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Hackers As Factory Workers?
DevDude writes "A strangely interesting article is running on MSDN, entitled: The Case for Software Factories. It suggests creating 'development environments configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application.' As a developer thrust into many an unsavory situation, I am constantly stepping in the remnants of some development methodology or other. Will super-specialization of software development teams help the industry to push out better software faster? Or are we hassled enough without being treated as an assembly line?"
This will never work. Not because it's impossible or inefficient, but because programmers will never submit to it. For some reason, people who type instructions into machines have gotten into their heads that they are underappreciated artists or that there is something uniquely heroic about what they do. The vast bulk of programming is just repetition. It's skilled repetition, but no more so than drafting or car repair.
It disturbs me that the general public and MBA types don't seem to understand how difficult software actually is.
There is this curve where when you learn how to program and write a few small projects you extrapolate from that experience and believe that large projects must be the same.
Part of the misconception lies in the belief that the difficult part is knowing a programming language. Being able to competently write code is only being conversant. It is really the higher levels of organization that are difficult.
You don't need to hire a genius to slap together a porn site for you...it is a solved problem and much like hiring a factory worker, you don't have to look hard to find someone who can assemble the pieces. But as you start going out into uncharted waters doing things that are more technically interesting, you will find that you cannot just hire anyone who knows how to type out correct code.
The good news is that believing that all programmers are the equal doesn't make it so. Any company who wants to try this experiment does so at its own peril.