Re: PG: Hackers and Painters

["Neil W. Van Dyke" <address@hidden>]

Matt Curtin <cmcurtin@interhack.net> writes at 16:21 19-May-2003 -0400:
> The (A?) problem seems to be that the economics suggest that quality
> building by persons trained well in the profession just isn't a cost
> that people will bear.  They would rather pay $20 up front and another

There are organizations that go to great expense to try to hire what
they consider to be the most generally skilled or promising programmers,
but I think most organizations do not, with good reason...

The majority of IT software development nowadays involves instantiating
applications using application frameworks or toolsets, which add their
own complexities, yet which greatly constrain the solution space.

In these cases, one might strongly suspect that a programmer's
experience with the *particular* framework/toolset predetermined for an
application is a bigger contributor to project success than the
programmer's general skillfulness is.

So, Master Generalist Programmer status, even were that identifiable,
might truly be a superfluous qualification for much IT work.  (And the
bastards would want too much money anyway.)

-- 
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/