Creative Destruction in Software Development
As design becomes more critical to software, programmers must find new challenges to realize user value
I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between front-end design and programming in software development, and this article hit me at just the right time (thanks for tweeting it, Wren!). Basically, Allen argues that as programmers become more productive, more resources get spent in the indeterminate and creative tasks of design than in the increasingly well-understood and less error-prone tasks of programming. I'm generally inclined towards his idea of a designer-driven industry, because I'd love nothing more than to spend my time exercising my artistic side. However, I think he gets a few things mistaken, because the state of our industry is not as cut and dry as he makes it out to be.
It would be impossible to positively address Allen's larger point without pointing out the elephants in the room. Yes, I laughed out loud at the mention of cookies as a data store. But the biggest pachyderm has to be the paltry sample size for such a sweeping conclusion. One project does not an industry trend make. This guy works with Microsoft frameworks; surely he's seen bigger, more involved projects than the one he describes as spending more time in design than in development. The more complex the functional requirements, the more time spent implementing that functionality. That takes time, and productivity can only shave so many man hours off an enterprise project.
Any well understood problem and solution will be faster to implement than one that takes a lot of planning. In the web world, we developers spend a lot of time developing the same basic applications over and over. While they don't all have the same function to the user, the relationships between the data entities on the backend are often pretty damn similar. How many of us build apps with account models? How many have entities that aggregate other entities? The reason ActiveRecord can model these joins and finds so well is because there aren't too many permutations of the data relationships in the database-backed web app industry.
