Re: [tlug] [OT] Good IT Resume

[Karen Pauley <karen-linux@example.com>]

On Wed Jul 25 14:43:05 2007, Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, Josh Glover wrote:

> >or b) programmers who are not in the top %1.
> 
> That I'm also going to disagree with. I've worked with a lot of junior
> developers, and in my experience, they excel when you bring them "in to
> the fold," as it were, rather than relegate them to "program to this
> specification."

I agree. I have used a variety of agile methodologies with programming
teams and I actually think they are more suited to normal programmers
than the top 1%. 

At one point I managed a team of 18 programmers, we had a mixture of
juniors and seniors and two programmers who would have been considered
exceptional.  One of the exceptional programmers was an expert in his
field that was recruited specially to put in a testing framework. 

Although the exceptional programmers could easily work productively
without detailed specifications in general they didn't interact well
with the rest of the team.  They found it really hard not to just
completely take over when pair programming and they didn't actually like
that lots of the agile methodologies have rules that you are supposed to
follow.

The expert in testing was very happy to put in a framework that allowed
others to carry out test first programming but it really wasn't that
easy to get him to agree to do that with his own code.

XP seems to require a lot of team work and working together towards a
shared common goal.  It also requires a belief that the methodology is
going to work.  Some very talented programmers much prefer to work on
their own and they don't believe in any particular methodology as they
have their own way of working that works for them.  And because they are
so good they get away with breaking lots of the rules.

-- 
Karen