Jeff Moden (5/12/2012)
Good article, Steve. I believe that you've hit the nail on the head. So many managers think that Hours worked = Hours wisely spent = Good lines of code and it's just not true. I've seen a lot of shops where about half of the work is spent on reworking crap code that was pushed to production to meet a schedule. More experienced managers would have seen the falicy in all of that.
I agree. In fact what is worse is that management is clueless to the point of not even comprehending what you just stated. Understanding complex systems and the big picture of how everything interacts such that one is truly capable of thinking out side of the box comes from tons of experience and knowledge across a broad skill set. Deep understanding and the resulting insights just don't occur to people with limited experience... period.
Drag and drop tools and technologies make it deceptively easy to create really cool stuff that impresses the hell out of people that don't know any better. All too often these sorts of non-designs crash and burn when put into production where real transactional volume and concurrency is happening.
Ignorance is bliss.
The probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.