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Comment by liotier | Hacker News Reader

Development requires analysis and programming. Some people are both analysts and programmers - they are the elite, not the norm.

I can manage large business requirements, I write functional specifications and negotiate them with users, I plan technical architecture... And then I'm happy enough with programmers who need hand-holding at every step - anyway my telco employer has long stopped having budget enough to pay contractors who understand our business.

Pure programmers may be short sighted but they provide the value some of the market needs, for people such as me who are decent analysts and exceptionally bad programmers - learning the latest Javascript framework is a dirty job but somebody's got to do it !

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Though it is quite common, I think this is a very bad way to organise a business. It's as if programming were bricklaying, a simple operation to be performed under instructions from an architect.

That's just not true, the main reason being that if you're not programming any more, how can you define a modern technical architecture? If you don't know the precise technical limitations, how can you negotiate functional specifications?

Engineering is Engineering, whether it's IT systems or bridges

> if you're not programming any more, how can you define a modern technical architecture ?

Knowing one's limitations is key - I certainly won't get in the way of implementers. But functional requirements do drive some architectural decisions and spotting them upstream helps, for example once the conceptual data model and typical query usage are defined, one can decide whether the contractor one sends a purchase order for needs to grok graph databases or relational ones.

Even without the burden of understanding business requirements, it still takes programmers a fair amount of analysis to program without making a mess that will kill their ability to make progress; learning the latest JavaScript framework does not help at all in that regard. I'm glad to hear you manage, but your employer may want to consider hiring fewer programmers and paying them higher wages - I know a lot of companies would benefit from that.

> your employer may want to consider hiring fewer programmers and paying them higher wages

I do advocate a high-low mix with fewer people and a higher proportion of the higher tier, but the purchasing department loves low unit prices and has decision over them. Well, at least we have the developers co-located with us in the same office and no longer work with offshore Indians through two layers of intermediaries... Progress !

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