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That's very much the point, and I'd suggest that "not thinking for themselves" is sometimes a totally reasonable goal. Joel Spolsky covered this fairly well in

That's very much the point, and I'd suggest that "not thinking for themselves" is sometimes a totally reasonable goal. Joel Spolsky covered this fairly well in his piece on McDonald's-style software. The best way to write a single program is to master programming, and develop alone or in a small group of masters, and build a beautiful and enduring tool with whatever practices suit you best. But none of that can be packaged up and passed around to new programmers on demand. It takes time to master, and it certainly can't be smoothly overseen by someone who never learned it. The best way to get 100,000 programmers writing a billion lines of code is to develop simple routines that can be followed and overseen by anyone. The results won't be as good as mastery, but in many cases they don't need to be. There's a lot of simple software out there which benefits more from being done now than being done right. Having said all that, I do think rigidity is becoming a problem for the software industry. It's not being employed at the levels needed to make software work, it's being employed at the levels needed to make development legible. Adding procedures that worsen development but make it easier to watch is a serious issue. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-naked-chef/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...

hinkley 10y ago
Experts often make lousy teachers. They don't have the slightest clue what they know and so they can't explain it to anyone else. Or they can explain it but can't write it down so they're always the bottleneck. The worst of this group often become indispensable, because they've designed something nobody else can understand. It's politically difficult to push back on this sort of problem, which is why I am job hunting now. Of the six or so really smart guys that remain on my current project, I trust maybe three of them, but would only work with two again (the third is so happy to be here that he doesn't resist any of the chaos)

hinkley 10y ago

Experts often make lousy teachers. They don't have the slightest clue what they know and so they can't explain it to anyone else. Or they can explain it but can't write it down so they're always the bottleneck. The worst of this group often become indispensable, because they've designed something nobody else can understand. It's politically difficult to push back on this sort of problem, which is why I am job hunting now. Of the six or so really smart guys that remain on my current project, I trust maybe three of them, but would only work with two again (the third is so happy to be here that he doesn't resist any of the chaos)