[thelist] re: My 12 year old son can do websites
Luther, Ron
ron.luther at hp.com
Thu Jan 29 10:18:51 CST 2004
john noted:
>>Now, I've just very successfully finished a degree in Internet Computing,
>>and I've always been a hand coder. But this stuff can take an awful long
>>time to produce by hand. Won't everyone's desire for a quick fix win in
>>the end?
Hi John,
Interesting degree! ;-)
Anyway, I'm just chiming in here with a few thoughts to be disagreeable.
First of all, there will always be work to customize things. No matter
how thorough and complete that 'off the shelf' system is -- there will
always be enough "we don't do it that way here" companies to pay the bar
tabs of the folks who can tweak the code to do things their way.
[Companies are waaaaay more willing to pay money to have the code match
their business processes than they are to change their processes to match
the code.]
Secondly, (slight agreement here), isn't a big portion of the history
of computing the tradeoff between 'speed to deploy' and 'efficiency'?
Long long ago, when hardware and processing time were more expensive
than programmers, code monkeys would take *a lot* of time and effort to
make their code more efficient. Today the economics have changed ... and
'best practices' have changed with those economics. As web development
matures ... more and better tools for contructing 'piece parts' will become
available and widely used. They probably won't be as efficient as hand
coding, but they will be faster to deploy and, as broadband technologies
become more prevalent and cheaper, fewer and fewer people will care much
about the slight loss in efficiency. Yeah, that raises the bar a bit for
the decent paying jobs ... but it also provides more opportunities for
folks who can tweak stuff too!
Finally, (cuz I think we've been beating around this bush for a bit),
isn't this thread really more about the value of experience than a
rehash of hand-coding versus non-hand-coding? I think the value of
experience varies inversely with complexity. [I know that if I owned
a fast food joint I sure wouldn't pay a heck of a lot more for a french
fry dipper with 15 years of experience than for an untrained kid ...
cuz that's not a complex job.]
While I *might* be willing to let a 12 year-old set up one of those nice
canned photo album sites ... I'm not bloody likely to sub-contract them
a business critical web app for managing purchase order transactions
involving dozens of separate vendors and several flavors of EDI signals.
My 2¢,
RonL.
(Who, like all old guys, likes to think experience has some value.) ;-)
[I liked the camera analogy too! - I will be using that one.]
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