lately i wonder if these "biz guy learning to code" posts are harmful. I'm not sure which is worse: a product owner who can't code, or a product owner who think

lately i wonder if these "biz guy learning to code" posts are harmful. I'm not sure which is worse: a product owner who can't code, or a product owner who thinks he knows how to code. "People who are not professional programmers often don’t realize how the difficulty of writing software increases with size. Many people who wrote 100-line programs in college imagine that they could write 1,000-line programs if they worked at it 10 times longer. Or even worse, they imagine they could write 10,000-line programs if they worked 100 times longer. It doesn’t work that way. Most people who can write a 100-line program could never finish a 10,000-line program no matter how long they worked on it. They would simply drown in complexity. One of the marks of a professional programmer is knowing how to organize software so that the complexity remains manageable as the size increases. Even among professionals there are large differences in ability. The programmers who can effectively manage 100,000-line projects are in a different league than those who can manage 10,000-line projects."[1] I had a product owner once who had an EE & signals background. He thought since he could implement a complicated algorithm in matlab, he knew how to write software. Love the guy, one of my long-time mentors, but the project didn't go anywhere and part of the reason is some really bad early technical decisions. [1] http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/09/19/writes-large-correct-programs/ http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/09/19/writes-large-correc...