I’ve heard this, often said tongue in cheek, “If people realized how simple software development was, it would be a minimum wage occupation.”  Of course it changes slight when said from person to person.  The main point is there, that somehow, someway, software development is easy.  I think it is easy, and many developers I’ve worked with, find it easy.

I sat and thought about this for a while during a re-reading of “Refactoring – Improving the Design of Existing Code” and came to a simple and straight forward conclusion.  Software development is easy to us software developers because we do it, because we’ve learned the processes, we are enraptured by the multi-faceted, multi-process, brainy work that it is, and we excel because we “software developers” are obsessive compulsive learners.

News flash, the general populace does not embody any of the listed characteristics.  The slightly above average IQ isn’t even in the cast of “obsessive learner”.  They aren’t even remotely interested in multi-faceted, multi-process, and brainy work.  This left me with a solace of some sort, the average person, even the above average person, even the witty fellow that seems to know a bit of everything is not going to come take over the software industry and drop the wage rates of software development.  Even the initial off-shoring of American Software Development has wavered in the simple fact that Americans are relatively good at software development.  You can’t introduce this occupation to average people or cultures that don’t inherently accept obsessive traits and individualistic perseverance like the software industry does.  We excel at building and creating “new” things.  Sometimes we have a hard time picking up good process, lean and agile, sometimes we bump our heads on the “stupid block”, but the average man isn’t going to intrude upon this industry.  The cultural and personal characteristics of the software developer are just not easily duplicated.

So to summarize, employers aren’t going to get people cheap anytime soon, software isn’t free no matter what license is included.  Somebody is going to do the work, and those software grognards aren’t remotely average.  The software people need to remember, that we aren’t average, and thus stepping out of self mindset and looking at one self from another perspective is important.  The two main things, don’t underrate one self and don’t overrate, know and work diligently to keep up with where you stand in the industry.

Period. 

…it seems for a while now that Microsoft has been tempting away a lot of the Portland elite of the .NET World here in PDX.  Just recently, if anyone was paying attention, Checkfree bought Corillion.  Now just a few months after that Scott Hanselman, their very senior main lead guru architect dude, has left for the borg as noted by Brad Wilson and of course Hanselman himself.

I personally think this is great for him.  I myself have been put forth offers from Microsoft several times over the last few years, but often it isn’t the team or focus that I’d want, and of course if anyone reads my transit blog they know I wouldn’t be very into living in Seattle until they at least get the light rail out to Microsoft, which probably won’t be done for another 5-10 years.  Then, maybe, if Microsoft is even around anymore (a lot can happen in 5-10 years) I might consider.  But I’ve promised myself no more suburban blight for me, it’s the city, urban life, and no more unnecessary car usage.  It’s just too frustrating and Seattle is still rather behind in that avenue of transit and lifestyle.

With that I want to wish Scott the best, and hope he has a blast working with ScottGu (how could he not?)

The second brain storming I completed.

I intend to complete the remaining sub-items and then start breaking out the process and flow of the vehicles and their respective uses.  Things should get really interesting then.

The new PDF file, and the updated Visio file are available.

…I’m not sure if I ever posted an entry based on string formatting, but I dug this up.  I figured it was worth a handy link and I often use this blog of mine as a reference tool, so with that being what it is here’s my link to SteveX’s rocking string formatting in C#.

I splurged and decided it was time for laptop number two.  My main motivation, I wanted some resolution and I’ve got it on the way.  I’ll be developing with a screen resolution of 1920×1200!  It’s so annoying using 1280×800 to develop, and with VS 2008 right around the corner and some of the cool stuff I’ve been toying around with (think WPF) I thought it about time to bump up the capabilities.

So now I’m en route to the path of multiple boxes again.  At one time I peaked out at 7 boxes, 4 Linux, 1 Windows NT 4.0, 1 Windows 2000 Enterprise Server, and my main box being a Windows 2000 Professional box.  Now I will have two Windows Vista laptops, a Windows 2003 Server (Source Code box!).  Eventually I hope to segment out the box to run a few virtual servers, but I’m not sure how well that will work out.  At some point I also intend to get Visual Studio Team Server and Subversion up and running to maintain my source repository.  I’d also like to get them running just to become more intimately familiar with them.

  Cheers to geekdom!