The biggest problem with the software industry (and most others, especially middle management) is the cowboys. This is a fact that haunts us daily – bad legacy code, bad design choices and, should they get into the higher echelons (which they often do) well, it’s all downhill. Can it be any wonder that so many software projects fail when there are no standards for the industry? Worse, how do you tell your software engineers from your cowboy developers? This is much, much harder than it sounds.
You can have someone who’s a fantastic coder but shouldn’t be let near an enterprise project. It seems to be a plague upon the brightest that they get obsessive – they reinvent the wheel in a better manner and don’t know when to call it quits. Great. But not when you have a target to work to.
You can have people with every qualification and certification under the sun who make entire teams curse their name. University is especially bad for this – university teaches people computer science, not software engineering. There are hordes of graduates, both talented and talentless, with no idea of how to build software (I know, I used to be one).
Experience is a useful tool but far from the whole answer. I can outperform some developers with much more experience than myself; likewise there are probably many people out there with less experience who would leave me in their dust. How do you measure that? It has been said programmer productivity varies by a factor of 10. It’s true and also very hard to determine in a short period of time.
So we have a mess of factors, which no doubt affect other industries as well. But unlike many other professional areas, such as law, accountancy and engineering, we have no bar at which to set the standard. Yes, there’s always going to be uncertainty – there are still plenty of bad lawyers out there – but how can we expect to be taken seriously with no basic standard of skills? Maybe it’s time we started taking ourselves seriously and make ourselves seen as not just keyboard jockeys – able to be put in a corner, feed shite and outsource at will – but professionals, valuable skilled employers who actually know what they’re talking about.
Which is not to say we can’t still reinvent a better wheel, just that there’s no place for it at work.
