[tpm] Fwd: [Boston.pm] Perl community "The Rising Costs of Aging Perlers"

Adam Prime adam.prime at utoronto.ca
Tue Jul 23 14:36:50 PDT 2013


On 13-07-23 02:57 PM, arocker at Vex.Net wrote:
>
> The data processing world seems to have "solved" the problem by breaking
> the development process into (rather too many) specialisations. Instead of
> a systems analyst investigating a business problem, writing a
> specification, and letting programmers code and test it, now we have
> business analysts and data architects and "software engineers" and QA
> testers and probably other categories I haven't noticed. Specialisation
> can be good, (thank you, Adam Smith), but if done badly or to excess, it
> simply substitutes communications problems for whatever the original task
> was.
>
> Perhaps companies developing Web applications should look at dividing the
> tasks sensibly. There's certainly no reason to expect technical people to
> make good aesthetic or interface design decisions, for example.

I absolutely agree that technical people should not be doing real design 
work. Not if you want the design to be any good anyway.

I don't think you're going to find many jobs working for companies 
developing web applications where you can get away with not knowing a 
large subset of the technologies I mentioned. You don't need to be an 
expert in all of them, but you can't be afraid of any of them.

I suppose it's possible to find "back end engineer" jobs that are 
basically "publish this database via REST", but I'd get bored of that 
kind of quick.

Adam


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