"Tal, Shachar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I have no idea what you're talking about.
More is the pity. Let me try to explain myself in a couple of simple sentences. To be a good software engineer, you need to read other people's code. To develop programs efficiently, you need to show your code to other people. A company that does not encourage these two activities whenever possible does not utilize the full potential of its developers (and I am being generous). IMHO, you need a very good reason *not* to do it. > Being an IBM employee, I'm sure you are aware of software systems > that are larger than any single person's perceptional abilities. > Working on a multi-hundred man-years software, I seldom need to > access code for subsystems I don't develop or maintain, and even > more seldom need to understand its inner workings. Design documents > are usually satisfactory. I never said you must read and learn *all* the code developed at your company. I only said that unless there are compelling reasons preventing this you should be able to access as much code as possible. What I said was generic, not IBM-specific. > As for internal consumption vs. customer consumption - perhaps IBM > can afford writing a lot of software for internal consumption. Most > companies first write customer software then internal software. These companies must be living in a dream world where everything they need for development actually exists before they start. I have worked for tiny struggling startups and for multibillion dollar multinationals - it's not a matter of money. This was not the case in any of them, and I have never heard of any case like that. You first create the scaffolding, then you build. You create more scaffolding as you build. > Granted, software is written internally everywhere (test suites, > load suites, code generators, various automation efforts, even the > sales people need Excel macros to compute what to charge a > customer). But not as much as written for customer consumption. If you know how to reach a ratio of internal to customer code of more than 10:1 (apart from Excel macros), and produce decent customer code, would you consider sharing the insights? -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
