Kay Pentecost wrote:
> See how it would be if you *had* used ridicule:
>
> "In the best case, it allows the best people to do what they do well with
> the schlubs doing the scut work."
>
> That statement, like many of Joels, locks people in to a particular
> role/skill/ability/level... like a statement that "methodologies are to sell
> books," which discounts all methodologies...
I'm having this debate at work at the moment. Management want us to adopt a
style of development advocated by BEA: "skilled Java programmers" sit in
the back room churning out generic controls of some sort, whilst "less
skilled Java programmers" use WebLogic Workshop to glue the controls together.
The concerns I've got with this are several-fold, but here are three:
1) This assumes that the less-skilled developers have more domain
knowledge, and thus know the better way to glue the controls together. This
is not the case in my organisation at least (not as a blanket rule, anyway).
2) The fact that we do have a skills divide (and we do) is a problem. My
preferred solution is to close the divide by training, mentoring, and other
forms of upskilling. This is a long-term approach but it has already
demonstrated in two teams that it is extremely effective (both of which,
BTW, are agile and using pairing extensively). Managements preferred
approach seems to be to accept the skills divide as inevitable and work
around it.
3) Any approach that commits to the skills divide locks the skill divide in
place. I'm convinced that the use of Workshop will seriously hinder a
developer's ability to grow past a certain point, simply because the
complexity is hidden, not removed. As an aside, this also creates the
nastiest sort of debugging problems - the ones where you grapple with the
toolset, not the problem.
--
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
Robert Watkins http://twasink.net/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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