On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 3:39 AM, Vincent Veyron <vv.li...@wanadoo.fr> wrote: > Le jeudi 12 avril 2012 à 13:14 -0400, eric.b...@barclays.com a écrit : >> Well, finding (good) developers is certainly an issue. >> > Over the years, I have seen more than one of those being driven out of > the field by the inane management that most developers toil under. And > considering how demanding it is to be a good programmer, I can see why > they give up : you just can't have both. > > On the other hand, I see scores of good developers in open source > projects (their products certainly are very good)
I think the one of the main reasons this dichotomy exists is that in open source, developers spend the bulk of their time programming. In closed source work, developers start out doing a lot of programming, but over time spend less time programming, and more time going to meetings, writing status reports, and filling out HR paperwork, killing processes on overloaded dev servers, etc. The best development managers I've seen shield their programmers from those tasks and allow them to get work done. There is no agile silver bullet to make programmers more effective except giving them uninterrupted time to do their jobs.
