| Great article and observations. It's always good to see what this field looks like from a newbies' eyes. If it only it were so simple as keeping a small tool set and a dev team committed to it. You can certainly build a business from scratch with a small toolset. But as the business adapts to customers, you always start to find things that customers want that the tools do not support. In initial dev, you don't necessarily care, but when you're live, it's better to implement than say 'no' to executive management and sales in most (not all) cases. Once you modify the tools a bit to support the unique business, you're no longer able to keep new developers focused on a small toolset, because you've customized. New devs may not agree and may look for ways to work around the customizations. Soon, you have a unique codebase that is valuable- central- to the business, and your changes have crept in to the point that off-the-shelf devs and tools and upgrades don't work. Now you're in maintenance mode. Code schools don't teach maintenance, but it is the lifeblood of the software business. Developers avoid maintenance jobs. They try to find new, greenfield work. That's why we end up with so many disposable business models, 3 year dev-to-acquisition cycles, and ridiculous amounts of abandoned code. Maintenance is hard. Much harder than development. But it's much more important. Anyone can launch an app that builds a business. Not everyone can adapt and grow that business with code changes that require getting out of the dev comfort zone. Code schools don't teach this because they don't want to expose aspiring coders who just want to get rich to the grimy dirty details of a real profession. But ask yourself this- would we have cars and highways if all we trained were new car designers (not mechanics or road builders)? |