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New Jobs, New Gods

October 19, 2009

Career leaderboards are misleading, indulgent, and hopelessly alluring. But if the details of individual professions are normalized away, strong trends become clearer, as in CNN’s Money Magazine survey of the Best Jobs in America 2009 where Software Developer holds the #12 position and numerous related careers cluster nearby.

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9 Ways Developers Fail to Accommodate Business

September 15, 2009

We continually hear from developers how they’re crippled or oppressed by clueless business interests, but there are a lot of ways developers contribute to this environment, or impose their own prejudices onto a team. I’m taking a moment of self-reflection to list our profession’s inconspicuous shortcomings.

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Tripling Programmer Estimates

August 9, 2009

Conventional wisdom has it that when asked for an estimate, a programmer will recede into fitful contemplation, perhaps aided by private notes scribbled in parallel, only to produce a number that should dutifully be multiplied by three for the sake of reality. Nobody can say where this constant came from, or why it so often hits the mark. Excluding some kind of the anthropic principle, I can imagine an answer.