QA Hates You

I thought an article entitled A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality would thoroughly explain why spending lots of money on developers was a bad idea, and how you could improve your process by putting development and the developer staff back into its place in the software development lifecycle. Unfortunately, while the article makes some good points about how a good developer is better than a bad developer (I mean, when isn’t good better than bad?), it falls too easily into the trap of DEVELOPERS ARE LIKE THE GODS!

Companies need to stop thinking about their developers as cogs in the machine. They are more akin to artists, authors, designers, architects, scientists, or CEOs.

The rest of the piece explains why expert developers are worth top dollar: because they’re ROCK STARS!

Expert/experienced anything are worth more than less skilled/less capable employees because they have experience in their field as well as problem solving ability related to their job duties. In many cases, developers have seen the rudiments of software (presentation, data access, network communication) before so they can apply those lessons to new problems at hand.

Big deal; any produce clerk at a grocery store who’s been on the job for a while will develop a system for culling stuff left on the rack quickly, for optimal filling patterns, and for building appealing displays. But does that mean that he or the equally skilled meat clerk is the axis around which the whole store rotates? No.

Likewise, having smart developers is better than having dumb developers, but it won’t make or break your organization because smart developers are only cogs in your machine. If you blow all of your money on Expert Developers, you’ll not afford smart project managers, smart QA, smart customer managers, and smart everything else. And an organization run by and for Expert Developers will do lots of cool and smart stuff, but that’s rarely the same as profitable stuff.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 8:18 am by The Director and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.