That was an observation from Reginald Braithwaite written in 2008. I did agree with him. My guess would be that things have gone from bad to worst. I am in networking at the moment but I coded for a long time before that and looking at the number of "programmers" my company hires that are not capable of solving simple stuff (and the state of our internal sales program). I can tell you that things are much worst than that. I imagine 1999 out of 2000 is more accurate now. Look at the Yahoo questions posted in this forum. These are people taking programming classes and they can not solve simple problems. Is like someone telling you: "yes, I can drive! Which one is the accelerator again? The one on the left or the one on the right? And to go I put on D right?" Would you let someone after that drive your car? (assuming you like your car.)

I don't believe that to be true.? I'm pretty sure the "199 of 200" was pulled out of?―?let's just say "thin air".

Reginald Braithwaite has admitted as much.? In his reply to Shelley Powers's critique, Braithwaite said, " I think we agree that is not true that 199 out of 200 programmers cannot actually program."

That seems to boggle the mind, right? And yet

consider how you develop programs. For myself,

it's with my text editor, in my chosen os, in a top-

down manner. If it should be a tiny function or a

rather more ambitious project. I do it in steps,

with a plan, and I get each step right. But these

poor bastards were put in a room, given paper, and

told to write "fizzBuzz".

When's the last code you wrote with pen and paper?

My guess is it never happened. Add to that the pressure of the interview, and you don't have a

favorable experience for a coder. Then, lots of

them are unprepared. I asked a kid taking a course in C to define a string. He didn't know what the

definition of a string in C is.

Worse, when I told him, "a null-terminated array of

characters," he didn't know what that meant!. And

he is taking the course!

>

> John (gnujohn)

83.27% of all statistics are made up on the spot. 44.3% of the population knows this.

Seriously, though, I know that fair number of recent grads a few decades ago didn't have a whole lot of coding experience. I can't imagine that the failure rate is 99.5%, though.