Materialized Talks

One week back, I read a great article on http://www.stickyminds.com titled “What's In A Name?” which says that developers are not the only “developers” who are working or developing the product. All the persons (System Engineers, Coders, Programmers, Testers, deploy persons, support functions) are developers. Developers should be called as “Programmers” or “Coders”.

I have added my comment on that article and I got a supporting response from the author, Fiona Charles, who is a Toronto-based test consultant and manager with thirty years of experience in software development and integration projects. See my comments that I published and the response by the author below:

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Comment:
by Sanat Sharma 10/29/2008

Great thought, Fiona. "Developers" are not the only one who are developing the product. It involves other roles also. And that is the reason; some organizations started saying developers as "SDE" means "Software Development Engineers" and testers as "SDET" means "Software Development Engineers in Testing". It all went wrong when we started calling programmers "developers." It is very difficult for me, having an experience of 7+ years in testing and quality, to deal with a programmer turned manager.

Sanat Sharma
http://www.xtremeedge.blogspot.com

Author's Response: 10/29/2008
Thanks, Sanat. That's an interesting example you cite, though I would prefer to leave the "engineer" out of both titles. What's wrong with "programmer" and "tester", after all?

I sympathize with your issues about programmers turned managers. Unfortunately for us, they are in the majority among IT managers. We need to find a way of reaching them collectively, not simply one by one, so we are not constantly having the same conversations or arguments again and again.

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Few days back, I discussed this with one of my programmer colleague and the response I got from him was amazing. I can’t pen down what he said but that was disgusting and shocking. And on top of it, one of the programmers sitting beside us, having around 3+ years of programming work experience laughed at his comments without even thinking of what has been told by both parties.

I realized on that day that sometimes you cannot change the attitude of someone who is not able to understand what you are trying to say. I decided better to keep my mouth shut with these kinds of guy rather than doing long discussions. Because it’s true that “Never argue with a fool, people might not know the difference.”

-- Sanat Sharma