs.nmsu.edu> Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: The Peter Principle Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2018 11:59:55 -0600 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 28 Message-ID: <1bzhz4ckis.fsf@pfeifferfamily.net> References: <pho0pp$s4$1@dont-email.me> <pho33o225k4@news4.newsguy.com> <pho55i$uce$1@dont-email.me> Mime-Version: 1.0 Injection-Info: reader02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="e71e3ba29a471314974e79218ecf0dd6"; logging-data="2907"; mail-complaints-to="ab...@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX185LTkq6p5AL2dv9DT+BAQptDRjwJM14pg=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.2 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:+6VvJlrN3OzB4EDeuiGKbjKQqUE= sha1:dZ7ujjCA3LGiw4IUWM1DIBHkhQo= Bytes: 2275 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit