Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmer) gives a talk called “Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep”. I had the pleasure of listening to his talk at the recent No Fluff.
If you haven’t seen Dave talk, you have to at some time. I mentioned that I liked Stu’s style, as he has ~5 slides, and just opens up his IDE and starts coding.
Dave has a different style. His talks are higher level (no code) and he just gets into a flow on the topic. The slides are just kinda there in the background.
If you have seen The Daily Show (and why aren’t you if you haven’t!)…. you know when a funny blurb is shown in the top left corner while Jon Stewart gives the news? It just makes you laugh… and is a side piece compared to Jon’s words. Dave often has slides which have the same affect. It is highly entertaining, and the topics are important to ANY type of programmer.
Dave has written up some key points from his talk, which focuses on different roles that we are in as developers on a particular topic (Novice -> Expert). If you are worried about outsourcing, you will want to make sure that you are skilled in a way that you are high up on the scale. This scale is the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, and was used in the nursing profession first.
Software development needs to shape up as a profession. Read End of the Knowledge Worker? to learn why.
