A developer may think that his favorite solution worked for 3, 5 or 12 clients in a row and therefore is the universal best solution to any problem. Such developers fail to see that these similarities probably resulted from the fact that he is hired as a specialist by the exact companies requiring his specific knowledge. It is very well possible that 98% of the other companies in the world have different requirements, but the specialist never learns about them, because these companies hire other specialists with different experience. And quite likely, these other specialists may also be under the illusion that their solution is the silver bullet to every problem.
For example: There are many discussions about the question whether RESTful web services are better than SOAP based services or the other way around. And in most cases, the answer to this question depends on the problem domain.
My idea is that both opinions can be explained by the different preferences of two kinds of developers: One of them likes to present large amounts of information from several data repositories and integrate them into an accessible web site. These people tend to work on projects creating public internet sites, requiring high quality templates and appropriate data formats storing and exchanging data.
His counterpart has spent most of his life creating rich web applications running on the local intranet within the walls of a single company. Typically such developer is much less interested in data formats because of the limited reach of the application. Far more important for him, is business process modeling, case management, workflow, security and data integrity.
The information specialist and the process expert may clash with each other for several reasons:
The information specialist spends a lot of time on details to get semantics, maintainability and formatting right. The process specialist may consider that a waste of time, because such things can be generated using his tools. The other way around, the information specialist considers generated code as poor quality. Quite likely, the process specialist is more interested in business modeling than information modeling, cares less about code quality and is better capable of meeting business requirements in a short period of time.
There are roughly two things you can do with these two developer types:
- Separate them and let them work on the assignments they are good at (or prefer)...
Or more interesting:
- Separate them and assign them to each other's work in order to learn to see a bigger picture than they are used to!
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