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by nostrademons 3832 days ago
That's not really true - with more and more tools and development philosophies coming available, we need more and more experienced programmers with the judgment to choose between them and apply them to the problem at hand.
1 comments
amelius 3832 days ago
If you have a team with 10 programmers, only 1 of them needs to be smart enough to pick the right tools for the other 9.

Also, I think tools are converging in the most important areas. So eventually it will not matter much which tools you use.

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nostrademons 3832 days ago
That's not actually how high-functioning teams work. If you have one person make all the decisions and pick all the tools, you will have one highly-productive programmer and 9 disengaged programmers who go through the motions of writing code but usually end up creating more work that the one highly-productive programmer will have to undo. End result, he gets burned out, the product never ships, and the 9 disengaged programmers never actually learn how to program.

I've been on teams where everybody understands how a compiler is built & when you'd want to write one, why & when performance matters, how Lisp idioms can translate to C++, when you might want to machine-learn a model and why you might want to do it manually first, and many other basic CS concepts. The difference is night & day from teams that are filled with people who just follow a tutorial and copy/paste examples from StackOverflow. In general, I've found that a team moves at the pace of the slowest member of the team - fill a team with 1 smart guy and 9 folks who just follow their leads and you might as well have just hired the 1 smart guy.

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