October 22, 2010 at 8:28 am
Curious that Steve's question was about efficiency rather than effectiveness. It reveals, I believe, an institutionalized bias in favor of speed over quality. After 30ish years as analyst/designer/developer/DBA/Informaticist (don't ask, I still don't know what it means), I find that my effectiveness has improved tremendously, but at the cost of a perceived reduction in "efficiency." Quality takes time, and though with very few exceptions it has a higher value than speed, it's much harder to measure, so speed remains the preferred metric.
So the short answer, then, is that I am less efficient, but more valuable!
October 22, 2010 at 8:47 am
I spent years in IT and Communications before the .Com bubble burst. At that time I found myself without an employer in a state with a declining IT industry. My choice for the next two years was a mixture of freelance work and pursuing a second Bachelor of Accounting. This seems to be a powerful combination. As I age I am finding I am being offered more business management oriented positions than programming which is fine for me. I often read on forums about the IT professional’s inability to communicate how IT fits into the Business Model.
This disconnect has become niche as I’m aging. I often find myself explaining, especially in this economy, that firing a high salary IT worker might be more crippling to your business than setting fire to the head office. My historical knowledge of systems projects and languages seems more valuable in business and strategic planning, while IT often undervalues that same information in favor of the cutting edge skills.
I know some of you may be thinking that I’ve gone over to the dark side. I tend to think I’m trying my best to shed some light on my profession and explain what kind of unbridled ingenuity can be extracted from a happy and healthy IT Department. My IT background and side work keeps me abreast of the latest technologies and although I find myself doing much less programming I still enjoy the problem solving only on a larger scope.
Aaron Hall
IT Infrastructure Consultant
Nothing is more confounding than a DBA that uses bureaucracy as a means to inflate his power. Ever try to get an index added to a government run SQL server and you'll know what I mean.
October 22, 2010 at 8:55 am
AJHall (10/22/2010)
This disconnect has become niche as I’m aging. I often find myself explaining, especially in this economy, that firing a high salary IT worker might be more crippling to your business than setting fire to the head office.
Wow I'd love to hear your stories about this one.
AJHall (10/22/2010)
Nothing is more confounding than a DBA that uses bureaucracy as a means to inflate his power. Ever try to get an index added to a government run SQL server and you'll know what I mean.
And that one too! Why the heck would the president of the country or a close subordinate be involved in a programming decision such as this one?
October 22, 2010 at 10:02 am
Steve Jones asked:
Are you becoming more efficient as you progress in you career?
Maybe you can answer how you are getting more efficient. Are you developing skills that allow you to produce higher quality code in less time?
I've been in IT for about a third of a century -- more than enough time to observe, and participate in, application development trends.
One very significant trend has been toward ever-higher levels of abstraction. I started programming in IBM System 360/370 assembler. These days, my staff use the .Net framework and jQuery.
Are the developers of today more efficient than the programmers of yore?
It depends on how one defines 'efficiency', and therein lies the rub of modern application development. In order to understand and take advantage of today's highly-abstracted libraries and frameworks, a developer must learn their object models -- or at least significant portions of them -- in order to understand how to build the application.
These object models are typically quite large and complex, and often offer several ways to accomplish the same task. This results in an efficiency curve which begins with a very low, gradual slope as the developer learns the object model and how best to employ its components.
As this familiarity increases over time, the efficiency curve steepens, and the developer begins building complex applications at a markedly faster rate.
In contrast, the developer of the past essentially had to learn just the programming language at hand - its syntax and constructs - before writing applications. The efficiency curve started off more steeply, but leveled out at a much lower point, than the curve seen today.
Of course, abstraction is nothing new, and I recall assisting in developing COBOL subroutine and copybook libraries in several shops. These were early attempts at improving efficiency; but of course it took the shops' time and money to develop these libraries. The fact that platform libraries like jQuery and J2EE may be had simply for the asking is a constant source of astonishment (and delight) to me.
I think the question of 'accuracy' is more easily answered: in a highly-abstracted development environment, the application is only going to be as accurate as the underlying code comprising the called libraries. If the building-blocks are flawed, the wall itself will not stand.
October 22, 2010 at 11:56 am
Michael Lysons (10/22/2010)
I'm finding myself less interested in learning new programming tech as I get older. I've been working in IT for 16 years now, the last 7 of which have been mostly using T-SQL with a bit of MS tech (VB, VBA etc) as well. I'm more interested in the design side of things now. I'd rather someone else did all the tedious typing nonsense!
About the same for me; T-SQL with some .Net, SSIS, VB. A lot of my colleagues and former colleagues have gone onto management. I think that after some # of years programming they'd rather guide people and projects rather than do the nitty gritty work anymore.
As for aging, I'd have to honestly say that I have a harder time when coding something from scratch than I did when I was younger. But the upside is that I have so much previous work to draw from that I usually don't have to start from the beginning. As if I've built code libraries in the past that I can use now.
With age comes more efficiency and better time management practices too.
Ken
October 22, 2010 at 12:35 pm
joe-1138249 (10/22/2010)
There is a very key difference between 'efficient' and 'effective'. ......
I could write a book on this subject. The takeaway would be this - if I need someone to develop a solution, give me an old bastard who has been around the block too often to count, understands business and people and return on investment, has reasonably current technical skills, really gives a damn about the result, and still loves this profession. It may not be as 'efficient', but it will be considerably more 'effective'.
Joe Lewis, CT USA
Here, here. Great post
M Balent
October 22, 2010 at 11:30 pm
I started my IT (wasn't called IT then) career in 1979.
For most of my career I was very driven to succeed. I have an impressive collection of accomplishments, awards, and successful endeavors.
After investing so much of my life into my career I had the misfortune of working with business which left me questioning if things were of a level playing field.
In addition to the aforementioned (much too long and complicated to explain in a post), I have become more and more disillusioned with the overall direction the industry has taken.
I wonder what ever became of the sub-second response time goals (aside better data capturing techniques than data entry). Why can't I tab through the controls and have default buttons work in more sites/applications than not? Why is there non-sensical data on the invoice from the dealership shop that I'm told to ignore? Why don't many applications allow me to import my data into the upgraded version? Why can't I search my checking account transactions, by whom the transaction was payable? etc etc ad ad nasuem.
I think I know and I don't like the answer.
But now....I have determined there is life aside from the SDLC and 60-80 hour work weeks don't really net the long term rewards I once had believed.
I now maintain a low profile. I work 40 hours a week. My co-workers have virtually no knowledge of what I at one time considered great accomplishments. I earn slightly over half of what I was in 1997. Let someone else set the world on fire. Or, jump tall buildings in a single bound.
I have officially become what I at one time detested. I considered people like me very contemptible (lacking drive and ambition).
Don't get me wrong...I do stay current in technologies. I can hold my own with the best.
However, the best doesn't seem nearly as inclined to want to hang with me. Age discrimination does exist.
October 24, 2010 at 4:32 pm
I believe that I am both more efficient and more effective. I can get more done with less code as my experience and understanding grows. On the age discrimination, I didn't realise that the US doesn't have anti-discrimination laws to cope with this. I looked up the anti-discrimination laws and found the following:
"Discrimination in employment is prohibited by the International Labour Organisation Convention 111 (ILO 111), which was ratified by Australia in 1973. Under this Convention, the government is required to eliminate employment-related discrimination on the grounds of:
* race
* colour
* sex
* religion
* political opinion
* national extraction and
* social origin.
Parties to the Convention are permitted to add grounds for their own domestic purposes. In 1989 Australia added the following grounds:
* age
* medical record
* criminal record
* impairment
* marital status
* mental, intellectual or psychiatric disability
* nationality
* physical disability
* sexual preference and
* trade union activity."
I am sure there is age discrimination in employment in Australia but it is more subtle due to our laws. I am glad I live in Australia as I am approaching my 40th birthday and 16 years in IT! :hehe:
Cheers,
Nicole Bowman
Nothing is forever.
October 25, 2010 at 6:50 am
I had a software business for about 18 years. A couple of years ago it dried up. Fortunately I had a customer for 16 years and they hired me on, gray hair and all. I'm not completely senile, though I have got to the point where I can wrap my own birthday gift and still be surprised. But what my employer has really come to appreciate about me is that what I lack in youth, I make up for in immaturity!
But seriously, folks, young people bring some things, and the older bring other. In every case, you have to evaluate the person's skills, soft and hard, and hire accordingly. Character is 70% of the equation.
*******************
What I lack in youth, I make up for in immaturity!
October 25, 2010 at 8:43 am
suzier (10/22/2010)
I wonder what ever became of the sub-second response time goals (aside better data capturing techniques than data entry). Why can't I tab through the controls and have default buttons work in more sites/applications than not? Why is there non-sensical data on the invoice from the dealership shop that I'm told to ignore? Why don't many applications allow me to import my data into the upgraded version? Why can't I search my checking account transactions, by whom the transaction was payable? etc etc ad ad nasuem.
I think I know and I don't like the answer.
That sounds like a topic worth discussing on it's own! I've been asking these questions too, but I don't have any idea what the cause(s) might be. That might mean that I'm part of the problem, but I hope not.
October 25, 2010 at 10:45 am
Nicole Bowman wrote:
On the age discrimination, I didn't realise that the US doesn't have anti-discrimination laws ...
Amendment 15, clause 1, of the United States Constitution, dated 3 Feb 1870, states:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Amendment 19, clause 1, of the United States Constitution, dated 18 Aug 1920, states:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
These are the seminal, constitutional anti-discrimination laws; from these, a great body of statutory and case law has emerged, enforced by the federal US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC website is http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/index.cfm.
Considering the ethnicity of the current inhabitants of the White House, I would offer the opinion the United States, like Australia, can be proud of the progress made in the fight against discrimination.
October 25, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Craig-315134 (10/25/2010)
Considering the ethnicity of the current inhabitants of the White House, I would offer the opinion the United States, like Australia, can be proud of the progress made in the fight against discrimination.
I meant age discrimination laws and I certainly didn't mean to upset anyone or sound smug; I was just shocked. I presumed that if Australia had these laws, that the US would have at least that and more. As an outsider looking in, I see the US employment market as very geared towards the employer. I have now read about people from the US on this forum who have very little leave, very long working hours, can be fired for no reason at any time and discriminated against due to age. Perhaps this is a misconception but based on this, I'm sorry, but I don't think that is as much progress in employment law as places like Europe and Australia. Australia can certainly lift its game too. Some European countries eg Scandinavian ones, lead the world with laws that promote the welfare of people and families. This builds a much stronger community with healthier, better adjusted, children and adults. I would love to see the rest of the world follow their lead including Australia. Again, apologies if my opinion offended anyone.
Nicole Bowman
Nothing is forever.
October 25, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Hello, Nicole,
I'm not the least bit offended, and you didn't come across poorly at all. For my part, I was trying to demonstrate the US does in fact have a broad and deep set of anti-discrimination laws.
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) is one of those laws. Please see:
October 26, 2010 at 2:34 pm
I like to think that I am getting faster and more efficient with time. Part of that is that things which have become learned are more habit and there may be more tricks to pick from that I have learned over the years.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
_______________________________________________
I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
SQL RNNR
Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
Learn Extended Events
March 26, 2015 at 1:01 am
I have to confess that I think that I have slowed down a bit...at least at work.
Having said that, my role has changed over time and I find that I tend to get given greater responsibilities. Through these responsibilities I have influence over a lot more people then I did before. It is by applying my experience to when to bring this influence into effect that I can bring the most to the table.
As for learning, I think that there are three types of attitudes:
Sometimes people's attitude change over time but often the same attitude remains but the circumstances change e.g. our fellow SSCer's Greek family men. This is particularly true of the second bullet point.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
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