Software Development Guilds
This past weekend I came across a very interesting blog post at the Object Mentor Blog entitled Master Craftsman Teams. The meat of the post concerns organizing software development teams around a Master-Journeyman-Apprentice hierarchy where masters are seasoned veterans in the industry with more than a decade of experience, journeyman are experienced professionals, and apprentices are young and inexperienced. A software team would include a single master, N journeyman, and 1 to 3 apprentices per journeyman depending on skill and experience. In such a team the master and journeyman write similar amounts of production code while apprentices write and re-write smaller sections of code as they learn the art of software development.
Three things came to mind when reading the article.
First, the author comes at the problem from an economic standpoint discussing the cost of a college education and the cost breakdown of the idea team mentioned above with apprentices earning basically minimum wage (they are young, after all!), journeyman making decent money, and masters doing very well. The example team above with one master, three journeyman, and nine apprentices would cost roughly $600k per year to employ in salary alone based on the example pay scale. If you subsitite nine college graduates making at least $50k per year that annual cost to employ such a team would be much higher. Add to that the cost of 4 to 6 years of college tuition and it’s higher still, though the $200k sited in the article applies only to the elite private universities. As a comparison, my undergraduate alma mater, James Madison University, would cost less than $60k today for in-state students who lived on campus all four years.
What I find interesting about the economic view of teams constructed in this manner is that the cost savings to companies and individuals would be significant, especially so in the current economic conditions.
The second thing that struck me when reading the post is that this is in fact how most teams that I’ve been on are structured. Generally those teams have had someone filling the role of “Development Lead” that has a lot of experience and generally directs the large, architectural design decisions for the project. Below the development lead are a group of mid level developers; people who have been in the industry for 3-7 years or so and who have a solid grasp of how to design and effectively execute a software project. Finally there is a set of junior developers who are usually very wet behind the ears, but who have the potential to be good software engineers.
The biggest difference between the teams outlined in the post and the ones that I’ve been a part of is that the wet behind the ears junior people have tended to be given a great deal of responsibility for their level of experience. Despite this, in almost every case, they’ve done a very admirable job and did not hinder the teams success.
The third thing that comes to mind is that I’m not sure that I would trust the nurturing and development of the very newest developers to all that many of the people that I’ve worked with over the years. In almost every case those people have been hard workers and have gotten a lot of good work done. However, there are a lot of them who don’t necessarily possess the requisite breadth and depth of knowledge and experience to guide new developers along an optimal path towards a successful career.
I envision journeyman almost taking on the role of college professors by teaching language theory and design, computer architecture, software architecture and design, database design and normalization, data structures, etc. to their apprentices and not simply handing out menial coding assignments that have to be re-written 5 or 6 times to become “acceptable” solutions. I feel there is definitely some real value in getting budding developers into the “real world” of software development early, but if these potential developers aren’t exposed to the fundamentals of software engineering and instead have to figure it out by trial an error the industry is doomed to mediocrity.
In all the blog post was thought provoking, but in the end I don’t think it is a very feasible solution for the industry as it currently exists. Companies are going to be very skeptical of hiring apprentice programmers for 2-4 years while getting very little actual work out of them even if they are only making minimum wage. Add to that the fact that company loyalty in this industry is not very strong and it becomes way to risky for a company to spend time and resources training apprentice programmers when they are most likely to switch jobs before contributing much of anything to the company.
Another problem with the ideas in the article are simply that software development teams already seem to be structured in much the same fashion. The major difference being that the most junior developers already have four years of instruction and can, at least theoretically, contribute to the team from the start.
That isn’t to say that the question of whether or not the traditional four year college degree is essential to training successful software developers. It isn’t. However, I don’t think that it can be replaced by a purely workplace based education. Perhaps some combination of work/school is the best recipe for success.
Perhaps a better career path for a future software developer would be a 6 month set of courses in the fundamentals of computer science dealing with computer architecture, algorithms and data structures, networking, database design, and software design followed by another 6 months of half schooling/half working under an experienced developer and then full assimilation into the software team? I don’t know what the right balance is off the top of my head, but something about taking an 18 year old high school grad and making them write and re-write code without any real teaching and guidance doesn’t sound like the way to improve the overall skill level in the software industry. In fact, it makes the future all the more frightening.
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