This whole issue of writing for people really distills down to two skills:
1. Empathy
2. Writing
There is a world of difference between writing some code and writing an application, a product. That is all this article is about, though less explicitly. Empathy is a factor in this because its the difference between self-orientation and external-orientation. Self-orientated developers are primarily concerned with easiness, convenience, code vanity, and other subjectivity criteria. It comes down only to their effort of delivery.
Externally-oriented developers are primarily concerned with architecture and documentation because for them success is all about how other people receive their work product. Simplicity is more important than easiness because externally-oriented developers know they cannot read minds and have no idea what other people find easy, but they do know how to reduce steps and keep their code small.
In the brain writing an application, from a holistic product perspective, is no different than writing an essay, article, or book. Its all about organization and features. The code is something that comes later, like words on a page. For people who only write pieces of code they never develop the higher order organizational skills that brings it all together. It also works in the inverse in that if a person cannot write an essay with ease they cannot envision writing a new application.
Those are the reasons I super detest frameworks. Frameworks deprive developers the practice necessary to write original software which means they are not developing those organizational skills. Its a massive gap that the inflicted cannot see, but is so enormously apparent to those that can see it. From a behavior perspective its no different than a learning or neurological disorder in that the inflicted know something is missing, but have no means to see what that something is, and that drives massive emotional insecurity.
So true, and this is a dilemma, right? People who build frameworks do so to make it easier for others to ship products. In the process of building the framework, they become better developers themselves. However, others now have to learn their abstractions, which distances them from the underlying concepts. This can make it harder for them to master the core skills needed to surpass the framework. I had that feeling when I learned Rails, only to realize it hid so much from me that I eventually had to drop it and try doing things from scratch.
I think what developers need to understand is that these large frameworks aren't there for them. Developers are not the primary audience or the primary benefactor. The primary benefactor of these frameworks are employers.
The large challenge employers face is where to find developer talent then how to select it. Developers then become a replaceable commodity selected on the basis not of capabilities or potential but solely on the basis of current compatibility on a bell curve. That devalues the better half of developers. It ultimately costs the employers more by allowing employment for people who otherwise are not capable at interference to future cost saving ventures from creative solutions. Also consider that employers are still reliant on recruiters to find potential developer candidates, so frameworks don't even help with identifying talent.
Im quite good at writing pieces of code but if the application gets sufficently complex i tend to attack the problem by rewriting things in a circle. Sometimes complexity puts me in an infinite loop of rewrites. That this is an entirely different skill is quite the eye opener. Its now a known unknown if you like. Thanks!
Empathy is great but you need to understand cognition otherwise the empathy will be misplaced.
How is this code going to appear or show up for someone whose boss is breathing down their neck, or who is fixing a production problem at 2 am? You don’t know how valuable that answer is until you actually need the answer, and then you’ll pay a lot for it. If you can find someone who knows how to do it. Few people do.
A lot of that is just experience from practice. If a person has solved a given problem before they will be able to do it faster the next time.
Another part of that is simply being hypo neurotic, low fear. If a person is hypo neurotic those conditions are just not stressful at all. For example being shot at by a violent aggressor is stressful but not writing code at a different time of day. It’s hard to explain unless you are that person or personally know someone who is. It’s also apparently a massive gaping hole in psychology. Neuroticism is generally viewed as negative, so the less of it the better. That does not account for the extreme states, that bottom 2%.
This whole issue of writing for people really distills down to two skills:
1. Empathy
2. Writing
There is a world of difference between writing some code and writing an application, a product. That is all this article is about, though less explicitly. Empathy is a factor in this because its the difference between self-orientation and external-orientation. Self-orientated developers are primarily concerned with easiness, convenience, code vanity, and other subjectivity criteria. It comes down only to their effort of delivery.
Externally-oriented developers are primarily concerned with architecture and documentation because for them success is all about how other people receive their work product. Simplicity is more important than easiness because externally-oriented developers know they cannot read minds and have no idea what other people find easy, but they do know how to reduce steps and keep their code small.
In the brain writing an application, from a holistic product perspective, is no different than writing an essay, article, or book. Its all about organization and features. The code is something that comes later, like words on a page. For people who only write pieces of code they never develop the higher order organizational skills that brings it all together. It also works in the inverse in that if a person cannot write an essay with ease they cannot envision writing a new application.
Those are the reasons I super detest frameworks. Frameworks deprive developers the practice necessary to write original software which means they are not developing those organizational skills. Its a massive gap that the inflicted cannot see, but is so enormously apparent to those that can see it. From a behavior perspective its no different than a learning or neurological disorder in that the inflicted know something is missing, but have no means to see what that something is, and that drives massive emotional insecurity.