I’ve been feeling the work I do as an application/web developer/programmer is not nearly as interesting or rewarding as it once was. As I was mowing the lawn a couple weeks ago (we haven’t had much rain so the grass is growling slowly!), I really got to thinking about the reason for this and I think it comes down to the fact that this type of work is just considered to be “run-of-the-mill“, now. Instead of being one of a small team of smart people who have developed these specialized skills, now I am one person in a large pool of individuals who have the same and often, even more skills than I do.

Additionally, when you work in these technical jobs today, for the most part, you are treated as a commodity – just a resource from which the company can extract work. Of course, this has always been the case but now it’s become very clear as most developers are moved around from one project to another and only work on code for the impacted applications long enough to implement a new feature and finish the project. This would be fine if we were just making a widget on an assembly line or a hamburger from McDonalds but we are usually building or working on applications or tools that are solving a business problem and will be in use and supported for long periods of time (I’ve been supporting an application that I first created in 2002!). When something has a history like this, it tends to grow and change organically over the years as features and functionality are added and removed and, because time is always in short supply, old code is rarely cleaned up. And surprise, surprise, new code is often undocumented or commented.

Over these long periods, code accrues an unwritten history that is passed down like ancient mythologies from developer to developer. But when you have someone who has been working on that code (or somehow intimately involved in that app’s development) since the beginning, they understand that history and the reasons things are the way they are. So, when this developer gets transferred off the project and the support for that application is moved to a team of people who don’t share that history, we lose that institutionalized knowledge and the ability to quickly home in on problems.

So, being treated like a commodity and a lack of respect for one’s accumulated knowledge leads to some dissatisfaction. I’ve seen this in many of my colleagues, especially in the last year or so. Some people who have serious skills have moved on to other employers and some have left the technology field altogether leaving companies to do the best they can with cheap off-shore support and little documentation.