"Coding" as a primitive activity has become subservient to the goals of coding. What are the goals of coding?
- Make money
- Solve a problem
In any non trivial pursuit along those two vectors, complexity typically creeps in because more people are involved. Since more people are involved, this becomes a human organization. A human organization is not concerned with only the primitive activity to be done, but also what are the right approaches, methods, measurement, priorities, politics, scaling, learning, etc. Therefore, one cannot just be doing the primitive activity and ignore all of these higher level goals.
I am going to use an analogy: let's say coding is brick layering + painting + wall building + carpet + etc. and we are going to build a building. The worker says he just "wants to do work" but if we let her do that the building would be a disaster, unless you are just building a dog house. In which case the risks are low and a single person can do the work.
At the beginning (startup), one can just "do coding" because the problem is ill defined and an organization has not been established to manage the higher level work.
I wonder to what extent this mentality of "just want to code" is related to the (stereotypical) aversion of the developer as anti-social and introvert.
In any non trivial pursuit along those two vectors, complexity typically creeps in because more people are involved. Since more people are involved, this becomes a human organization. A human organization is not concerned with only the primitive activity to be done, but also what are the right approaches, methods, measurement, priorities, politics, scaling, learning, etc. Therefore, one cannot just be doing the primitive activity and ignore all of these higher level goals.
I am going to use an analogy: let's say coding is brick layering + painting + wall building + carpet + etc. and we are going to build a building. The worker says he just "wants to do work" but if we let her do that the building would be a disaster, unless you are just building a dog house. In which case the risks are low and a single person can do the work.
At the beginning (startup), one can just "do coding" because the problem is ill defined and an organization has not been established to manage the higher level work.
I wonder to what extent this mentality of "just want to code" is related to the (stereotypical) aversion of the developer as anti-social and introvert.