Quirky Engineers Gone the Way of the Dinosaur?

Milican writes "I think its time we ask our fellow Slashdotters, 'is there still room in a company for a quirky 'guru', or are projects so large now by necessity team-based development rules.' Read this article on Embedded.com and decide for yourself." I think this article didn't describe someone really 'quirky' though - it was someone who didn't really want to work.

Comments

Lets turn this crap into fertilizer.

[DougNYC]

Instead of arguing with the author, lets focus on something useful. He writes:
"We've spent a lot of time making Linux techie-friendly - powerful, configurable," he says, "but not enough time making it easy for Aunt Tillie to use." Why should Linux try to lure Aunt Tillie? "Because," Raymond says, "dat's where da money is."

Well, I couldn't care less about Aunt Tillie I'm a programmer. Note, I'm not a developer. Developers, IMHO, are people who need pretty little drag and drop silliness to get their work done. It may be that they need these "IDEs" because they really can't program or it may be that when a manager says "The SVP of Marketing promised The Big Customer delivery by this afternoon" developers need these drag and drop tools to meet deadline, it doesn't matter. Developers are the people who care about Aunt Tillie and her OCD need for cute WYSIWYG apps, and to a developer Linux sucks.

Why should we care? Because were ever the developers go Aunt Tillie follows, NOT the other way around. Remember, Aunt Tillie couldn't spell computer before she learned about Quicken. Now she changes banks because they don't support online bill paying. She thought AOL was a country music station until her daughter went off to college and forced her to learn how to email. Now Aunt Tillie can't live without v-mail images of her 18-month-old grand daughter, and she wants broadband so she can video stream with her sisters on the coast.

I'm a programmer and I think Linux has been and still is a beautiful programming platform, but it has a long way to go before it's can claim to be a good development platform, and we need the developers if we want Aunt Tillie.

How do we turn Linux into the most powerful development platform ever built? How do we make it so powerful even MS Windows developers will want to work on it?

We laugh at Tom's interest in the Mayans now ...

[opencode]

But in just a few years, they'll be a redux Y2K scare, as anyone who's studied the Mayan Calendar can attest to: according to them, there is "no history" of civiilization to record after 20xx (sorry, I forget the exact year -- ask the quirks in my own department, and they won't shut up about it). They had categorized the Calendar for centuries, but foresaw no reason to do it after this said year ....

.. they didn't know why (many believe it to the the dawning of the next New Age) .... but they didn't make calendars past this year ...