How does a programmer judge how talented he or she is?
I got to thinking today about one of my major projects. It's a vital piece of our daily business and would cost the company a large amount of money if it came grinding to a halt for a day.
There are two new branches of this application that were recently rolled out and while I was rolling the first out I worked extensively with the team that would be benefiting from this branch to get this developed to meet their needs. After I rolled it out, it was modified slightly to become the second branch that was rolled out. I haven't heard much from the team that is using that second branch but I know it gets used heavily and they benefit dramatically from it. In fact, as I thought about it, I hadn't heard from the first team in a while either. I called someone up from the second team to find out how things were going and she said things were going great! and thanked me for checking in.
I'm not saying I'm talented (I'll leave that up to my peers to decide), but I did take a large amount of pride in my work today. If I were to try to judge how talented I was, I would take the fact that this major piece of software that is used so heavily and has had no complaints against it or feature requests for it to assist in that judgement.
I admit this could also mean that people have come to live with it, deal with the problems and have been too lazy to request new features or think the feature requests will fall on deaf ears. However, this software hasn't been out long enough for people to "learn to deal with it" and the second team sounded very pleased with it making me believe they truly have no feature requests at this time.
4 comments:
Mary Poppendieck (LEAN expert) mentioned one time that a good indicator or whether your software was being used, is if the users request new features.
If you don't hear ANYTHING, be worried!
@Superjason: We'll see what the future holds. Just as they haven't had time to "just deal" with its shortcomings, I suppose you could say that they haven't had time to come up with new feature requests. But Mary's statement makes sense because if they don't request new features, then that software is at the end of it's life cycle since there's nothing left to develop on it. Thanks for putting it in that light.
Just FYI, a certain piece of software that all 3 commenters on this post helped write, has been on the market and test-deployed by some major customers, for near 6 months now, and not a *single* defect has been submitted yet.
I once read somewhere (probably on Slashdot) that competent people tend to under-estimate their abilities, while incompetent people tend to over-estimate. This stems from the fact that people who know their subject matter well, realize how broad their field is, and how much they will always have to learn, so they down-play their own skill level. While people who don't know jack, don't really understand how insignificant their tiny bit of expertise actually is, so they don't realize how stupid their confidence is.
PS: Are you still using Blogger?! Get on the WordPress bandwagon, man!
PPS: No bugs, but two feature requests! And they were outstanding ideas, too!
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