Teach Your Programmers Well
By Allen Holub
January 15, 2005 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Regardless of what people say about how they develop software, the best way to find real priorities is to look at the departmental budget. Things get particularly interesting when the perceived needs of the managers are not reflected in those budgets.
Enterprise Systems just published an interesting budget survey based on the voluntary replies of 250 subscribers, half of which are senior management. (You can see this survey at www.esj.com/surveys/itbudget2004.aspx.)
In that study, the disconnect between needs and spending struck me forcibly in two areas: training and staffing. The top four areas where the managers were planning to reduce spending were desktop software, desktop hardware, staff head count and training.
Cutting out unnecessary hardware and software purchases doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but cutting head count and training is a problem, especially when you compare these cuts with the top three items in the “What new IT initiatives are on your IT wish list?” category: staff salaries, staff training and staff head count. The No. 1 item in the “What one skill does your IT department need to develop most?” category is “technical proficiency.”
To quote astronaut James Lovell: “Houston, we have a problem.”
I strongly believe that you can’t produce even moderately acceptable software without excellent programmers. I also believe that it takes longer to develop mediocre programs than it does to produce good ones, and mediocrity is the best you’ll get out of an untrained staff.
Though excellence is important, it’s not innate. You achieve excellence by superb training and constant practice. By superb training, I mean classes taught in the flesh by experts in the field, not online courseware churned out by some education mill. The online stuff is no better than reading a book—it’s not useless, but you get what you pay for.
Unfortunately, our university system falls down on the superb-training front. A degree is, more and more, a job requirement, but most experienced programmers consider someone fresh out of school to be useless when it comes to doing real work. Programmers don’t become productive until they’ve worked on nontrivial projects for at least a few years, but even those years don’t guarantee an excellent programmer. Since our universities aren’t doing the job, you’d expect employers to make up the difference by training their workforce. Most companies don’t do that, so the programmers who work for those companies never get better—they just get older.
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/28367
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|