Quantifying ROI for learning some new technology is really hard. There's an intrinsic benefit to picking up new stuff, even if you never use it in "real life", just because it makes you a better developer.
As you'd expect, there's a period of lost productivity for picking up something new, so if you're stuck in a "short project" mentality, it's never going to make sense to learn anything new. Each time you learn something new, the project you're working on (and probably the next one) will take longer. But in the long view, I think it's pretty clear that picking up new things will be a time saver. I can say with utter certainty that CFC-based applications, Fusebox, and ColdSpring make me a more productive developer. Not having them available (or not knowing how to use them) would probably cost me 8-10 hours a week. So if learning how to use them effectively were to take me 2 months (which is probably not unreasonable), it'd make sense to learn if I were to intend to program CF for at least two thirds of a year (2 months * 20 work days * 8 hours / (10 hours / week) = 32 weeks to catch up). Which I certainly planned to. So it was a no-brainer to learn how to use them effectively. I didn't learn them all at once, of course, but over a period of time, and continue to do so. Like any investment, you have to keep contributing if you want it to keep serving you. cheers, barneyb On 2/19/07, Phillip Senn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Will I see a savings of time by the time I am done? That's been the unspoken question for so many people. I wonder what the group has to say about that. It used to be (back in the 80's) that you could cost justify an expense if you could show a 3 year Return On Investment (ROI). In other words, if a new piece of equipment paid for itself within 3 years, you could more than likely get it approved. Taking that analogy into the time-save category, and recognizing that we are now working on Internet time, Q: What do you think should be a good ROI should be for spending your time on a new technology? This might be helpful in making the millions of little decisions that I've been making all along. "If I create this shortcut, will it save the amount of time that it took me to create it over the span of the next x years/months/weeks?" "If I put business logic in CFCs…" "If I learn this framework…"
-- Barney Boisvert [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.barneyb.com/ Got Gmail? I have 100 invites. You are subscribed to cfcdev. To unsubscribe, please follow the instructions at http://www.cfczone.org/listserv.cfm CFCDev is supported by: Katapult Media, Inc. We are cool code geeks looking for fun projects to rock! www.katapultmedia.com An archive of the CFCDev list is available at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
