Kunan said:
Offensive was harsh, I'm in a bitchy mood today
My apologies for starting conversation in such a blatantly bad manner.
No problem I took it as a joke (that I didn't get, but I understand jokes </homer>)
Kunan said:
The point was you completely undervalue each individual's contribution to a project. Managers may manage people but the programmers and their ilk actually create said project. Not only this, this is done by constant language between the manager and said programmers; the managers and designers are hardly the only ones making decisions about how said project should move forward. I am biased as someone who has worked multiple programming positions (and a few artistic ones), but that is how it went. The manager will sit there with their programmers and bounce ideas back and forth on how things could work. Pushing the envelope requires a lot of out of the box thinking and a good sense of design (architecture-wise, not gradient vs solid color), both skills being not easy to find.
Well ideally, the devs would be indeed the ones providing the solutions.
A good programmer is really valuable, a good manager is also very valuable.
Still a bad programmer impact can be mitigated if the other progs take the slack or if the one managing is that good (be it project leader or what have you). If the manager suck balls, in my experience, everything becomes way harder than it should be.
Heck I'd prefer bad programmers to a bad manager any day.
Then again I guess nobody would like to chose
.
Still generally speaking the one managing the team should help buffer the pressure on the team so they could actually get the job done in time.
And a project is usually not even sure to have a 'good ending' (last I checked 50% of IT projects ended in failures, most of the time the reason given was lack of confidence from the hierarchie).
My point is that I'm kind optmistic and believe that there's plenty of talented people out there wanting to do the job given the chance, the solution they'd provide to problems would certainly be interesting even if not optimal.
Now good managers on the other hand, they're harder to find I guess.
Kunan said:
There are a LOT of programmers out there, I will give you that. But just slotting in any old programmer does not make work get done. Finding programmers, or code monkeys as you elegantly put it, that are capable of carrying a lot of work due to a small team size and pushing the envelope in efficiency, graphics and carrying out your design ideas (such as Mario Galaxy's planetoid worlds) to bring your game forward is not a simple thing anyone can do. There are a lot of programmers, but a lot of them do not have what it takes (nearly completely devoid of knowledge of standards, not a team player, unable to think outside of the box). You don't just sit there and say "make my game run faster" and the programmer pushes the make game run faster button. Any programmer could find some ways to do that, but to find someone who can truly push the envelope requires someone who can visualize and think outside the box. This isn't even to mention the fact that you are hardly guaranteed that the person you replace someone with could even understand what you have done so far.
To be fair I took the worst possible case ever, untrained people doing coding all day.
Now a good programmer is hard to replace but it still can be done (like everything there's a cost).
Let's not even go as far as talk about video games, they're fiendishly hard to finish and the ROI is way too low for the amount of work I'd say.
Still if you can train the guy you hire to take the position of the one who left, you can mitigate the loss more easily than if you lose the guy that was leading the project from the start it's usually not a good sign for where the project is heading.
Kunan said:
/nonsensical rant, apologies
I don't see a reason for apology
EDIT: I'm not saying I undervalue managers either. A strong-minded, creative manager can very easily be the difference between a AAA team and a D+. I'm just saying that programmers unfairly get a bad rap (a lot being done by programmers themselves who just sit around and are less useful than the coffee machines on floor 2) and it makes me sad.
Well unless we're speaking of something else, I don't believe programmers are getting a bad rap either.
I mean they're not exactly known as lazy coffee machines emptier.
At least not in my mind.
Like for everything there's bad apples, I doubt that they're even a significant number at all (then again graduating from a tech school is not mission impossible either I guess :lol).
