On May 23, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Robert Hoekman Jr wrote:
Fascinating stuff. Still, I've had 20 or 30 conversations in my
personal
life that unanimously went the other way, with practically every
last person
wholeheartedly agreeing that coding is a tough skill to keep up on,
not
practicing it for a while (even a short while) can be seriously
detrimental,
and that it's remarkably rare for someone to be great (key word:
great) at
both design and development — so rare, in fact, that when someone
actually
knows a person like that, they excitedly refer to that person as
"amazing"
and feel significantly humbled by contrast.
I'm still thinking you're not hanging around with the right coders.
I've had opportunities in my life to work with some amazing folks --
people who could regularly do what others strongly believed to be
downright impossible.
In a few cases, they found the work too intense, so the took a multi-
year sabbatical away from technology (starting a farm, sailing around
the world, starting a pizza place). Some of them returned to tech
after being away for 5+ years. After a little hiatus, they were back
to their amazing stuff, with all new technology.
Most of programming isn't the APIs or syntax. It's the skill of seeing
a problem and knowing how to massage the machine into doing your
bidding. Frankly, it's not that far from design.
So, I think you can go away from something and come back to it just as
strong, if you have the skills and talent to do so.
But that's not what Joshua was suggesting. He was suggesting that he
could design and implement simultaneously, which I also believe is
possible. Taking a design from concept through code is a great set of
skills that I'm betting many a manager would pay handsomely for right
now. You get increased skills without increased headcount -- a great
value.
Jared
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