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> The author's argument makes as much sense as saying a professional baseball coach should be spending 30% of his game time actually playing with his team. Thi
by hkarthik 13y ago
> The author's argument makes as much sense as saying a professional baseball coach should be spending 30% of his game time actually playing with his team.
This is a bad comparison because baseball hasn't significantly changed in the last 100 years, but software development changes significantly every 5 year to 10 years.
Over a 40 year career in software development, a typical person will see major fundamental shifts at least 4-5 times.
So yes, if you are directly managing engineers, you should be coding at least some of the time.
If you can't or don't want to contribute code, you should quickly move into upper management and focus on coaching middle managers.
- gaius 13y agoNo he won't. He'll see the same shift 4-5 times with different marketing buzzwords attached. Anyone who got his first management job managing "systems programmers" 40 years ago will be perfectly au fait with "devops" today. Anyone who did ASN.1 will be perfectly comfortable with XML or JSON. Anyone who did IMS will be perfectly comfortable with NoSQL (in fact anyone who did IMS in the 70s would find MongoDB laughably primitive). I could go on and on...
- hkarthik 13y agoYou're specifically focused on technologies, which I will admit don't change that fundamentally from generation to generation. But the way software gets built, deployed, and used has changed a lot.
- gaius 13y agoIBM was doing virtual machines in the 1970s too. Thin client, which is all a web browser is, has been around a long time, in fact a web browser would be recognizable to anyone who had developer for the old 3270 terminals. Or with the client-side execution of scripts, anyone who remembers NeWS from the 1980s. Very, very little in the 2010's is "new", it's just abit shinier this time 'round.
- marktangotango 13y agoAmen bro, rock on rock on!