Comment by Confusion
17 years ago
Everyone can come up with parables that make some point of view look good. However, two diametrically opposite extremes are presented, instead of a more realistic situation, making the value of the parable zero and none.
For instance, were the 'enterprise' team to be headed by a capable technical lead that forces his team to produce reasonably readable, reasonably documented, reasonably maintainable and futureproof code, then the situation would already be very different. If we add to that that the inexperienced hacker prodigy would produce working code much faster, but his code would turn out to be brittle when someone else has to take care of it, because he does not yet have experience in interacting with lesser gods via his code, then the match would be even more equal. We may still prefer the hacker, but we would be forced to think about the trade offs involved.
I think that enterprise teams typically follow strict syntactic coding standards and then check off the "maintainable" and "readable" requirement from that alone. Additionally, they generate mountains of bloated Word and PowerPoint documents and then consider that responsibility fulfilled. They end up with an incredibly expensive, over-engineered mega-application that exacerbates rather than solves the intended problem. Don't think that this doesn't happen.
There are only so many things that you can force upon a team of programmers, and overall quality and cohesiveness aren't among them.
It's fairly easy to degenerate "enterprise developers" when you're defining what "enterprise" means.
My definition of "enterprise developer" comes directly from working in a gigantic financial company as well as an even more gigantic government defense contractor. Would you like some more anecdotes?
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