Re: Macros Make Me Mad

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Todd Proebsting wrote:

>While it would be wonderful to have a large team of such talented
>individuals over a long period of time, it has been my experience that
>groups tend, over time, towards mediocrity or worse no matter how good
>they started out. 
>
As teams get larger, one tends to add people who are less and less 
senior.  However, in my
experience, we do not give these less-senior people the same degree of 
control and the same
latitude of behavior that we grant to the senior people.  For example, 
the senior people have
a greater say in establishing the coding conventions used by the team. 
 Similarly, the senior
people would have more latitude and permission to introduce macros than 
the more junior
people.  Of course this is all very delicate and that's why you need 
talented managers, to
help determine who should be allowed to do what, when it's a good idea 
to take a chance
on a newcomer and give him some space in which to grow knowing that this 
is a calculated
risk, and so on.  But in general I don't think there's anything too 
special about macros here.
When there are elements of the programming environment or programming 
process that
affect many members of the team, that are hard to control, that require 
more experience,
then you take more care about whose hands are allowed on that steering 
wheel.