What's "convenient" for the developer is rarely good for the end user
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I work for one of those "big companies". Unfortunately, the developers don't have a lot of choice in the matter. I've been here long enough that I've seen us swing to both sides more than once. At the moment, we're in "don't let the developers talk to the customer" mode, which sucks. Problem reports are often third or fourth hand, by which time "button A doesn't work" becomes "the product tried to format the Internet, and keeps refusing to open the pod bay doors".
Software Zen:
delete this;I dont think the statement is necessarily true. I've seen cases when developers made more informed decisions than customers did, and far more informed then ones coming from the management/marketing area. Although it is clear that this is not the right decisional chain, developers can help a lot in the process. They are forced to think for the inner details of the product, which more than often are not covered in project documentation and sometimes happen to contravene with that. For those projects that are not specified with mathematical precision, the developers must be part of the decisional chain, and if they do their job right, what's convenient for them, on long term, is convenient for the customer and viceversa.
Alex C. D.
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This discussion of Linq got me thinking about other "new" technology and tools and IDE improvements that were supposed to make developers lives easier and in nearly every case it seems they result in mediocre developers being able to generate code faster at the expense of the end user with bloated software or slower software or software with crazy dependencies etc. I contend that anything that is billed as making life easier for developers and does anything more than helping them write the code the way they always have should be taken with a 400 pound grain of salt and carefully examined to see if it actually brings any benefit to the END USER of the software (which is the whole point of writing software often forgotten by developers too in love with their tools).
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
Hm... I have divided feelings about your statement. 1.Language sugar (and "cool new stuff")can taste sour, but even the best tools in hands of inexperienced (immature, unskilled...) can do more damage than harm. 2. Job needs to be done, so if the "RAD tax" isn't too high, why not? 3. It's all marketing, something needs to be sold. I'll always chose to work with someone who is too eager to apply "cool new stuff" than with someone who rants about stuff being deprecated since .Net 1.1 (I had to mention it... I worked with person who was lousy company, short fused, always complaining, had no clue what is hidden under the hood and firmly believed to be solid programmer). I believe the true problem is that green programmers are too early thrown in the pot and people rarely read books (excluding Learn X in 21 days and their kind).
Excuse me for my bad grammar, feel free to warn me. Deka
modified on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 4:43 AM
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any "dinosaurs" i see these days i have a great respect for as they obviously figured out how to evolve and survive *really* well :cool:
"mostly watching the human race is like watching dogs watch tv ... they see the pictures move but the meaning escapes them"
<Rodney_Dangerfield_with_a_pocket_protector> Finally, I get some respect... </Rodney_Dangerfield_with_a_pocket_protector>
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Gary Wheeler wrote:
digestive ejecta
Sounds like a great name for band...
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
A lot of them already sound like it, so the name would be redundant ... :laugh:
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I dont think the statement is necessarily true. I've seen cases when developers made more informed decisions than customers did, and far more informed then ones coming from the management/marketing area. Although it is clear that this is not the right decisional chain, developers can help a lot in the process. They are forced to think for the inner details of the product, which more than often are not covered in project documentation and sometimes happen to contravene with that. For those projects that are not specified with mathematical precision, the developers must be part of the decisional chain, and if they do their job right, what's convenient for them, on long term, is convenient for the customer and viceversa.
Alex C. D.
In my particular case, I think direct contact with the customer helps rather than hinders in some areas, especially usability. Customers often have specific features in mind when they make requests. After those requests have been filtered through sales, marketing, and engineering management, they often bear little resemblance to the customer's original idea. By the time we implement the feature (which is yet another layer of interpretation), the customer's need often isn't met.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
John C wrote:
it's the best windows operating system to date.
I second that. Give it sufficient memory and it rocks. Follow the established design rules and the UAC won't bother you much. And it is both faster and more robust than XP. My XP system is on an extended holiday now. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
Fixturized forever. :confused:
Luc Pattyn wrote:
Follow the established design rules and the UAC won't bother you much.
Pray tell, what "established design rules?" And whose blog was I supposed to read to get this set of design guidelines? I find the UAC to be a complete PITA, and even more annoying when you try to disable it. I finally figured out the 3 or 4 settings to change to minimize the number of confirmation dialogs I see while retaining the ability to bump my privileges when necessary. Unfortunately, I figured it out accidentally and haven't seen it documented anywhere (correctly), so I have been unable to reproduce the result. :-(
Grim MCDBA, MCSD, MCP+SB SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue IS NOT NULL (0 row(s) affected)
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John C wrote:
I contend that anything that is billed as making life easier for developers and does anything more than helping them write the code the way they always have should be taken with a 400 pound grain of salt and carefully examined to see if it actually brings any benefit to the END USER of the software (which is the whole point of writing software often forgotten by developers too in love with their tools).
:shrug: Well, sure. I mean, that's just healthy skepticism - taste and see before you chow down... That said, as comfortable and productive as i am with my trusty ol' C++ compiler and thin Win32 wrappers, i can't ignore the benefits that HTML+JS UIs... or even WinForms UIs in some cases... can contribute both to me and my users. IMHO, the biggest benefit to be found is in tools that let you quickly implement and demonstrate features or changes to a user - the best looking paper prototype won't ever come close to flushing out the sorts of subtle usability issues that can only be caught by sitting and watching someone work with your software, and the faster you can identify a rough spot and tweak functionality in response the faster you can create a smooth end-user experience. This has very little to do with LINQ. Just sayin'... I have high hopes for LINQ, and they've little to do with writing code faster. That may well be a nice side-effect, but it's not something that really gets me interested. Nor do i get particularly excited about the potential for building ORMs with LINQ2SQL or ENtityfRAMEWork; that's cool if it works i guess, but ORMs are dull no matter how you slice 'em. LINQ is cool because it brings query language syntax into C#. And C# needs a query language. Needs it the way a fish needs a bicycle - to be precise, the way a fish being chased by a much larger fish needs a turbo-powered aquatic bicycle designed with fish ergonomics in mind and guided by pure aquatic vertebrate fear. The fish doesn't know it needs the bicycle, but that's why the Schwimm Bicycle Company hires so many "technology evangelists". The fish will love 'em once they have 'em. uh, that last paragraph sucked. Lemme try again... LINQ is cool because it brings explicit queries into C#. It brings a me
Realizing that your post is mostly satirical....
Shog9 wrote:
most developers suck at writing code to query their own data
I think this is the key point of your whole diatribe. That being said, I completely fail to understand why anyone could possibly believe that a developer who can't design decent relational data models or write decent SQL code would be any more capable of designing decent domain entity models or writing decent LINQ code.
Grim MCDBA, MCSD, MCP+SB SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue IS NOT NULL (0 row(s) affected)
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Gary Wheeler wrote:
Mature, professional developers have been bitten by this phenomenon too many times. They're the ones who try out the new technology, and then start asking lots of pointed questions in the forums. Often they get ridiculed for it, being accused of having a 'dinosaur mentality'.
You're sooo behind the times! In fact you're dangerously close to sounding like a Neo-Luddite! That was all soooo 1990s, now we're into Web 2.0 and we no longer ask questions. All you need to do is just throw some code against the cloud, hope pray assume it sticks, and then move on to something else! It's all about allowing the user to collaborate with rich socially interactive applications that create content mash-ups and real time distributed intelligence with synergistic use-flows.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
I use some of the neat new stuff, and others I don’t screw with others. I've worked both areas; where I never had contact with the customer and where I worked closely with the customer. When you can work with the customer and they do learn to respect and value your opinion, the end product can become one that they will not like but use successfully. Also have found that maintenance on a collaborated system like this is so much easier.
One day soon, I suppose I should come up with one! Something like: There are times I really miss the old DOS programming days.
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Thelly wrote:
the people in charge of hiring coders have to learn how to figure out who knows what they're doing, and who googled up some examples, pasted them together in a monolithic source file, and called it their grand unified program for inventory management at their previous employer.
this has always been true for anyone hiring anyone. that is the point of a hiring process, to figure out who knows what they are doing and who is faking it.
----------------------------------------------------------- "When I first saw it, I just thought that you really, really enjoyed programming in java." - Leslie Sanford
True for, but not always true of, especially in a Really Big Corp. of America setting... what I've noticed is that faking it has become a lot easier and organizations which don't pay enough attention to their departments during the hiring process are getting a lot more people who are not terribly good (and thus easily fooled themselves). A fatal flaw which should be corrected, but one which leads to the OP's complaint very quickly.
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Gary Wheeler wrote:
Mature, professional developers have been bitten by this phenomenon too many times. They're the ones who try out the new technology, and then start asking lots of pointed questions in the forums. Often they get ridiculed for it, being accused of having a 'dinosaur mentality'.
You're sooo behind the times! In fact you're dangerously close to sounding like a Neo-Luddite! That was all soooo 1990s, now we're into Web 2.0 and we no longer ask questions. All you need to do is just throw some code against the cloud, hope pray assume it sticks, and then move on to something else! It's all about allowing the user to collaborate with rich socially interactive applications that create content mash-ups and real time distributed intelligence with synergistic use-flows.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
Jim Crafton wrote:
You're sooo behind the times! In fact you're dangerously close to sounding like a Neo-Luddite! That was all soooo 1990s, now we're into Web 2.0 and we no longer ask questions. All you need to do is just throw some code against the cloud, hope pray assume it sticks, and then move on to something else! It's all about allowing the user to collaborate with rich socially interactive applications that create content mash-ups and real time distributed intelligence with synergistic use-flows.
I've never wanted to punch someone in the face as much as I do right now. :laugh: And my work day hasn't even officially started yet...
“Acer, Gateway, and eMachines are the same company now. Great! Now we just need a really big toilet, and we can get rid of all three at once.”
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This discussion of Linq got me thinking about other "new" technology and tools and IDE improvements that were supposed to make developers lives easier and in nearly every case it seems they result in mediocre developers being able to generate code faster at the expense of the end user with bloated software or slower software or software with crazy dependencies etc. I contend that anything that is billed as making life easier for developers and does anything more than helping them write the code the way they always have should be taken with a 400 pound grain of salt and carefully examined to see if it actually brings any benefit to the END USER of the software (which is the whole point of writing software often forgotten by developers too in love with their tools).
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
I think I'll take your post with a 400 pound grain of salt... These tools can also result in GOOD developers being able to generate code faster to the benefit of the industry in far fewer lines and with minimal deployment issues. The real test of the "success" of a piece of software is how long it can stay in service, and a great portion of that is how easy it is to find people to work in the code and how uniform that code is. Throw a .02% hit to speed against a 20% increase in ROI and the money always wins - sorry. So - you keep hand-crafting your apps out of primal clay and the rest of us will adopt the resoundingly more sound approaches proffered by every single massively successful company on the planet. Eventually someone will be hired to rewrite your code from scratch, and they WONT use primal clay. Whether you like it or not, Wal-Mart is kicking the dog squeeze out of every mom-and-pop it gets near and there are like - what? - TWO hand-made car manufacturers? SURE Wal-Mart sells inferior products and SURE everyone would LOVE a hand-made car, but what counts when decisions are actually made? R. O. I. Is a .02% increase in speed going to offset a 20% decrease in development costs? If you're having a hard time with this one - go ask your CTO. There is also the idea that using a standard tool will result in standard code that a standard human with standard training can comprehend. If you're having trouble understanding the benifits of standardized production... Well... I'm not sure who you need to see on this one... The guy who changes your light bulbs? Anyway... The way we as software developers really affect the bottom line is by BALANCING production costs with the quality of the end product, and some of these tools help us do that. That said - you would be correct in saying that there are a lot of tools that simply aren't needed. They're like the pasta-cooker that you bought from a TV commercial that ended up in your garage or at Goodwill after sitting on your counter for a week, getting in the way while you boiled spaghetti in a pot... So - "Not all tools are created equal" - Sure! Of course! But that doesn't seem to be what you're saying. What you do seem to be saying sounds a bit too much like a reluctance to learn something new, with a dash of added job security tossed in for flavor.
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Gary Wheeler wrote:
Mature, professional developers have been bitten by this phenomenon too many times. They're the ones who try out the new technology, and then start asking lots of pointed questions in the forums. Often they get ridiculed for it, being accused of having a 'dinosaur mentality'.
You're sooo behind the times! In fact you're dangerously close to sounding like a Neo-Luddite! That was all soooo 1990s, now we're into Web 2.0 and we no longer ask questions. All you need to do is just throw some code against the cloud, hope pray assume it sticks, and then move on to something else! It's all about allowing the user to collaborate with rich socially interactive applications that create content mash-ups and real time distributed intelligence with synergistic use-flows.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
Jim Crafton wrote:
You're sooo behind the times! In fact you're dangerously close to sounding like a Neo-Luddite! That was all soooo 1990s, now we're into Web 2.0 and we no longer ask questions. All you need to do is just throw some code against the cloud, hope pray assume it sticks, and then move on to something else! It's all about allowing the user to collaborate with rich socially interactive applications that create content mash-ups and real time distributed intelligence with synergistic use-flows.
BINGO!
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Jim Crafton wrote:
You're sooo behind the times! In fact you're dangerously close to sounding like a Neo-Luddite! That was all soooo 1990s, now we're into Web 2.0 and we no longer ask questions. All you need to do is just throw some code against the cloud, hope pray assume it sticks, and then move on to something else! It's all about allowing the user to collaborate with rich socially interactive applications that create content mash-ups and real time distributed intelligence with synergistic use-flows.
I've never wanted to punch someone in the face as much as I do right now. :laugh: And my work day hasn't even officially started yet...
“Acer, Gateway, and eMachines are the same company now. Great! Now we just need a really big toilet, and we can get rid of all three at once.”
Then my job here is done :)
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
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John C wrote:
it's the best windows operating system to date.
I second that. Give it sufficient memory and it rocks. Follow the established design rules and the UAC won't bother you much. And it is both faster and more robust than XP. My XP system is on an extended holiday now. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
Fixturized forever. :confused:
Established design rules? You mean the really good, established design rules that they had pre-Vista, and then decided those design rules should not be followed when they rolled out Vista? The rules that used to say "All application-specific data should be kept in the application's folder under Program Files", but which has been amended to read "No data should be kept in the Program Files folder, and if you try to do the things the way we we told you to before Vista, your application is going to have very bizarre behavior that is going to take forever to track down to the inane virtualization model we came up with"? Do you mean those established dsign rules?
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The problem with tools that make things like that easier is that too many developers believe that their job is done all that much quicker. Since it only took them a day or two to put a data base record on the screen and hook up some buttons to update and delete it, they think they're done. They don't bother doing capacity testing. They don't check to see what happens when the data base server goes down, or if there are millions of records or thousands of users. Mature, professional developers have been bitten by this phenomenon too many times. They're the ones who try out the new technology, and then start asking lots of pointed questions in the forums. Often they get ridiculed for it, being accused of having a 'dinosaur mentality'. Eventually the Next Big Thing comes along, and the process starts all over again.
Software Zen:
delete this;Duh!! Of course new tools don't help developers who don't understand the technology, requirements, or basic software development practices. Your post should be titled: "NEWS FLASH: new tools don't make bad developers better". Any "good" developer has a healthy sckepticism about BUT interest to learn new tools in the off chance they can do "the job" better. If you turn your nose up and big new things you will be called a "dinosaur".
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The problem with tools that make things like that easier is that too many developers believe that their job is done all that much quicker. Since it only took them a day or two to put a data base record on the screen and hook up some buttons to update and delete it, they think they're done. They don't bother doing capacity testing. They don't check to see what happens when the data base server goes down, or if there are millions of records or thousands of users. Mature, professional developers have been bitten by this phenomenon too many times. They're the ones who try out the new technology, and then start asking lots of pointed questions in the forums. Often they get ridiculed for it, being accused of having a 'dinosaur mentality'. Eventually the Next Big Thing comes along, and the process starts all over again.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
The problem with tools that make things like that easier is that too many developers believe that their job is done all that much quicker. Since it only took them a day or two to put a data base record on the screen and hook up some buttons to update and delete it, they think they're done. They don't bother doing capacity testing. They don't check to see what happens when the data base server goes down, or if there are millions of records or thousands of users.
Strange but true: many business-critical applications have fewer than a dozen users. Someone has to write those applications, usually in too little time. I put forth the idea that the bulk of business applications (even in this day) are developed in this scenario.
Gary Wheeler wrote:
Mature, professional developers have been bitten by this phenomenon too many times. They're the ones who try out the new technology, and then start asking lots of pointed questions in the forums. Often they get ridiculed for it, being accused of having a 'dinosaur mentality'. Eventually the Next Big Thing comes along, and the process starts all over again.
Most of that ridicule comes from the people who suddenly see the glow of daylight from behind the pile of their backlogged work, who don't want to be told that it may the headlight of an oncoming train. In many cases, the critique from the pro doesn't apply as the apps being written by the new tech beneficiaries may as well be written on toilet paper for all the life they will have, thus the insecure among these will attack any seeming threat to the means of their livelihood - to me, insecurity is all this is. To survive in this field, you have to keep an open mind but a skeptical one as well.
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John C wrote:
I contend that anything that is billed as making life easier for developers and does anything more than helping them write the code the way they always have should be taken with a 400 pound grain of salt and carefully examined to see if it actually brings any benefit to the END USER of the software (which is the whole point of writing software often forgotten by developers too in love with their tools).
:shrug: Well, sure. I mean, that's just healthy skepticism - taste and see before you chow down... That said, as comfortable and productive as i am with my trusty ol' C++ compiler and thin Win32 wrappers, i can't ignore the benefits that HTML+JS UIs... or even WinForms UIs in some cases... can contribute both to me and my users. IMHO, the biggest benefit to be found is in tools that let you quickly implement and demonstrate features or changes to a user - the best looking paper prototype won't ever come close to flushing out the sorts of subtle usability issues that can only be caught by sitting and watching someone work with your software, and the faster you can identify a rough spot and tweak functionality in response the faster you can create a smooth end-user experience. This has very little to do with LINQ. Just sayin'... I have high hopes for LINQ, and they've little to do with writing code faster. That may well be a nice side-effect, but it's not something that really gets me interested. Nor do i get particularly excited about the potential for building ORMs with LINQ2SQL or ENtityfRAMEWork; that's cool if it works i guess, but ORMs are dull no matter how you slice 'em. LINQ is cool because it brings query language syntax into C#. And C# needs a query language. Needs it the way a fish needs a bicycle - to be precise, the way a fish being chased by a much larger fish needs a turbo-powered aquatic bicycle designed with fish ergonomics in mind and guided by pure aquatic vertebrate fear. The fish doesn't know it needs the bicycle, but that's why the Schwimm Bicycle Company hires so many "technology evangelists". The fish will love 'em once they have 'em. uh, that last paragraph sucked. Lemme try again... LINQ is cool because it brings explicit queries into C#. It brings a me
Shog9 wrote:
VB coders less skilled programmers will continue banging their heads against the nearest wall, stopping to build one if necessary, same as ever.
*sigh* I am a programmer who doesn't suck who codes most of his stuff at work in VB (mostly with ASP.NET). It is one of the most intriguing ironies of my development career, as my main emphasis is to write it (a) so that it will do the job in a splendid fashion (which CAN be done even in VB if you're careful), and (b) so that someone much less bright than myself can maintain it. Thus, if we ever move out of .NET 1.1, I will gladly embrace LINQ, as it may enhance the success probability of my primary mission. Still, I do wistfully think of the days of programming in way too little memory under DOS, managing my own memory because the malloc() handlers did a poor, poor job...
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This discussion of Linq got me thinking about other "new" technology and tools and IDE improvements that were supposed to make developers lives easier and in nearly every case it seems they result in mediocre developers being able to generate code faster at the expense of the end user with bloated software or slower software or software with crazy dependencies etc. I contend that anything that is billed as making life easier for developers and does anything more than helping them write the code the way they always have should be taken with a 400 pound grain of salt and carefully examined to see if it actually brings any benefit to the END USER of the software (which is the whole point of writing software often forgotten by developers too in love with their tools).
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
The software development and education spectrums are money making industries in-themselves, so naturally people wish to sell you easier, or more rounded, tools and qualifications -- which often makes it seem better. We all have learning curves and soon we realise we've walked, or are walking, the same road. :laugh:
Interested in answers.