Shortly after I commented on The Two Types of Software Development (application development vs. consulting), Joel Spolsky posted the text of a talk that he gave at Yale. It largely agrees with my comments and it’s why I am firmly in the apps side and never want to go back to consulting.
Ever eloquent, Joel does not mince his words: it sucks to be an in house programmer. The arguments he makes largely overlap with mine. He points that “a programmer is never going to rise to become CEO of Viacom, but you might well rise to become CEO of a tech company”:
And I could tell that no matter how critical it was for Viacom to get this internet thing right, when it came time to assign people to desks, the in-house programmers were stuck with 3 people per cubicle in a dark part of the office with no line-of-sight to a window, and the “producers,” I don’t know what they did exactly but they were sort of the equivalent of Turtle on Entourage, the producers had their own big windowed offices overlooking the Hudson River.
The text of the talk is published in three parts, but the part about in-house programmers is in part 2. It’s well worth the time to read at least that part.
