Why we need to be more than just programmers

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 04:16:13 GMT

How do you handle new job request? It seams to me that people in a fast moving company tend to run with things before they truly understand what is really needed.

Example:
The director of creative services wanted to put some graphs and charts on a web site that is used to support our dealers. Later they would do the official project that would result in quality print material. So for 20 min, every one threw around ideas of how this should be done. All of which would require lots of reprogramming to an old application that we are trying to phase out.

So I decided to speak up. I asked what are we trying to do, who are we really trying to support, can it be public or private. Once every one decided to answer, it became clear that all we needed to do is take the art work and turn it into PDF's that we could place on our public web sites. Turns out this would provide for our dealers and their customers which is more than they originally planned for. This took about 5 min.

My question for you is do you try to strip every request down to its lowest common denominator or do you just run with what ever the client thinks they need?

We need to be more than just programmers. We need to be a counselor and mediator. We need to counsel our clients just like a therapist counsels a patient. You ask open ended question that help to gather the information your looking for. We also have to play mediator when there is some conflict amongst the clients. Most of the time it turns out to be a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge that causes the conflict.

I know there are the fortunate programmers out there that have project managers to do this sort of thing. Those programmers have their own issues to deal with. I'm not one of them. I have to play all the rolls and I think there are more like me than not.

I guess my point is if an average programmer develops these skills, even he will become successful.

--
Phil

Blogability

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 19:35:14 GMT

I was reading this entry on Sean Corfield's blog.
http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/Closures_updated
I got to it from fullasagoog.com and it sounded interesting. The problem was, I had no idea what he was talking about. I tried clicking the link "Closures for CFMX" but that just gave me a zip file. I looked around the site and didn't find an easy way of gathering info about Closures.

I've had this problem on a lot of peoples blog sites that are ColdFusion related. People use their blog to talk about their apps and thats cool. The problem I have is that there is not always a one click link on their blog that talks about the app in question.

This seams to be a usability issue. Minimal clicks to get the user to their destination. That's what I have always focused on. Maybe its just me but we should be trying to make gathering information about a simple tool like ColdFusion as simple as possible. The better we as developers market the tools we use, the easier it is for us to market our selves.

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Why we need to be more than just programmers

Blogability