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Pro Developer - Optimize Your View - It's Not My Job

Christopher Duncan

It's Not My Job

What's that you say? I've just clearly proven that it's not your fault? Nice try. And pass me a pretzel, will you? Projects fail for an unbelievably simple reason. Extremely intelligent and otherwise talented programmers time and again make the naïve assumption that if it's not about the code, it's not their job. In modern air to air combat, a jet fighter pilot who finds himself close enough to his opponent to fight it out with machine guns has already missed critical opportunities to solve the problem from a safe distance with long range missiles. And so it is with programmers. If you find yourself in Overtime City with a guaranteed release disaster right around the corner, you screwed up long before then by failing to control your situation before it controlled you. Ouch. Can I say that? Well, maybe I should at least have offered you a pretzel first.

Your view of the software development process dictates what you do, and do not do, in the course of your work week. If you believe that everything beyond coding is "not my job", then you and your project will without question fall prey to the strong and illogical forces that sweep through the corporate world. However, the follies of marketing and management can both be minimized by the savvy programmer. For every bone headed thing that these rocket scientists can throw at us, there is a counter. Manage the problems early enough in the game, and your release disaster instead becomes a release party. They'll probably even spring for the pizza.

Christopher Duncan is President of Show Programming of Atlanta, Inc. and author of both the monthly syndicated column Pro Developer and the recent book for Apress, The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World. A veteran contract programmer with over a decade of experience, he has seen the extremes from the small shops you've never heard of to the huge corporate cultures such as AT&T, Equifax, and Bell South. Irreverent, unconventional, and occasionally controversial, his focus has always been less on the academic and more on simply delivering the goods, breaking any rules that happen to be inconvenient at the moment. Chris can be reached at Chris@ShowProgramming.com Copyright (c) 2002, Christopher Duncan.

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  • a little short

    Posted by Rollershade on 26 Apr 2005

    And wheres the info??? i would like to see you expand on the methologies you use day to day and how you approach new apps in time managment.

  • Posted by Christopher Duncan on 12 Oct 2003

    [quote][1]Posted by [b]BeastlyPhrase[/b] on 11 Oct 2003 07:28 PM[/1]
    After reading it, however, I think it would make a very, very good intro into a much longer essay (or book!) concerning this topic...

  • yes..."meaty"...

    Posted by BeastlyPhrase on 11 Oct 2003

    I have to agree- I was left with my mouth watering, waiting for the beef to arrive. I have absolutely no comments regarding the message of the essay (all quite true). After reading it, however, I th...

  • RE: Pro Developer - Optimize Your View - Introduct

    Posted by efs on 06 Oct 2003

    Conceptually a good article to get programmers who have not already embraced the concept started thinking.

    Lacking in the "meaty" details of just how this is done.

    First, management has to buy i...