It makes me think that we're training the wrong people in college by making CS a very difficult, math heavy field which often causes the more human skilled people to drop out. Programming doesn't have to be anymore math heavy than building a house yet we force undergrads to implement algorithms on paper? The amount of wasted potential talent due to college is staggering.

I always say the customer/client does not have requirements, they have problems. You will not discover all the requirements until you start solving some of the problems and providing solutions. Only then will they say "oh but...." and drop more requirements on you that they didn't think of up front.

Back to that quote. It's not that software development is exploratory in itself. It's that the development is intertwined with an exploration of the problem being solved.

We started with a simple problem that plagues HR departments in every conceivable industry with unions, finding substitute personnel and erroneously assumed that it was a simple fix. Over the past year and a half we have accumulated a great deal of knowledge after interacting with as many people as possible and have finally released a version that meets our original criteria (and much more). It was obviously not a simple fix.

If I have one thing to tell anyone who is looking for business ideas to try out their new programming skills on, I strongly suggest taking the time to learn as much as possible about the people to whom you want to provide a solution, then recruiting one of them to help you build it, lest you become another project that solves a non-issue beautifully.

In the consulting world, we call this job "enterprise architecture". It does, in fact, pay very well: it requires someone with both a sharp business mind and comprehensive technical skills, and those are very difficult to find in one person. I personally am more of a "jack of all trades" type; but you can be a successful architect by focusing on specific technologies as well.

I honestly find that it's easier to take someone who's a hacker type, and teach them the business. You look at the business itself as a large, complex system and model your application development around that. But you also have to be a good enough technologist yourself so that you can tell your dev team when their designs don't match up to the business problem (this is a common problem when requirements are not clearly communicated).

A good architect is the person who understands both the business context and the technology implementation. You don't have to be in-the-weeds building the product, but often you do have to build quick POCs to prove out an approach before handing off the designs to development - so being able to code is a necessity IMO.

Put like this, it's hard to agree with the above statement.

Following the spirit of the article, I assume the author means that the problem domain is pretty stable. But I've been in this for more than 20 years, and I know that requirements always change. Not only our understanding, but also the customer/user's understanding of their needs and priorities change.

(Edit: typo)

- intuitiveness i.e how easy is it to communicate with this person (language fluency, etc...)

- quality i.e. how well do this person understand not only the requirements but also the actual goals

- 'latency' i.e. how convenient and how fast can you communicate with this person (time zone, can you both see facial expressions, hear changes in voice, etc...)

Also the experience may vary. In my admittedly not so long career(less than a decade) I have seen teams where business rules are the major source of complexity while there are other teams which have less business rules (example the databases/data warehouse/build systems team). Admittedly there are less teams of second type in the world so the general perception is that the hardest part is communication and understanding of business context.

Coming to domain knowledge, even the Mainframe and COBOL chaps make a lot of money while smart open-source contributors freelancing don't. Money is not the only way to judge the hardest problem about software development.

Solving well defined algorithm puzzles has zero bearing on the skills described by the author.

That, ironically, is part of the authors' point: software engineering hasn't changed that much. They were saying that in the late 70s, looking back on the past two decades (all the way back to the late 50s, when software was typically written in assembler or machine language and had to be rewritten if you bought a new computer!), but it hasn't become much less true. The technology changes, sure, but the failure of software development projects has never been mostly the result of technology. It's always been on the human side -- failure to understand the requirements, failure to meet them, failure to estimate the effort appropriately, failure to work with the customer, failure of the customer to understand what they were paying for, etc. There's a long list of things that go wrong, and I suspect anyone who has been in software for a while has seen many of them.

It was eye-opening for me, the first time I read it, to realize that people had been dealing with the same issues I was dealing with, for longer than I'd been alive. (And a bit depressing, too, that we seemingly haven't gotten much better.) Languages and project-management methodologies come and go, and the tech skills and understanding are certainly necessary, but they are not sufficient. The business knowledge and human factors seem to be the difference, or at least the largest controllable variable that leads to a difference, in a successful or failed outcome.

Ha! We need a "tribal leadership" discussion forking off this point.

- Here's a pool of knowledge about software development: hardware, operating systems, memory, disks, file formats, databases, networks, protocols, languages, debuggers, design patterns, security, accessibility, UI/UX, distributed systems, paradigms, typical algorithms & data structures, and CS problems

- There's a pool of knowledge about whatever industry you get into as a developer: user demands, existing workflows, existing infrastructure, previous decisions, legal regulation & compliance, physical laws, profitability, and practical limits.

Your software development skills should reach a point where you don't write "Bad Code" -- anything that's wrong like loading a entire database table that eats memory when you can read individual rows, storing passwords in cleartext, or not doing anything for accessibility (this is not design pattern, space/tab debates). These have been done hundreds of times by new and 'experienced' people.

It takes time to get to this point. More time than anyone likes to admit because the pool of knowledge grows and shrinks daily, but has undoubtedly had a net expansion since computers were a thing.

It takes time to get deep knowledge about whatever industry you get into. This is different for every industry. There's a practical minimum that you need to work on solutions or do maintenance on software within this industry. This is to avoid "Bad Code" which will hurt you, other people, or your business.

You can gain industry knowledge by just being given problems and being shown. This is probably how most of us know our industries from the get-go. A minority of us came from those industries and transitioned to programming later, so we already had a base level of knowledge of our problems.

If I've got the definition of Deep Context right from this article, it means to get to that point, you have to spend a good amount of time within the industry. It's not something you can gain completely by reading out of a book.

If you're to gain deep context within an industry, you have to devote some time away from software. You can't do both at the same instant (but certainly within a day). When you study an industry, there's an opportunity cost to not learning something new about software and vice versa.

When you add more requirements to a single job, it increases the time we have to spend before we're employable. Not every industry changes as fast as software does, but some certainly do, possibly catalyzed by software.

If you increase the time requirements, it's going to reduce the available pool of engineers as long as all of the engineers are honest and don't apply for jobs or remote contracts until they're ready.

If you don't want the time requirements to increase, you have pay the opportunity costs from one of your pools of knowledge.

So really, we need a much better "good enough" for employing developers and career development, including teaching software and industry knowledge. Because eventually the time requirements are going to become steeper and steeper. It can't go up forever.

> multiple if-elses encoding the business rules

A good architect would add a linter with a cyclomatic complexity check that fails the build. There's always a way to avoid these hideous nested else ifs. Code review is helpful here to train people who don't understand some of the various abstractions to avoid this such as polymorphism. This is also the code that has high value for unit tests.

How about instead of becoming the expert at whichever business domain the software is for, we become experts at helping business domain experts find and express the business rules that need to be implemented?

You can fit a decent amount of that skill and the technical knowledge you mentioned in one skull, and it still lets you be quite effective in more than one domain.

That's what I'm going for anyway. Wish me luck.

What most firms are interested in are software engineers. The dearth of software engineers has led them to hire computer scientists (and, in fact, a rather large percentage of computer scientists that I know are quite happy for this).

But if you proceed down that road, I am not sure that what's left over, in terms of value-add, for the pure-play "computer scientist" who doesn't want to deal with requirements or schedule or that other messy stuff, really is. Once you have the problem suitably defined and the requirements nailed down... you can offshore the hell out of that job, or farm it out to some bidding-war site, and let people chisel each other out of a living wage while you laugh all the way to the bank.

I wouldn't want to hang my career on that. If you're willing to deal with the messy human-factors stuff, and sit in on the requirements-gathering meetings and deal with the client and work on setting the schedule and doing the estimation with the BD guys and all of that other shit ... you're never going to have to worry about some dude in India taking your job. That's not to say you don't need the technical skill. But if you're gunning for a job and it's between two people and one is a little better on the technical side but the other person can get involved in the process that much earlier, maybe iterate on the problem as part of requirements development (as many modern methodologies basically require)... I think they're going to do a lot better.

If you're a "throw it over the wall" coder, well, good luck with that. There are certainly jobs around for pure coders, but I tend to be suspicious of exactly how many (particularly if you want to make a top-end First World salary), and I suspect strongly that supply is going to outstrip demand for a generation or two.

FWIW, some of the most highly-compensated people I know are the ones who have some combination of really impressive technical skills but also have the business understanding and can participate in the process from kickoff, or close to it. It's also easier for them to negotiate since they have the option of going out on their own at pretty much any point, vs. a pure-play coder essentially depends on having someone around to feed them requirements and technical problems to solve.

The good thing is that I think a lot of people who think of themselves as pure coders probably have more business understanding (in some area) than they give themselves credit for, it's just a matter of developing that understanding, which can be hard in an organization that intentionally tries to keep its developers away from "the business".