Scott Leberknight's Weblog

Probably the best session at No Fluff is Dave Thomas' "Herding Racehorses, Raching Sheep" talk. It isn't really a technical session and could be applied not just to software development but to many other industries. The basic premise is simply that the software industry does not have enough people who are at the Competent level or above on the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition, and that this has had a negative effect on the software industry in terms of the quality of products produced. The Dreyfus Model basically states that there are fundamental differences in how people at different levels perceive the worlds, how they solve problems, how they create mental models, how they acquire new skills, and what affects their performance. The Dreyfus Model has five levels: Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Proficient, and Expert. A person can be at different levels for different things. For example, Dave gave the example of how he began learning to fly as a novice, the differences in the way you think and perceive, and how you progress to higher levels.

The title "Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep" derives from the way the software industry treats individual software programmers, which is to say many naive companies think all developers are interchangeable and should be treated the same. This is extremely common in the industry, and the companies that do best understand this sentiment of uniformity and interchangeability is simply wrong and is actually counterproductive. Many studies have shown that programmer productivity differs by orders of magnitude between beginners and experts.

What can be done? Dave suggests we must "encourage competence" through better methods of training, keeping experts in development jobs rather than "promote" them to management, and make payscales match the actual skills and more importantly productivity of programmers. Trying to change the mentality of companies will be a difficult challenge at best, and an onging one. But one sure thing individual developers can do is to, as Dave puts it, "invest in their own Knowledge Portfolio" and continue to learn new things throughout their careers. Yes, many low-level development jos are moving offshore and will continue to do so, but developers who continually maintain and enhance their skills and knowledge portfolio will thrive.

My own philosophy has been to always be learning, always upgrading my skills and evaluating myself against others. This is the same mentaility as in the medical, law, and accounting indistries where those professionals are constantly learning, going to conferences to gain new knowledge, etc. For some reason, though, a large percentage of software programmers do not this. They feel no need or desire to learn anything new and continue to stagnate. I have worked with many developers who simply do not care about improving their skills or learning anything new. In the past these people had no problems retaining a job, because programmers were in such demand. The big difference now is that the demand is still there but their jobs are leaving to go overseas. After all, why pay someone here in the United States three or four times as much for the same productivity and skill level than someone half-way across the world who has the same skills and knowledge but costs much less? In fact, Dave mentioned at one point that he though about 30% of developers should be fired, to weed out those who haven't learned anything new since they graduated college. My only question is whether the percentage shouldn't actually be more like 50%.