Comedy Monday

I found a link to this comedy .net developer critique this weekend. Oh how I laughed.

For several reasons…

The main one being its some deadend expenses reporting startup moaning about struggling to find staff. I thought Excel was a bit passé, but expenses reporting – purlease!

Secondly, I kind of agree with some of his sentiment, just not the way he has categorised it. Yep people who get overly reliant on advanced tools do lose some edge on the underlying stuff, we agree on that. Is it just .net devs? no. Is it an all bad thing to lose some of that edge? no its 2011 ffs, we need to move on from machine code, its a little thing called *p-r-o-g-r-e-s-s*.

When I leant to drive wagons we had to double de-clutch because the gearboxes had no sychro, do I double de-clutch my scooby or my trumpet? no, do I think all those poor schmucks who never learnt to double de-clutch are inferior? nope. Is a bit of knowledge of the internals useful? not really, for many day to day drivers, but probably yes for those wanting to progress to competitive or professional driving.

I also agree with his premise that start ups don’t use .net. I am thinking more of small software dev companies selling a product. I know MS lost a ton of this market when they binned VB6, and gifted Delphi a lot of disgruntled one man bands. But .net is an enterprise tool, not a small software vendor tool, Microsoft no longer target that market. Web service/cloud stuff I’m not so sure about, no reason not to use .net, but I know from Business of Software events, that at least a couple of years ago, .net was a minor player in shrinkwrap. Losing the ability to create compilers cost Microsoft a lot of this market, whether they are bovvered I don’t know, but I assume not-really.

The real problem is how high and how wide is the wall between the Microsoft ecosystem and the rest of the world. There are so few people with solid experience of .net and php/java/etc its hard to have a reasoned debate of the relative strengths.

And the other real problem, and the killer for me, is he is moaning about technical skills and experience, where in my view a bit of business experience is more of a critical factor in a successful developer. If you have no empathy with your target audience, how can you target them? not intuitively thats for sure, maybe via a few multi thousand page specification docs. (yay! waterfall how I love thee…)

I read a few of the comments (can’t sleep with the clock change!) what made me PMSL was the number of commentards saying ‘if thats your attitude shove your job’. What about ‘if thats your business plan – *expense reporting* – shove your job, yawn’? If it was curing cancer, or creating world peace, or a new way to discover or consume useful info then maybe they would have a shot at some of the sharpest minds…

Or am I being too cruel, and you think expense reporting is that sexy?

(I started grown up life as a management accountant, which is pure expense reporting (and maniplulation – otherwise anyone could do it and it wouldn’t be a profession (which programming isn’t of course)).

What do you think of the article?

(key point, he is saying .net devs aren’t right for his start-up, its not a complete hatchet job, although many commentards have ignored that fact.)

cheers

Simon