It’s hard for me to put my finger on it, but the gist of it is that developers paid upwards of $60,000+ a year were doing static content management while a $15 an hour developer fresh out of college would most likely setup Drupal or a WordPress blog and let them update it while he focused on more important things. I’d know… I was once that $15 an hour developer.
It’s a common problem I’ve seen in large companies in my experiences… problem A is easily solved by tool B but tool B is written in language C while the company has embraced language D (and its derivatives). No good equivalent to tool B exists in language D so the developers will spend lots of time doing manual work, in which case you have one to five developers with degrees updating text (I’ve seen it). The worst case (and common) scenario is the company will possibly spend upwards of a quarter million or more developing a poor imitation of tool B in language D that will only work in house and will never be able to be used outside the company.
Why is this? Why is it so hard to just use tool B and keep focusing on the more important tasks at hand? From what I’ve observed in my career is that companies with large company mindsets rarely can consider using languages outside of their core language choice. It requires server provisioning, training, hiring developers or server administrators experienced with language C… and quite possibly the hiring of consultants who specialize in tool B. The prep time for such a task could easily take up to six months or more and in the end it probably will be decided that tool B isn’t up to the task.
Compare this to a more fluid development environment. The developer probably uses language D too but knows tool B would be the best choice to get the job done. He’d probably have the company drop 40 stones on a rackspace instance and install tool B and language C on it and integrate it with the current site written in language D. I’ve seen this done in days, if not hours.
Notice I really try to emphasize “big company mindset” over “big companies” as the guilty party of this tomfoolery. Just because you’re big doesn’t mean you have to act like this and I’ve seen small companies engage in this behavior as well. “Large Company Minded” companies tend to prefer a great deal of process in the way they do business and identify success with solid, foolproof process that can be adhered to by anyone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying absolute chaos of no processes are a good thing but I believe that a business should have a certain degree of fluidity to be successful. Why not just do a quick cost analysis over how much it would cost to have a single server (probably even one already running some other application server) to run language C and tool B rather than redevelop tool B in language D? Why not just determine that that would be the best option and just do it instead of lollygagging around and wasting your company’s money?
Reference: Big Company vs. Small Company from our JCG partner James Carr at the “Rants and Musings of an Agile Developer” blog.
- How to Fail With Drools or Any Other Tool/Framework/Library
- Diminishing Returns in software development and maintenance
- Essential Stories for any Enterprise Application Product Backlog
- On the importance of communication in the workplace
- Dealing with technical debt
- Java Tutorials and Android Tutorials list
