{"id":23,"date":"2004-07-16T23:59:02","date_gmt":"2004-07-16T22:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=23"},"modified":"2004-07-17T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2004-07-16T23:01:00","slug":"hire-developers-not-programmers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"Hire Developers, Not Programmers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Sink<\/a> has written another fine article. His first article, Make More Mistakes<\/a> was fantastic – if you’ve not read it, I can strongly recommend it.<\/p>\n

In his article about the Hazards of Hiring<\/a>, Eric must have been sat at the back of one of my presentations: he describes “programmers” and “developers” in exactly the same way I do! Indeed Eric has blogged about it here<\/a>. Another fine piece of writing.<\/p>\n

When necessary, however, I do state that some tasks bring the developer down to the same level as the programmer. For example, when discussing Test-Driven Development (TDD), I believe it is the person at the coal-face who should be writing the programmer tests<\/a>. Whether a developer writes them, or a programmer writes them, in my opinion is neither here nor there.<\/p>\n

However, as for Eric’s thoughts? I agree: I was a programmer in my youth, I just churned out code. <\/p>\n

Back then, despite my title (Library Programmer), I became a developer…because the distinction Eric and I agree on wasn’t written down back then. The team I worked with also were developers: we took an open-minded approach to challenges, in many cases turning what might have sounded almost impossible into reality.<\/p>\n

After that, I took a position that allowed us to customise our job title to suit what we were doing at the time: enterprise development. We kept a focus on the bleeding edge – everything we did involved XML, it was so cool back then. Nowadays of course, XML has its place, but we don’t have an “XML everywhere” scenario anymore.<\/p>\n

Since then, I’ve still kept the word ‘development’ in my title: because I believe that one shouldn’t pick a single track and follow it. It’s important to be able to lend a hand to many tasks without selling yourself as a Jack of all trades, that’s totally different from being a Developer. <\/p>\n

Nowadays, I’m a Certified ScrumMaster, with a strong bias towards all things Agile. I can see how Agile could have helped me\/us on earlier projects. Equally, somewhat prophetically, can see that Agile will bring my current project in on time and within budget. So much, so I’ve signed up to SellingAgile<\/a>, Clarke<\/a>‘s Yahoo group aimed at individuals and developers who need to understand how traditional approaches can be improved by adopting Agile approaches. <\/p>\n

Lending a hand to many tasks facilitates getting the job in hand completed through team-work, drive and focus. Developers can do this, they have the mind-set – hire developers, not programmers<\/em>: good advice, I’ll follow it when I set up my own shop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What’s the difference between a programmer and developer? Eric Sink knows. I’m just commenting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}