Jeff Moden - Monday, October 2, 2017 9:59 PM

Phil Factor - Monday, October 2, 2017 10:49 AM

I agree that siloed thinking is bad, but so is a lack of understanding of the tasks that your team members have to perform. To participate in any team process, whether it is building a house, producing a new soft drink, or developing software, you need to have some practical experience of the whole process. I don't mean that you should be an expert but you need to know about every role.  After all, a musician in an orchestra won't be expected to be able to play every instrument, two or three maybe, but will need to know enough about what is involved to understand the constraints and limitations. The poor conductor is actually expected to know quite a lot about every instrument. An Anaesthetist has a complete medical training and experience in surgery, intensive care and pain management.   In IT, by contrast, it is common to find developers who have not even the vaguest idea of multiuser/multiprocess systems and transactions, and entirely lack any knowledge of the legal constraints under which we operate. We have, to be fair, Database people who entirely lack understanding of application development. No amount of group hugs or whiteboard meetings can substitute for an appreciation of the roles and tasks of other IT disciplines.

Agreed but you don't have to give up being a specialist to understand what other people are doing.  Nothing says that you have to be able to do something to understand some of the things it may need.  For example, I can troubleshoot C#, COBOL, and a lot of other languages if the Developer can explain things a bit.  But sit me down and tell me that I have to write code from scratch in one of those other languages?  That's just not going to happen any time soon.

And unless the brain surgeon has an interest, he probably has no clue how the drive train of his car works and probably couldn't replace a tail light. even though the car is very important to his job.