Gary Varga (7/23/2014)

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TomThomson (7/23/2014)

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I rather agree with Patrick's comment above - but I read the rubbish and got steadily more appalled as I went through it. A (Python) Programmer is apparently the highest form of life and people who do testing, quality assurance, deployment, or operations and of course DBA's too are all "lower" beings, clearly below him in the natural hierarchy - I just can't stomach that inflated view of a developer's place in the scheme of things. If I had ever had a developer like that working for me I would have fired him if I couldn't persuade him to change his attitude.

Oddly enough, I have lots of four letter words for developers who want to do no testing, or do no customer support, or do no deployment.

I'm happy with the idea that a developer does plenty of unit testing of his stuff, that the developers work together to do system testing, and that they don't take responsibility for quality assurance (although the QA team may ask them to develop some tests for them). I'm happy with the idea that software that is very difficult to deploy is pretty useless software, and that developers have to understand that and will have to assist in deployment if they haven't managed to produce software that is easy enough for the deployment and operations teams to deploy. I'm happy with the idea that when, despite all the unit testing and the QA the sofware still has faults and the customer support team can't provide an acceptable workaround for the customer a developer may have to understand the problem (which is likely to involve talking to the customer, maybe even visiting the customer) and finding either a quick fix or an acceptable workaround. I'm very unhappy with the idea that those things are no part of a developers job.

I think I expect developers to be a more concerned with testing, QA, deployment, and customer support than Steve appears to think is right, and Steve in turn thinks developers should be more involved with such things than that Python Programmer with the inflated ego appears to believe is proper.

As a developer, I can honestly say that this "leave me to code" attitude stinks. It is all about the overall result which we all get judged on. And so we should.

[Paraphrasing Mr Python Developer] "Leave me alone. I am superior to you. I am more worthy."

Really? I agree with Tom. Get a grip and join the team.