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by eitally 4020 days ago
I know exactly what you mean and I agree, but your scenario doesn't cover most enterprise web developers, who likely live in Visual Studio or Eclipse/NetBeans/IntelliJ 95% of their day, especially if there's strict separation of duties and they aren't allowed to directly touch the DB server/admin console.

I got fed up with this state of affairs a few years ago and stopped looking for .Net or Java developers and started looking for self-described hackers, assuming that would increase the odds that they had some passion for programming and could/would/had pick up whatever tools they needed for the job. It has worked well.

As an aside, though, especially in countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Bulgaria, Poland, and others which are low cost recipients of outsourcing dollars, "software factories" are common, and in places like this it absolutely is common for an individual programmer to literally spend their time all day, every day doing the same one type of thing. Imho, the higher the CMMI number, the worse this gets (the pinnacle is the "just write a function to pass this test. No, it doesn't matter what it's doing or what this software is for. Just pass the test.", where developers on the front line are plug & play cogs who don't even know what they're working on).

1 comments

Interesting. Haven't thought about this kind of businesses and you're right, there might be many more such developers than people like me.