Developer Mentality

Joe has been a New York City cab driver for 15 years. On Monday his boss will tell him that they have an important client and he must drive a limousine instead of his usual cab. On Tuesday his boss will ask him to drive an 18-wheeler. On Wednesday, the Goodyear blimp.

It’s hard to imagine a story like this being true but in the world of web development it happens all of the time. ASP, PHP, XML, Flash, etc. This list of technologies available to do the job is long and daunting. What’s worse is that most clients don’t know about, understand, or even care about this list. They have a problem and it’s our job to provide the solution. When the client wants a project in Flash I don’t have the luxury of saying “Sorry, I’m a .NET guy”. Instead, it’s a trip to the bookstore to pick up an Actionscript book, unhealthy amounts of coffee, and 3 days without sleep to string together a project in a language I’d never used before.

The difference between a good developer and a bad one is precisely this ability to think on one’s feet and adapt to any situation. One of the questions I always ask whenever I interview potential new hires is “How do you keep up with changes in the field?” More often than not the candidates don’t have an answer to this question and for me that throws up a big red flag. This industry changes almost daily and the proverbial list I mentioned earlier grows longer and longer. The people who actively seek out new information and thrive on learning new things are the ones who’ll be successful in this business.

I’m headed home for the holidays tomorrow armed with a book on SQL Server optimization and a set of video tutorials on the new Visual Studio so I should have some good stuff coming soon. Until then, here’s to hoping that next time I ask my interview question, the answer is “I read Code Scene”.

Happy Holidays.