Richard Rabins at Tech News World recently published an interesting op-ed piece regarding developer burning.
Specifically, he brings up the case that we – now more than ever – have more operating systems, platforms, and applications from which to choose and, as such, are placing demands on developers as never before.
Yet the demands on them continue to grow, because every company wants an iPad or an Android app. Plus, they’re looking hard at private and public clouds, SaaS solutions, and so on. And most important, they’re looking at ways to tie all these systems together into common back-end infrastructures.
You can read the article in its entirety here, but I’m not sure I totally agree.
A number of other fields – anything from auto mechanics to medicine – feature a variety of things with which the service providers are tasked with knowing. On top of that, it’s a moving target so there’s a level of education that must be constant.
although it’s fine learn an array of languages and platforms, this is why I argue that developers should go deep rather than wide. Specialize and focus on a particular niche of the field and add the most value possible where possible.
There’s no reason anyone should be tasked with writing an application for Windows, OSX, webOS, and iOS.
Speak your mind...