{"id":399,"date":"2017-07-27T11:28:48","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T15:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/?p=399"},"modified":"2017-07-27T11:28:48","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T15:28:48","slug":"a-developers-impact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/a-developers-impact\/","title":{"rendered":"A Developer’s Impact"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There are a few metrics in common use for gauging a developer\u2019s ability:<\/p>\n

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  • Proportion of success<\/li>\n
  • Years of experience<\/li>\n
  • Speed \/ efficiency<\/li>\n
  • Quality of code<\/li>\n
  • Fame or reputation<\/li>\n
  • Amount of code written<\/li>\n
  • Ability to think abstractly<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

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    Different people and organizations give varying weights to these indicators when evaluating a developer for one reason or another, whether for potential employment, as part of a competition, or simply out of personal interest.<\/p>\n

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    But can a developer\u2019s skill be described by some formula composed of such figures? Is any one weighting system likely to be more accurate?<\/p>\n

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    Yes <\/em>to the latter; very much no <\/em>to the former.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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    Can we feel assured that some systems of evaluation are more dead-on than others? Absolutely\u200a\u2014\u200athere are some ways of examining a developer\u2019s ability that strike way off. Taking \u201clines of code written in career\u201d as a major metric is bound to lead to failure\u200a\u2014\u200aany developer worth his or her salt knows that lines of code are virtually independent of quality. In contrast, a careful comparison of a developer\u2019s career and success of his projects might provide a more accurate version of their abilities, in light of what they have accomplished.<\/p>\n

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    But what are we trying to achieve when we rank this way? We\u2019re only trying to figure out where we place a person in comparison to others. It\u2019s at best an approximation. It doesn\u2019t nearly<\/em> explain who they are <\/strong>as a developer, nor what they have accomplished <\/strong>in the broader sense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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    A young schoolteacher educating fifteen children in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Montana one hundred years ago is a good representative of the class of people we might call \u201cnot highly accomplished.\u201d Such an individual lived in a small community, interacted with few people, had a very small legacy that lasted not very long after death, presumably. If you were to \u201cgauge\u201d such a person\u2019s effect on the world in some kind of ranking of teachers worldwide, you wouldn\u2019t place him or her very high.<\/p>\n

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    And you might be right. Or you might be very wrong.<\/strong> The point is that from an external standpoint, you have no way of knowing the true quality and impact of this teacher.<\/p>\n

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    Would you know if her students were bored and uninspired by her teaching, or if she taught with an infectious love that gave them a thrill of learning for the rest of their lives?<\/p>\n

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    Can we determine if half of those students never worked a solid job in their lives, or if they raised children with such dedication to success that they went on to become movers and shakers?<\/p>\n

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    And is there any practical way to say if the words of wisdom that teacher imparted fell on deaf ears, or if they were received willingly by eager students, used to guide their actions through the course of their lives, improving their choices, their own lives, and the lives of those around them?<\/p>\n

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    These are imponderables, mostly\u200a<\/strong>\u2014\u200awe won\u2019t ever know, we can\u2019t know, and that\u2019s alright. Some of the best legacies are an undercurrent; unknown and largely unfelt, but raising the quality of our lives and our world in humble but significant ways.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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    Rating a developer is much like rating this teacher.<\/strong> In fact, rating any individual\u2019s accomplishments follows a similar vein, but as practical creators in a decidedly hard (as in not soft) discipline, developers have their abilities and accomplishments rated, ranked, and considered much more often and more stringently than many other fields.<\/p>\n

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    This discrepancy elucidates why it\u2019s so important not to let our systems of evaluation for a developer\u2019s effective quality <\/em>influence how we evaluate their actual accomplishments<\/em>. A good developer\u2019s impact on the world goes far beyond the number of projects they\u2019ve created, or the number of users they\u2019ve gained for a company, or the amount of money they\u2019ve earned\u200a\u2014\u200aor indeed any such metric or combination of metrics. A developer\u2019s impact is the lives they\u2019ve affected in a thousand subtle, unknown and probably unknowable ways.<\/p>\n

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    People in the software industry often say \u201cour software changes lives\u201d<\/strong> or a similar variant. It\u2019s meant to inspire confidence in the product they maintain\u200a\u2014\u200atotally understandable. But the ways in which software really<\/em> changes lives are the ones mostly unseen.<\/p>\n

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    Software changes lives when two people who might never have met use a small-market app to get together and collaborate on a project that one day balloons into something significant.<\/p>\n

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    Software changes lives when a doctor makes a better diagnosis because the diagnostic software they use incorporated a library that simplified the primary developer\u2019s task, enabling them to focus on the big picture and make a more accurate algorithm.<\/p>\n

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    Software changes lives when a destructive virus is blocked by free antivirus software using a definition that was submitted by an anonymous user who discovered the existence of this new virus using white hat hacking techniques he plays around with in his free time.<\/p>\n

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    And software changes lives when an educator is able to use an interactive 3D model to represent a molecular structure to a struggling student, or when an lonely child connects to the world through an online game, or when your car doesn\u2019t crash and kill a pregnant mother because it has well-written collision detection, and in a hundred thousand other ways which go undocumented and uncompensated and likely always will.<\/p>\n

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    And all these ways that software changes the world mean a developer changes the world whether anyone knows it or not, and whether the developer even knows it or not\u200a\u2014\u200abut it lives on as an invisible legacy of that developer making people\u2019s lives better<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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    That is a developer\u2019s ability<\/strong>. That is what makes an accomplished developer, though we may never know it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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    Practical rankings and ratings are understandable and necessary. We live in a practical world. If you need to develop software in a timeframe and scope and with a limited number of resources, you need to confirm as accurately as possible who will best meet those criteria. You can\u2019t possibly, and shouldn\u2019t, probably, take the time and effort to figure out just who this developer really is<\/em>, and what we can expect from their lives, and all the tangential paths through which they impact the world. That\u2019s all very nice, but has no bearing on the practicals of here and now.<\/p>\n

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    So go on with your rankings; try to be fair, but be realistic<\/strong>. There\u2019s no cruelty inherent in making decisions with cold, hard, verifiable facts. Good decisions breed success, and success, when achieved properly, leads to a better world in its own way.<\/p>\n

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    But take some time to think about the million ways that a million developers you have never heard of and never will are improving the world every day without even knowing it, and be glad.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    (Cross-posted at https:\/\/medium.com\/@MartinBerlove\/a-developers-impact-f2f76385c811)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    There are a few metrics in common use for gauging a developer\u2019s ability: Proportion of success Years of experience Speed \/ efficiency Quality of code Fame or reputation Amount of code written Ability to think abstractly   Different people and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[191,125,147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-lessons","category-programming","category-software-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mberlove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}