The developer totem pole
Posted by posted by Francis @ 4/09/2008 08:00:00 AM
Web developers get no respect. I swear this is the sentence that I used the most often in the past few weeks.
I have said that sentence in frustration because I had to fight the perception that web development is easy. That any developer (except maybe for a VB developer) can do it. This perception is ingrained at all levels of software organizations. From the developers themselves all the way to management.
There is a pecking-order, a totem pole where developers can be classified based on what kind of developer they are. You won't find that description in any programming book. This is not explained in any school curriculum. But it is there nonetheless; implied in the way projects are funded and staffed. It is often assumed that the people at the upper echelons of the order can (when they are coerced or there is no-one else available) do the work of anyone located below. Conversely, it is assumed that you're going to be in a world of hurt as a manager if you are forced to use a developer at a lower level to do some work "above his skill".
Some might argue that Linux kernel hacking is measurably more difficult than ASP.Net web development. That might be true but I don't think that it is so much more difficult that we can assume that it is impossible for a web developer could ever undertake a Linux kernel project. I think that we just have to understand that making a switch in programming discipline requires a certain level of learning. Whether you're going up or down the totem pole.
We have experienced the "going down the pole" phenomenon recently at work. We had an exiting project to complete that was a Java-based web project. We were short on web developers to complete the project so, naturally, it was assumed that if we put a bunch of Windows VoIP developers on the project, they should have no problems completing the work. After all, it's only a web project, how hard could it be?
A few months and a lot of overtime later, we successfully delivered the project. But it turns-out that it was a difficult transition. Everyone involved had to brace for a rough ride and pull together to make it work. It was not as easy as expected. I hope that the developers that were assigned on this project have a new found respect for web developers.
In my career, I have worked at pretty much all the echelons of this totem pole and I felt that I had earned my stripes. But recently, I have been involved in a lot of web development and I have noticed that the perception of my coworkers towards me was different. I have the stigma of the web developer. I do easy stuff now.
I think it is time we get rid of the totem pole. Working in software is challenging enough without the attitudes and the disrespect.
Labels: work
5 Comments:
Amen brother! Cue the Rodney Dangerfield mp3!
This is so true. I think it comes from the legacy of web development being a sort of wild frontier back in the late 90s. Early in my career I was a web developer, and like a lot of other web developers I was self taught. I had no formal CS education - no concept of design patterns, no clue what OO was, and so on.
Web development, and most early web developers, evolved slowly from HTML, to CGI scripting, to frameworks like Cold Fusion, and they all had a low barrier of entry. You could hack your way through it and get something working. No wonder early web apps had a lot of vulnerabilities, and no wonder it got a bad rap.
Today, web development is just as challenging (and often more so) than other kinds of development - scalability (even estimating load is challenging, let alone designing and developing for scalability), database design, developing a secure system that's open to the whole world to try and hack...
And thanks for debunking a myth. You can't solve many real problems for $12k in 3 weeks. Sure, maybe a quick and dirty web 2.0 mashup in Facebook, but something like Salesforce.com? Try 5 years and $5m.
So true...
I'm a Windows/Unix C/C++ developer with Windows kernel experience, so according to the totem, I'd be near the top.
And recently I worked on projects that required JSP or ASP.NET. And man, was I ever lost at first! It was even funny! Last time I worked with web technologies, I used notepad... Let's just say my self-esteem took a hit...
Now imagine doing software in a hardware oriented company... The HW engineers consider themselves on a different pole.
Well said.
Another major hurdle that 'web developers' need to deal with everyday in they're jobs is the rapidly changing trends, frameworks, and technologies that changing at nearly a nauseous pace. Good web developers have become specialized bread. Gone are the days of easy work, in are the days of challenges for scaling web apps, challenging database design, and applying strong OO principles.
I think the totem poll in many areas popular to tech is long gone.
Where I work much like every other technology-centric business area we saw a boon during the dotcom times. This caused numerous people from marketing to grocery store clerks to gain employment as "web developers" or really over glorified html computer operators.
Once the businesses failed, you heard of the numbers offered in the press for technologist out of work. In my opinion those that couldn't find the work for years at a time were the underqualified and under achievers that ultimately went back to marketing or off to the latest grocery store opening.
Now that businesses are back to making 100% of their revenues online and have felt the financial pinch of failed launch, patement processing and missed timelines, they've nearly all recognized that web development much like any other engineering has it challenges and is taken far less lightly when hiring.
I get my job offers from companies that fully recognize and value software engineering. Having worked within a large consumer product software company and being starred down by 60 desktop developers that had hundreds of year combined experience aided in my own success at forcing employers treat web devs just as they would any other scientific position. Being able to present a engineering team as a software engineering team within any environment is quite easy once you apply the same perdictability and receive the same resources as a traditional set of "engineers" would.
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