Were these programmers magically transformed from "Bad programmers" to "Good programmers" overnight?

Er... no, they're still the bad programmers. Bad programmers can write good code. They just require much, much more handholding. And a project manager can't do that handholding; it has to be a good programmer. (Note that a great project manager can fill in that role -- if he happens to be a good programmer.)

I'm not saying project management is useless. In fact, it's critical. But I fully agree with the original quote -- it's not enough by itself, and much, much less of it is needed if you have good programmers in the first place. Which isn't saying much, because part of what makes a programmer good is being able to do a part of the project management.

It is certainly possible to create a decent product with a team of bad programmers and a good project manager. I've seen it done. And I've seen two good programmers get fed up with the pointless lack of flexibility and maintainability, and rewrite the whole thing in less time and produce a far better product. Admittedly, they gained from the experience of the first implementation, but they didn't stop there -- by the time they finished, the product had at least twice the functionality of the original (it was being sold in parallel, so new requirements were pouring in.) And it was still easier to maintain and extend, and there still wasn't a product manager involved. Sure, it's anecdotal, and there were some near-disasters that could have been avoided with better project management, but it still supports the original claim.

In reply to Re: Re: Maxims for Programmers by sfink
in thread Maxims for Programmers by perrin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.