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Coders, Your Days Are Numbered
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister argues that communication skills, not coding skills, are a developer's greatest asset in a bear economy. 'Too many software development teams are still staffed like secretarial pools. Ideas are generated at the top and then passed downward through general managers, product managers, technical leads, and team leads. Objectives are carved up into deliverables, which are parceled off to coders, often overseas,' McAllister writes. 'The idea that this structure can be sustainable, when the US private sector shed three-quarters of a million jobs in March 2009 alone, is simple foolishness.' Instead, companies should emulate the open source model of development, shifting decision-making power to the few developers with the deepest architectural understanding of, and closest interaction with, the code. And this shift will require managers to look beyond résumés 'choked with acronyms and lists of technologies' to find those who 'can understand, influence, and guide development efforts, rather than simply taking dictation.'" Update: 04/04 19:52 GMT by T : InfoWorld's link to the archived version of the story on open source development no longer works; updated with Google's cached version.
So, I might do well if:
1) I can actually communicate with the people that are paying me.
2) I can write code that doesn't suck.
3) I actually understand the business needs for the code I'm writing.
Wow. I'll be much more effective now. Thanks.
I think the anti-pattern I see in most companies that are weak in the technology area is the guy at the top is great at landing deals, public speaking, and sales but he can't figure out what those damned pesky nerds are doing and why they need to get paid so much money.
As a general rule, most successful tech companies are started and run by people with engineering and/or cs backgrounds (Google, Paypal, Ebay, Microsoft to name a few). Many companies these days, which are in the information handling business (finance, etc), have little competitive advantage over their competition except for their technology platform and are thus essentially tech companies, even though they might not know it yet. Now with the down economy they actually have to be better than the competition and can't just survive by endlessly rolling over credit lines. Hence, the greater need for engineers who can create a technological vision for the company instead of just doing what they are told to do by clueless bosses.
I'm always amused when I read stories like this about how X or Y is the only possible future of development.
What works for one application or company doesn't necessarily work for the next. This isn't a one-size-fits-all industry. If it were every company would be using the same languages with the same methodologies.
Meh.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Leaving development decisions to core programmers can lead to chaos in development priorities. A hard core coder may spend large amounts of time chasing down just that little bit of latency in the process scheduler; but what the business needs is a rewrite in order to simplify processes.
This is why the OS model has a hard time living in the corporate environment. Many times what needs to be done for the business is tedious programming driven by idiots (== users). No one wants to do that. So a core group of programmers ends up adding a plethora of new features that are elegant in implementation, advanced in design, and useless for users.
The other major factor in corporate America (can't speak for the other 96% of the world) is the vast armies of "business analysts". These people allegedly have communication skills with both users and coders. In reality, however, they are incented to drag out projects in requirements and testing phases in order to make their own functions seem more useful. Many projects I've worked on have burned upwards of 3/4 of the hours billed to business analysts.
The remedy? Coders who can speak Business, are WILLING to speak Business, are willing to let the needs of the users drive their projects, and the ability to code. In that order. These people are far and few between, sadly.
Witness the common reaction to the idea of pair programming: "it'll disturb my concentration... it's hard to hold the details of your coding in your head if you're talking to someone".
Yeah right, that's just the reaction on the outside. On the inside the guy is thinking, "He wants me to do pair programming? He's an idiot. Maybe I'll give him tons of reasons and he'll go away." If you have decent programmers, pair programming is a waste of resources. Much better to have team programming, where each person is working on the different parts of the same project. Then when you have problems, you can discuss them with your partner, not on every single line (should we use a while loop or a for loop here?)
Incidentally, he is right. When I code, I don't think in words, I think in code. If someone speaks to me while I am coding, it can take a second for me to get back into English mode. A similar effect happens when I'm thinking in Spanish and someone unexpectedly says something to me in English. Or when I am playing the piano and someone talks to me.
And for the record: a few years ago there was a study published in Communications of the ACM that showed while pair programming is more efficient than a single solitary programmer, it is not as efficient as two programmers with two keyboards. FYI.
Qxe4
I'm sorry, but as someone who has recently been exposed to pair programming I can say you're talking out of your backside. If a programmer can't deal with pair programming them they're a very poor programmer. Pair programming is about getting together, thinking and knocking out some code that both programmers agree is the best solution. If you can't do it then it's likely that your ego is taking over and you're ignoring better solutions.
Two decent programmers sitting together pair programming will set out some good, robust code with a lot less bugs as the other is pointing out problems as they go.
I'd suggest that you're a poorer programmer than you think and that you should rethink how you go about problem solving.
And for the record: a few years ago there was a study published in Communications of the ACM that showed while pair programming is more efficient than a single solitary programmer, it is not as efficient as two programmers with two keyboards. FYI.
It's much older than that - IIRC "The Mythical Man Month" first formalized the idea that N programmers do not produce working code N times as fast as 1 programmer, and that's essentially what is happening with paired programming.
The real problem was discussed long ago in "Programmers and Managers" by Kraft. Two skilled programmers operating independently will indeed produce good code faster than two programmers paired. The problem lies with the idea that there is a large supply of "skilled" programmers. There aren't and most of software development methodology for the last thirty or forty years has been aimed at creating processes by which mediocre programmers can produce reasonable quality code in a reasonable time. Unfortunately nothing will ever change the fact that the productivity range of programmers spans an order of magnitude, possibly two depending on who you listen to.
Want good quality results? Hire 5 good programmers, not 15 mediocre programmers. That means that you'll probably have to pay them pretty good coin and treat them well and that is management's real problem. Management dreams of cheap replaceable labor working on an assembly line. After all assembling cars and developing highly sophisticated software have so much in common!
As for the comments on disturbing concentration - absolutely! Any significant chunk of code is highly complex and detailed. It needs to be kept in the head as a whole, in an organized fashion and in detail. It is nothing short of mind boggling that anyone can imagine that a process that requires being continually interrupted and distracted will aid that task. This is nothing but another doomed attempt to take the bottom 10% of the talent pool and try and squeeze some productivity out of them.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop