Companies can’t blog, people do. Every time I read a post about someone saying something about how stupid/bad is some language/framework/methodology I ask myself: does this person work in a project with more than 10 people?

Most of the times that’s not the case, in fact in 99% of the cases it’s not. What I’m trying to say is that real proyects are running and working everyday. We are not asking if this projects will fail, but if the programming job will be fun/beautiful/great. And you know, reality is hard: most projects works because bad programmers can contribute code to big projects, bad programmers that you can replace any time. And all the work in this projects is a pain, and programmers life an horror. That’s what reality says of real projects.

We can now ask ourselves if this is right or not, but that’s what works in 99% of the cases. No mater the size of the company or the size of the project.

Agile methodologies, agile frameworks, agile languages… all that things can’t scale to code bases of hundred of thousands (or millions) of lines of code, with different generations of people working on them.

I hate Java, really, I program in Python if I can. But Java let you create big code bases with normal people. And companies are great if they can make normal people create great things. All this stupid search for … talent? is the last light of an era that is ending. Now that all companies are out of cash you need normal people with normal salaries do the work. The best and more profitable companies are the ones that make profit from normal workers, not the talented ones.

And programmers are just a cog in the machine, now system administators are as important as them in many web companies. And you know, they can have a real life, they can be sysadmins with 40 years or 50 years without too much problem.

I suppose that most of us, developers, entered in the field because we loved the idea of being able of changing the world from our keyboards. The sense of power was like a drug. But reality is that: 99.99% of use will never change the world. We will only contribute to things that make the world run as usual. I think that it’s a myth the idea of a programmer saving a company (a big one) because the amount of work that a programmer can do (no mater how great she is) is limited. He has to relay in others. But we all lone “machos” who can code everything by ourselves… isn’t it?

Sorry for the long commit, but that’s the 10000 post I read about how cool will be to have “great” programmers everywhere, while the writer forget one of the main rules of engineering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl‘s_law . No mater how many cool great programmers you have, their contribution will not be that great

All software tools and many libraries try to create the illusion that you don’t have to know how they organize the particular problem, when in reality you have to know exactly that to make sense of them. sadly, all libraries try to create the illusion things “become more easy” when in reality it all is just the reduction of redundancy (or some times the introduction of new ideas).

on “Strive for the simplest thing that can’t possibly fail.”, a case history.

As design team head for an inventory system (8 warehouses, 250+ stores, lotsa trucks) we used an imaginary Dr. Y who would attack every transaction with wildly wrong entries. We designed and coded so Dr. Y could not screw things up.

Then the following sequence happened:
1. The prototype went live for several departments, and
2. Some of the warehouses had to bust walls into doors for more trucks, and
3. Eighteen months later the first bug had not yet been discovered.

For those of you who had Fred Brooks talks, or are otherwise wise about inventory, turn up 38%, profits up 25%, out of stocks down 85%.

Hey CollegeGrad,

Watch the hubris, “I find that I often know exactly how to solve a problem before the veteran programmers at my job even have a chance to really think about it.”

Suppose you are two s.d.s out on the normal curve, the other programmers probably average one s.d., so of course you have to explain ‘over and over again’ but it does not have anything to do with ‘veteran’. I started in my teens at IBM in ’65 and I still have to explain, over and over, all sorts of things to self impressed hotshots and some of them cannot code cleanly until about nine months experience and a lot of code reviews until they ‘get it’.

The real greenies are slower to catch on than moderately experienced. As Headspin says, some never get it and they are shoveled off to where they cannot do more harm, even young ones who got 4.0 in CS courses sometimes cannot hack the real (design and coding) world and are sent to QA or the web sites.

Keep in mind, young’uns, that great programmers, like Steve Gibson, will keep on blowing your nappies off until he is, maybe 80 or so.