Evan,

>Development skills mean *nothing* anymore except to other developers. Managers, clients, investors -- they could care less. It's *SAD* for those of us who have put forth some serious effort to think through how we design and build our apps.
>
>It's like being a good bridge player -- unless you're interacting with another serious bridge player, nobody understands or cares.

In my current contract, I'm fortunate to have a coder as manager. I'm developing a spec for a data archiving project on Foxpro UNIX, and although he doesn't speak Fox, the manager asked me for a detailed spec written as if someone else other than me would be coding it.

He wants details of criteria for selecting records to be archived, field names and types, relational rules for tying the tables together, and a thorough analysis of other programs and scripts that might be compromised by the archive process. Very refreshing!