[wiz21c]

but in the end, you decide who gets promoted or not, you decide who has to put the "extra effort" to satisfy whoever you work for. So of course everyone is a major player, it's your best interest.

but you're also the one who gets the time to see the big picture and hopefully realize that, yes, the development side of a project, while the most fundamental, is also just one of the part. The other being : handling customer expectations, making sure the budget use can be explained, making sure people stay happy even when confronted to "absurd" customer's request, making sure to understand the project ecosystem to make sure you get the right customer contact person in front of your team, making sure the one dev with a broken back gets a proper chair, making sure good project are rewarded, you make sure HR's department craziness don't alienate your devs, you-f*g-name-it (been there, done that, got the tshirt : I've been in dev, business consulting and management :-))

[ABCLAW]

>the development side of a project, while the most fundamental

There's an entire world of industries in which software is a 'nice-to-have' enabler of various levels of business logic, not the product itself.

The assumption that development is the fundamental key to all projects is, I'd imagine, the 'delusion' referenced earlier.

[wiz21c]

Yeah, I work in an industry where software enables things, so it is central. But even in my industry (business apps), we could just go on with pen and paper like before. So programs are not "absolutely fundamental" but in the 21th century, well, they are :-)

But I can admit it's not like that everywhere, sure. But I've yet to see industries where people pay programmers to work on IT project which are not fundamental in a way or another or in the process of becoming fundamental. The point is when programs get deployed, they usually transform (and hopefully improve) a situation. Once the transformation is accomplished, the program becomes fundamental...