ShowStoppers Inc. (3) : The dev

After getting an ringside view of the biggies of the IT industry, you must have lost all your hope and must be getting a feeling of disillusionment that people to whom you looked up to as brilliant are mere ordinary. Sadly, in most cases you are true except when the guy in question is a developer, aka dev. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the chefs of the IT kitchen. It is because of these guys that the term IT as a knowledge industry is not totally a misnomer. These are the guys who knows technology and does something with what he knows. But, a word of caution before you go hyper over the devs, they'r no rocket scientists either. You know the components to make a dish, you have a guess of how much of each ingradient will require, you have a general idea of how to cook it and there you go: you are chef. Which is to say, your great-great-grandmother would have made an equally good in developing a software as any of the developers today!

The analogy might sound awkward but you get my point. The dev has knowledge about his technology and he does things using that. But so does a chef, a mechanic or a mason. The only difference is that IT is new while other know-hows are a little older and consequently, there are alot less people who knows IT than the people who knows the other stuff. But work and amount of knowledge wise, it is all the same baby. Similar to a chef, it's only the developer who can tell you how some particular dish was cooked. If the same dish needs to be cooked in some other time, only the developer will be able to make similar or better dish. Thus the developer holds some knowledge which others doesn't know. Hence the 'knowledge industry'.

Hold on. Before you lebel the devs as the heros of IT, think again. Had devs been all such goody-goodies, your software would have worked smoothly, without the slightest hitch. Your computer would have never hanged, your webpage would have never returned that unexpected error. But they happen and that's because the developers are not upto the mark of developers. And not that the occurrance of the error is one in a million instance. Instead, it occurs so frequently that it takes an entire department to put the product back on track, i.e. the testers. Taking you further deep into the world of IT, there is an process where developer develops the product and the tester tests the product at the same time. Imagine preparing a dish and putting some salt when you find it less salty and putting some water when you find it more spicy, ad infinitum. That's IT for you.

They are the bunch that make most number of mistakes. And that's because they do the most amount of actual work.Despite a big number of mistakes he is never shy of repeating them again. With a technologically impaired manager and equally handicapped lead, only he can understand what the mistake is and what caused the mistake. So mistake or not, he is the one with his head held high.