Kathleen makes some great points about how Development is really, really hard.
Why Your Development is Crazy - Leaning Into Windows
I STILL see that many clients think a single hacker in a weekend can crank out the software equivalent of "War & Peace". I find this incredibly frustrating when talking about my hourly rate and that it is going to take about 10x more hours to do the work than they seem to think it will. Granted this is not always the case, but it still pervades the small business world.
Tools are getting better, but at the same time, the demands for what the code should do keeps getting more complex.
My very first paid programming experience was a Label Generator for a Dot Matrix Printer written in Ashton-Tate's DBase III on a Kaypro CP/M machine.
The "Design Doc" consisted of my Client saying... "Make it print names and address on pin-fed labels..."
Compared to that "Program", software development has indeed become quite complex. Just wrapping your head around something like Generics or debugging Events with Delegates can make your head spin when you first look at it, or the Second or even 10th time you look any more. Just about every time I look at software I have written, I think I can improve it. That's not because I wrote it "bad" in the first place, it is because the sheer number of alternatives we have to do things today is staggering.
I am one of those people pushing for VB.NET to return to its roots and make this stuff easier to do. Sure we can have all the power in the world to write great programs, but if that comes at the sacrifice of productivity, all is lost.
Can a Lone Developer survive in today's world? Yes, but its certainly not easy.
Copyright © 2003-2009 H. Steele Price, IV -
All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, your mother, or any government agency.