John Hooley :

…how working within constraints can produce potent results…

True that! I don’t know that I could be trusted to cook up a good design based on several elements and colors needing to be interwoven together. Single color + motif is a much easier system to solve.

You make a great point about the definition of mastery. My operating definition in this essay is somewhere between competent proficiency and the level of the mystical, a la Jedi Master: that level at which one is able to flow through the work quickly & efficiently, make it appear effortless, and if there are any skills or deep knowledge one lacks, a savvy observer would be hard pressed to recognize as much.

Thanks for adding your thoughts–I dig your style and ethos!

Might I compliment you on your beautiful name?

I had a similar experience at a conference in October. An entrepreneur was giving a talk on building start-ups based on a specific web framework. He started to talk about hiring programmers and made the claim that, “back end developers only are good at back end and front end at front end, don’t ever hire someone who says they can do both.”

I thought, “that’s odd, I’m good at both.” Later on he happened to catch me working on something while listening to someone speak. He seemed amazed that I was building it while I listened. It was a front end interface, and while I’m no slouch on the front end, I am much stronger on the server side.

I do agree with you that it’s possible to find developers who are proficient across a spectrum of related technologies, as I believe myself to be (Yay LAMP!), but I think that it is highly improbable to find someone who can truly be considered a master of more than two disciplines, let alone three or more. Really, to master one is extremely difficult and to be applauded (I believe that mastery is far beyond being able to adeptly use a technology.)

When you begin to interweave indirectly related experience and knowledge that is critical to performance, like project management, software architecture, specific frameworks, specific web based apps, design patterns, build tools, unit testing tools, integration testing tools, IDEs, image manipulation software, mobile device constraints, common API architecture, and etc. “mastery” gets even trickier to attain.

To sum up: Padawans aplenty, Jedi Knights uncommon, Jedi Masters exceedingly rare. I agree however, that real Jedi Knights are strong enough to handle most multi-fauceted challenges. And we deserve every penny we get (though hopefully not at an hourly rate ;) )

1. There is definitely a threat for you. You cant ignore the fact that things in India are changing for the better.

2. There isn’t a way out of outsourcing. Outsourcing job to India basically means running your mill for 24 hours. While your expert US programmer sleeps, two Indians slog to send him an analysis of the bug, so he can wake up to have the logs, and all patches, that would have taken him hours to generate. He knows how to work his way out hereafter. So don’t say we did not help. I returned from office today at 1 am (IST) finishing up just that.

3. You want us to ştop growing. I work for a big multinational. It is one of the best companies to work for. I struggled for weeks before I got hardware specifications and all the relevant docs. I am among the few above average Indian programmers. Had I had these docs earlier I would’ve performed at better. You pay us peanuts and regard us as monkies. Why then expect programmers out of us.

4. Education in India is mediocre. having studied from a non-IIT, I know what my batchmates and a vast majority of Software Engineers in India are worth. Personally, when I start my company, I am not going to hire them. Its worth noting why would gthese people want to remain mediocre. Its because the 25 k rupees that you pay to a fresher in India is more than what his father earns after 25 years in his job. A contrarian note here, if you only paid less, this bachelor would have gone ahead for Masters and probably wouldn’t have remained mediocre. So you don’t feed us enough to be a lion, but for a Goat that we are, you do give us meat once a week.

5. A sentiment is changing in India. People are moving out of service based comapnies, and Indian product companies are coming up fast. We’ve learnt from you and we are still cheap, but we won’t sell.

Fast forward some fifteen years and we Indians are everywhere. We even have our own markets in your country. The fact of the matter is, we have sucked out enough from your country and not much is left. So it is time for us to move on…

See you in some other country. Who knows?! We just might be competing for the same projects.