[Catalyst] Re: Business Point of View

[Marlon Bailey]

>That's what I've observed: when given the choice between solutions  
>that require a few highly skilled programmers and solutions that will  
>work acceptably well with many barely-adequate programmers,  
>organizations almost universally opt for the latter.  More often,  
>organizations *have* several programmers of varying ability levels  
>already, and choose frameworks and environments that work with the  
>lowest common denominator.
>
>This makes a lot of sense from a business point of view:  it's much  
>easier to find barely-adequate programmers than highly skilled ones,  
>and it's much cheaper to pay them, so there's less risk involved in  
>choosing the framework and environment that can be used successfully  
>with them.  This means that highly-skilled programmers tend to get  
>bored with that sort of work, but unfortunately few businesses exist  
>primarily to create interesting problems for programmers.  About the  
>best you can hope for in most cases is low resistance when you try to  
>automate the most boring elements.
>
>Charlton

Good well organized documentation usually solves this issue.  It greatly reduces training cost, which corporations love.  And if it's well written(ie. By someone on the Development team), it will usually have "Best Practices" for solving 90%+ of the general problems the framework is supposed to address in the first place.  This makes it so that you don't have to hire someone who is brilliant, just someone who can follow those "Best Practices" laid out by the developers; this is a reduction in labor costs and corporations love that also.  Unfortunately, good well organized documentation is rarely ever commited to in the development schedule.  On the flip-side an extremely verbose piece of software such as Hibernate(www.hibernate.org) can take off, due to it's extremely good documentation.  I believe if a developer/development team wants anyone outside of a one or two man team to take their software seriously, they need to take their documentation seriously, either that or offer training for free. = )

_Marlon_


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