At a time when a developer can be called a “senior architect” with only 5 years experience, what do you call someone with 25 or 35 years experience?
Unfortunately, for the most part we can no longer call them developers, because there are few developers with 25+ years experience. Most have either drifted into other fields, been moved into management or are now independent consultants. It is rare for a developer to be able to keep improving their craft skills for 25 years because they get sidetracked into other things.
Other fields of endevour do not have this problem, so I suspect that the economic incentives in software development are skewed such that it makes little sense to get really good at being a developer.
Some thoughts on finding good developers to work on your projects.
To attract good developers you have to let them know what kind of application you are building, because there are two important questions that developers need to be answered about any development job - will this build my skills and reputation, and is this the kind of application I enjoy creating.
If you just list the technology in the project listing it is a negative because it implies you just want a coder to follow directions, so immediately you go to the bottom of the list of possible clients.
So to attract good developers, sell them on your idea of what you want to build. Specify the technology if you must, but that will cut down the number of people who will be interested in doing the work. You will also have to find some way of signaling that you have the budget to afford the type of people you want. It would also help if you could let people know the timeline and commitment involved - is it a small part-time task or full time total involvement year long task.
It seems that once again some people are pushing to create a certification program for software developers.
This time they are promoting the idea that prefessionalism requires a certifying body with recognized certifications just like accountants etc. Luckily the author of the article is alert ot the problems of credentialism, so maybe the movement will be stillborn, but we need to stay vigilant to ensure that our craft does not get stuck in teh stone age due to some corporate welfare scam of IT credentials mandating that everyone who wants to work in It needs to know about mainframe JCL.
I never cease to be amazed by project managers who give lip service to the idea that there are some unknowns in their project plan and then give precise estimates for their schedule.
It seems as if intellectually we can see that there are unknowns, but when it comes to our projects we think we are special and we can precisely predict how long our project will take.
