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The 70ish programmer I work with is fabulously valuable and he's not even directly leveraging his hard-to-find COBOL skills (he works as a SQL DBA, we have othe
by dpritchett 15y ago
The 70ish programmer I work with is fabulously valuable and he's not even directly leveraging his hard-to-find COBOL skills (he works as a SQL DBA, we have other COBOL programmers on staff).
His main value to me is that he can immediately and measurably improve any design we bring to him.
When I'm designing a new system or process I always run it by him and he'll give me a few thoughtful suggestions that make my design more robust, auditable, and maintainable. This "unconscious competence" [1] borne of decades in the trenches can't be taught.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence