[Clubber]

Yes, when I started in this business developers were expected to work hand in hand with the business to understand how the business worked and why a feature was warranted and the find an elegant solution in software, and even suggest new solutions to fine tune the business processes encapsulated in software.

That still happens, but it seems the "cogging" of developers has largely made that a rarity as cheap offshore developers aren't expected to do that sort of thing anymore.

As an aside Spolsky should be required reading for any person who oversees any department that interacts with developers in any way. Most people think of development as a scientific endeavor, but it's largely artistic with mathematical tools.

[jimnotgym]

I'm sure it is possible to have an artistic layer of software management that reduce everything to "write me a function that passes this test", which you could outsource to wherever. But having reduced all of the code to that level you have done all of the hard work in writing it anyway, haven't you? By involving the all of the junior devs in that reduction process, you are also teaching them how to do it, so they can be he next 'architect'.

An interesting and sort of related aside: I do some work with a company that makes old fashioned 'Enterprise software'. Their process seems to be that the back end dev gods write functionality that is convenient for the database, and then the front end people make that accessible to humans in the most convenient way for them. So instead of working the way humans do, the humans have to work the way the database does! When you talk to their back end devs, they talk down to you like you are an idiot for not following the way they work! Their db implementation is actually pretty good, the application is only really usable to people that can write SQL, however! If their API didn't also suck it would be tempting to re-skin the whole app.

[mathattack]

I think ten years ago everyone was reading along with Spolsky. I haven't found a good equivalent nowadays.