Reply #124: Indeed. Back in the day when skills and knowledge were still valued, [View All]

I had a junior code-monkey that had managed to get his degree without ever learning the MOD function. He was working on a form generating application that required it's use and he didn't know how to do it. "Well", says I to myself, "maybe they have a different term in India and he just never ran into the function before, no biggie", and I tell him what to use.

Utterly blank stare. I could have told him to "polish the signatory using the rewiring from the cuneiform capacitor" and got the same result. He had managed to get a degree in computer science without ever grasping the concept of a modulus. At this point my boss walks in to get some information from me on the project and sees what's going on. So there we are, the two people in charge of this multi-million dollar contract standing at a whiteboard teaching a college graduate elementary long division and trying to shoehorn the concept of a remainder into this guy's head.

It's pretty amazing how far, and how quickly, we've fallen so far.