Everyone’s a developer
February 12, 2009 12:32 pm RandomWhy does everyone think they are a developer?
On one side I’m annoyed I have been programming for commercially for nearly 10 year (20-25 if you count BASIC on the ZX81 and Commodore PET). So when people come up and say ‘oh I’ll fix that bit of code I wrote a Macro once…’ or ‘I’ve done a bit of PHP I’ll fix your database…’ I can’t help but get riled. Half of me is annoyed, well basically out of egotism I guess, my years of training and effort have just been undermined by a simple,’ I’ll do it myself’. On the other side part of me is amazed at how easy and accessible programming had become and is really pleased to see people being able to do it themselves is great.
However I do wonder about the depth of understanding. In some cases not understanding doesn’t matter you get what you want done and it works, but in other these fundamentals are essential, as the systems get bigger ad have to interact with more other systems then you must understand, and I feel that sometimes the easy of entry to ‘programming’ lulls people into a false sense of security that it is all easy. These people make awful managers and are probably the reason most Government projects fail, they think they know because they wrote a macro once…
I’m not against people giving it a go and I don’t think that you have to be formally trained to be good, some people are naturally gifted (at whatever they do).
I realised last night that this isn’t me isolated as a programmer thinking this. Last night on ‘Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud had similar misgivings (although he expressed them much more eloquently!) about a client who wanted to do a lot of the work the architect would normally do themselves. He thought this was bad and undermined the learning’s of the architect…. but in the end the project went extremely well, perhaps because it meant so much to the client that they put their all into, perhaps because of natural talent… perhaps because these things aren’t as hard or inaccessible as we make out….?
So if you want to write code, go for it in fact whatever you want to do you can, just put your mind to it.