Hi Virgil,

I too am self-taught, from the very first language (Fortran), which I taught myself in 2 weeks in 1969, using IBM's 3-workbook self-taught course. Then I had to learn to use the keypunch. <s> Literally.

What I see happening in the software development industry is what happens in any industry: an attempt to routinize, make routine, the development of the products of that organization. This is not peculiar to the software industry: it happens everywhere. Think McDonald's, where every step of the process has been made routine. Not great hamburgs: but routinely adequate, depending on your definition of adequate.

I don't think the way it has been attempted has, for the most part, been particularly wise: I believe the case can be made, based on recognized principles in software development (e.g., the 2-pizza team, which is an implementation of principles enunciated a decade before by Fred Brooks, Ray Ozzie and others), that software is best developed in small, coherent teams. Having 200 coders sitting in cubicles just runs up your payroll: the average number of lines of code per day per person, after debugging, comes to about 4, a number that had stood up for 15 years the last time I checked. Another number that has lasted: about 3% of those 200 will produce 90% of the code.

But all of this amounts to stupidity, not a conspiracy or even a plan. Corporations have no corner on stupidity. Of course, if you or I are stupid in our business decisions, we go out of business. If big corporations make bad decisions, the bosses lay off starting from the bottom and going up. As any plumber can tell you, stuff runs downhill.

So I'm not really sure what you are saying. Should we be angry at corporations for being stupid? Should be attempt to legislate them into being smarter? Should we restrict free trade by forcing them to hire programmers here rather than outsource?

Market capitalism says that those on the edges of the market, that's us, always have the danger of being marginalized by larger events (think: recession, or in this case outsourcing, or .Net itself), but have the advantage of being able to adjust to changing conditions faster than those parts of the economy that are more central in the market. Big boats turn slowly. Being able to see how things are changing, and then finding those adjustments that work in the new situation, are the keys to longevity for outliers to the market. Or as a WWII vet told me, "I learned early on that a moving target was harder to hit, so I kept moving." <s>

Hank



>Hi,
>
>I am working on a series of articles about how people from all backgrounds got their start in Foxpro.
>
>You can read the first chapter on the following link
>
>http://keepamericaatwork.com/?p=7921
>
>If you would like to submit your story, please email me at vbiersch@ktc.com as I don't get over here too often.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Virgil
>http://www.KeepAmericaAtWork.com
>http://www.VetsFindingVets.org