Software Development - A new series 1

A long ago, a friend of mine argued with me that Software development is like painting and developers are painters. As per his view, software development should be done by artists. I straight away disagreed and his argument was immature and naive. Painting and artist are gifted one, not everybody gets those and Software development is a professional job, so it doesn't always required some gifted person to develop it.

Lets take a example of construction field, it is heavy physical intensive work, it required some 250 lbs and 6 feet to perform the job but that is ideal. If a construction company wants to hire only 6 feet and 250 lbs, they can't hire enough employers to build a house and can't make profit. They want to hire any body physically fit for work and then divide work that heavy object lifting job goes to 250 lbs and some arranging, nailing job goes to other below 250 lbs. This is the system, this is how our society work, no body feels discrimination if 150 lbs not getting 50 lbs lifting job.

The same with software development, for a minimum level of coding one should have fundamental strong on the programming language, some working knowledge of database, a decent level of knowledge of Linux/Unix. The distinguish comes as form of expert level, which can be achieved with in 6-8 years of experience. There are 10 million software developers are here in U.S, all of them are not gifted and they are fit into this expert, medium and starter category. But other than that in Software there is one main aspect is attitude, the attitude is really important for developers. In fact attitude is important for any professional work, but i feel very strong about attitude and software development. Development required brain work and run through some analysis/processes in mind all the time hence good attitude required to develop quality software and within budget. More over attitude is really important for young industry like software development.

Why it is important? Again lets take construction field, construction is very old industry and all are well defined and well formed. Lets assume there are 100 people building a house, they may not even know their names each other, but the coordination and building process goes smoothly. All they want to know is what is their job today and when they have to finish it. But the young industry Software development, there was nothing defined, each day there are new development methodology, processes, each company has it's own processes and so on, nothing was integrated and everything working as it's own area. At end of the day, based on my 12 years of progressive development experience, each software developers attitude is making difference of successful completion of project particularly in IT industry.

Based on my experience, there are some main factors contributing good and bad attitudes, they are A. Context Switching B. Stress Management C. Ask other's help/ego.

Context Switching :
What i mean context switching, there are two types of context switching, first as soon as we start to work, we have to forget our personal and concentrate on professional one. second, with in work switch context between projects without losing temper. The first switch is something important and everybody should follow it, a successful career rely on how one separating personal issues with professional life.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks for sharing this post I read your complete post I agree with your view that every system developed contains something unique, original and clever. Increasing your web traffic and page views
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