[mathattack]

There are two kinds of programmers with massive productivity benefits to an organization:

1 - Those that can identify what needs to be done at a level deeper than the end users, can communicate very well, and can code reasonably well. (Coding well enough to understand complexity, and can do things on the fly if needed)

2 - Those who appreciate the difficulties that users have, and have an enormous technical toolset to bring to bear on tough problems.

Much performance literature says, "Play to your strengths" but when people in batch 1 already know their end users in and out, it helps to develop technical skills. And people in bucket 2 - when they make the leap to deeply understand their customer's business, they're extremely powerful. This is also why many firms like to hire CS majors for non-CS jobs.

[benkross]

1 - You describe what most Banks and Hedge Funds would call RAD (Rapid Application Developers) Developers (I know redundant like saying "The La Brea Tar Pits...the the tar tar pits ; 0 ). They are those who are good enough with dev, but understand the biz domain well. I've seen some startups where Product Managers can also function in that capacity, prototyping, basic dev.

2 - Couldn't agree more, but ALAS, there aren't enough people graduating with CS degrees, let alone STEM in general. When I tried to do a market analysis, it was a painful experience. My CoFounder (Great Engineer) was able to do in two hours, what would have taken me two days, because of his software and database skills, not to mention that he had more time to interpret the data vs just gathering. I'd be curious to continue the discussion. If you'd like, please send me an email to [e-mail]

[mathattack]

I'll shoot you an email....

[seanmccully]

Why are people as short sighted to always say there is a limited number, and expect they define every possibility.

[mathattack]

It writes a little easier than, "Here are two dimensions of many. On the X axis consider technical skills. On the Y consider 'knowing your customer's business better than they do'. Plot a line..." :-)