Agreed.. MIS = Management Information Systems.. What IT used to be called back before most of ya'll were born <grin>
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ricardo Aráoz Sent: Sunday, February 14, 2010 8:22 AM To: ProFox Email List Subject: Re: .NET and other languages for a VFP developer Virgil Bierschwale wrote: > Because you need to understand these things.. > > Too many programmers are considered incompetent because they do not > understand the process (business process) > > Just as a doctor would need to spend 6 or more years learning their > trade and then another 6 or more years being mentored by the senior > doctors before being turned loose on their own, so must our people or > we will continue to have incompetent programmers. > > I myself have been in situations where I was the only developer, or I > hired and mentored teams and I can guarantee you that in most cases > when I came onboard, the MIS dept was clueless about the basic > functioning of their company. > I don't really know what does the "MIS dept" stand for. But anyway. What you say may stand for medium to small business and small teams. But, to go back to your construction parallel, if we are acting as programmers we should be nothing more, you wouldn't expect a brick layer or a carpenter to know by heart the blueprints of the building he is working in. They know their end of the deal, and that's ok. It is called "separation of concerns" (check modular design), the blueprint is the engineer or architect's concern, in our case it's the system's designer's concern. Of course in our trade we sometimes assume several roles, but we should still try and keep the roles separate. Of course it is better if you know the basic layout of the systems and where is your work inserted, but it should not be necessary. > For us to develop anything, we need to understand two things: > 1. How the business process flows from beginning to end (without > computers) when they receive raw materials and they are turned into > finished goods, and 2. How the business process flows from beginning > to end (again without > computers) when they receive a order until it is shipped and also any > problems received after it has been sold. > And a carpenter should know where and when and by whom the wood he is using was cut. Also the whole process of construction of the building he is working in, how materials flow from beginning to end, management plans, and of course have a mental image of the blueprints of the building. Yeah! Good luck finding such a carpenter, brick layer, plumber, or whatever. > Until you understand these processes, you are only a bandaide > installer in my opinion, or down here in the south, a bailing wire fixer-upper.. > LOL, must be a southern thing. Down here we believe anything can be fixed with bailing wire. :-) > The reason I bring this up is because if a programmer is incompetent, > it actually is the team lead's or the managers fault because they are > not doing their job of being the mentor. > Not really. Maybe because he is really incompetent. But sometimes there are other... political... considerations that prevent him from being fired. I've seen it happen, cases where two, three people are absolutely no good, and the manager also knows it and suffers them. But nothing gets done with them. > I know ed doesn't agree, but until we take responsibility for our own > people, we have nobody to blame but ourselves > > Think about this. > How many jobs have you been on where there might be 10 or even 50 > developers working on projects, but typically two of the superstars > are doing the majority of the work and the rest are only doing bits and pieces. > > This is because: > 1. The superstars won't or don't have the time to mentor the junior > members, and 2. Job security for the superstars. > Answer : promote the superstars to having small 5 people teams with which to develop the systems. Force them to delegate work by not accepting the excuse that they have to do all the work, now they have a team and the superstar is responsible for it. Suck it up and accept things will get a bit behind schedule till the superstars organize their teams. > My belief is that if we would spend the time mentoring the junior members > and get them all up to speed and cull out the ones that can't come up to > speed, the sum total of 50 programmers that are outstanding would far > achieve the sum total of two superstars. > And if the world's resources where equally shared there'd be no hunger nor extreme poverty in the world. But things just don't work that way. > Professionals or not, just as there are good doctors and bad doctors and the > same for attorneys, no process will work correctly without the manager > working on the big picture and focusing on the details of making sure that > their team has all of the skills (programming, business, etc) necessary and > I've seen far too many managers that refuse to participate in the > development of their teams because they were worried that one of the > memembers would take their job. > True, but then you ask yourself if the system that allowed a person with such a flaw to rise to his actual management position is flawed. And then you ask yourself if the company that allows such a flawed management selection system is not flawed. And then you ask yourself if the market that allows such a flawed company to exist is not flawed. And then....... 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