I don't think a rock-solid technical team "will probably choose the best technology", this is usually dictated by the environment (employer). I do think a rock-solid technical team will implement faster, communicate to management effectively, etc, etc.
In my experience, it is more like 3% in most shops - not 1%. I agree with your statement "for every 10 people maybe one knew what was going on and was productive." Some possibly related comments :-) While I don't have a PhD, I did experience a "crisis" as I neared my 10th year in programming. I noticed that many of my friends who had entered the field about the time I did were leaving the field. I also noticed that I came to a new job all excited about the prospects and learned lots of new stuff the first year or so. Then the next two years I just repeated the first year again and was "bored". So I found a new job. By the time year 10 rolled around, I noticed that I had done this 3 times - and I had to ask myself if I wanted to constantly change jobs or if I too should leave the field completely. In the end, I decided that I liked computers too much to leave the field and that I needed to adjust my attitude about what was "interesting" in order that I shouldn't feel the need to change jobs so often. Over the years, I've changed my "challenge" to building systems that are easily enhanced, modified and maintained. This has forces me to learn new techniques (still trying to wrap myself around xUnit) and technologies (moved to OO a while ago) to meet my internal commitments. I still change jobs occaisionally (and I still feel that 3 year itch) but I find my problems with jobs are now things like the arbitrary hours that I need to spend at work rather than the work itself. Since I am now coming up to 30 years in this field, I think the change in attitude was a positive thing for me. If experience and responding to a challenge are part of what makes a good programmer, perhaps things like this are why the percentages of "good" people are so low. Shalom Reich -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Chris Finlayson Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 1:50 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [patterns-discussion] Pattern-Oriented Programming Oh, and another thing! Naturally, a rock-solid technical team will probably choose the best technology, implement faster, communicate to management effectively, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the 1% of such individuals can only go so far..... I've consulted for large companies where for every 10 people maybe one knew what was going on and was productive. The reality is that a rock-solid technical team likes to work on interesting problems, and doesn't want to do something that's been done a million times over (think eCommerce). Not everyone is a Software Engineering PhD, or very much interested in continuing their education past the bare-bones-minimum, or very much interested in working at all. I'm not a Software Engineering PhD, and even I'd be bored if I were working on American Express' eCommerce site. I can only imagine how a real PhD, or similarly trained/talented individual would feel. _______________________________________________ patterns-discussion mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/patterns-discussion
