This post is a response to Walters blog
Actually, I think we can all relate to being end users.
What I don't get is why IT people think they live in some special world where the rules are different for them and their products. “Software developers” are just “Product Developers” by a different name, and their products stink just as much as anyone else’s when they don't do what the consumers want. There are in fact laws that protect normal consumers. A product must fit for the purpose it is sold for. How many software developers could claim the same of their products?
Many, but not all.
But we can safely blame the end user and say it's simply their own technical incompetence that prevents them from using the product properly.
You ask a pharmaceutical company to explain why it’s the consumers fault that they died from a reaction to a drug because they obviously didn’t understand how to take it properly. I am not an engineer and I shouldn’t have to be to drive a car. When I put my foot on the brakes, I expect the car to stop. If the brakes fail, do the designers of the car blame me for not understanding how they work properly?
Most designers and developers have an inflated opinion of what we do. The reality is that we are in a service industry, and currently our level of service sucks. The only reason we have gotten away with it for so long is that we have had something of a strangle hold on the market. But as understanding and awareness of IT grows, and people see that most of it is just smoke and mirrors, there will be a backlash. I think we have already seen the start of it. The .COM crash in the wake of the whole Y2K farce when people started to realise they had been taken for a ride by the IT people promising the moon.
90% of the people in our industry are no beer than trades people. Code chimps (those damn monkeys again) that just do what they are told. The other 10% actually do real cutting edge development, but the rest of us just follow along in their footsteps claiming to be some cabal keeping the sacred and secret trust with the gods of IT. As long as we can obfuscate the truth we can keep people from realising we aren’t worth half the money we are being paid to do our jobs.
Not true? Then how can so many script kiddies cause so much havoc all the time. It doesn’t take much skill or intelligence to do this stuff. Tools like Visual Studio make developers out of high school students.
To be fair, some few of us are truly good at this stuff, and I feel privileged to watch some of our students who shine so brightly, and to be in the company of some of the brilliant people I work with. I just wish I was half as good as them. These people deserve the big bucks. Just like lawyers and doctors who get paid the big dollars to be so good at what they do. Unfortunately I think there are an awful lot of snake oil merchants in our industry at the moment.
As soon as consumers wake up and realise they are not getting value for money, they will start to hold us accountable. The end user is the customer and they are the ones paying our wages. The days of us being able to get away with thumbing our noses at them are numbered. Just look at the web industry. For a while any fool with a copy of FrontPage could hang out their shingle claiming to be a web developer. Now the bottom has fallen out of the market and it just doesn’t pay to do web pages because the market is saturated by people with practically no technical skills building sites for next to nothing. I see this as a good thing. The same is now happening to the programming industry. Off shoring development jobs to countries that can underquote us so grossly only underlines the fact that we have been getting away with murder with the rates we charge.
Bring on the revolution!
