IT - a fall back opportunity...

I don't mean to demean teachers & teaching but 'IT' has become what teaching had become to any university graduate before 1995 - a fall back opportunity in case you couldn't think of anything more interesting to do with your life. I remember quite a few graduates of the early 1990's who did teacher training just because they couldn't be bother to work out what they wanted to do with their lives, not exactly an encouraging state of affairs for the education system. It was only a fictitious TV show but Teachers hit the mark for me.


And now we're reaping the reward of this thinking in the computer industry, notice I don't say IT, I hate the expression 'IT', when ever I hear someone say I work in 'IT' - it tells me 'I couldn't be bother to work out what I wanted so I chased the easy money...'.
I'm not saying you have to have a PhD in 'pixel fibrillation and the effects on digital e-commerce' to work in this industry you just got have a passion for doing the job, some of the most passionate people I know don't have any qualifications.


The industry is now made up of too many people who don't care about the projects they work on, they only care about bonuses and the latest 'corporate handcuffs'. In the development community these are typified by people who either become managers because they didn't like writing code or developers who expect the company to provide training in technology. These people are the 'bad apples' in any development project they don't want to learn and they don't understand how developers think, they just don't get the statement 'the devils in the detail'. Ultimately these people are why methodologies like Agile & SCRUM will fail to deliver the benefits to the majority of software projects because these methodologies require people to take responsibility for their actions and do the job to the best of their abilities and these people definitely don't.


What's the out come of this?


Simple - The clever people are thinking of leaving...


I'm not one of those clever people (yet!), I care greatly about my time at work and the code I produce. And if this code is not up to the job it causes me great anguish when I've failed to deliver what's required. A good example was last week when we were having an OO analysis & design session and I produced a design that was sub-optimal compared to the final solution. This caused me some mental discomfort for the next 2 days. The outcome of which was I realised I need to improve my analytically skills when it comes requirements and use cases. I often discount stuff to early when analysing what's required. I meet to many developers\managers who don't think this way, to be blunt they don't care they didn't produce a solution the end user wanted. This attitude for me is why so many of the good people want to leave the industry.