How well do these startups pay (as a point of reference, RethinkDB offered an absurdly low salary for what amounted to a top-5% developer)?
I think the original article might have been talking about the real world.
OTOH, the media is very good about discovering poster cases to earn our sympathy. One common theme I've noticed in all these cases is that the person in question took their job for granted in the face of the changing technical landscape, didn't upgrade their skills and finds themselves in a tough situation.
Another problem in the tech industry is ageism: the media doesn't talk about unemployed 30-something and 20-somethings. Haven't seen this piece, maybe it did.
I've read that memory is an integral strength of high performers in fields such as chess and music.
And btw, you can extend this casual dismissal of expertise to knowledge of algorithms and data structures too. Would this author be equally dismissive if somebody pointed out that, what he was solving was an application of so-and-so algorithm.
If you're getting downvoted on HN for criticizing Microsoft, you might want to take a serious second look at those comments. Oh btw, I took a look at them and if anything you're getting off easy.
Thank you for your follow up. Clearly your experience is far outside my world. I've never heard of an outside consultant being brought in to second guess the company's "architect".
It seems like you mostly move among bad developers. I don't think your experience is relevant to most of the developers reading HN.
Obviously, a full rewrite not a good idea in most cases as Spolsky eloquently argued.
PS: I didn't detect any "defensiveness" (you know, the catchall passive-aggressive term that is used to use to imply that the other side has a weak hand without backing it up) in the post you were responding to. It rang true to me.
I don't think I move among bad developers, per se, but when I consulted I generally worked at places that weren't software companies. HN is filled with developers who plan to build companies (or work for companies) whose core business is to build software and either sell or have that software be the key part of a service. A lot of the places I did consulting for, if all of their in-house software stopped working, they could probably still do business, but a lot less efficiently. Most companies are not "about" the software just like they're not about the desks in the office.
And actually... quite often I wasn't brought in to second guess the architect. Many times I was brought in at the request of the architect. But yes, most of the time you're brought in because they lose faith in the architect or team. If you see me stop by to do a simple audit of your code, you should probably get your resume ready -- well not really, as I don't do any consulting any more.
Actually, in my experience, developers understand the business quite well. It's the other business functions which doesn't understand development.
You WILL drive out (and keep out) good developers if you fail to treat developers as professionals whose inputs of how to develop software should be respected.
Yes, often businesses don't understand development... but...
Us dev's have it drilled into us time and time again that we are so special and can't possibly be expected to participate in the company as a whole (our time is too valuable! we can't stick to a schedule! they don't understand software!).
That's a load of bullshit, developers don't get to wall off their private kingdom of code, same as no one else gets to wall off their section of responsibility and dictate outwards from within. Please stop furthering the (on that note) false dichotomy that programmers are either:
1) mismanaged by egregiously incompetent tyrants
2) given free reign to dictate to the business
Software developers don't deserve any inherent respect. Their value added to the business does.
I've heard developers tell me, in all seriousness, MS should dump Windows and start shipping a real OS like Linux. False dichotomy? I don't know, but I think you'd find the business would probably lose a fair bit of money doing that.
Amiga Workbench, while not a Unix was very capable of this. I used to do 3D Renders in Imagine while making music on OctaMED SoundStudio without drops. Likewise, you could usually carry on during heavy floppy access, whereas most other OSes of the day would hang temporarily.
I used to participate using a recognizable name for networking reasons. But I was self-censoring myself too much, since I don't agree with lots of HN's groupthink. So I switched to an anon handle.
Surely some level of self-censorship is desirable. If you disagree with something and doing it politely you generally won't get hit too hard from what I've seen (though I appreciate my account is fairly new).
Saying things like 'groupthink' are probably the sort of words you may actually want to self-censor.
