Chapter Nine: Techies and Bit-Twiddlers Are Doomed

Overview

The smart corporate programmer will use the simplest, most basic program code to implement his projects, reserving his intense focus for the business function being developed.

Your job as a corporate programmer is to produce programs that will improve the productivity of your company ”save it money or make it money. You were hired to improve corporate business processes in the most straightforward, productive way, not to come up with fancy-for-fancy s-sake coding techniques. This message is so fundamental to the success of corporate programmers that it deserves a separate chapter in this book.

Corporate programming means implementing practical business tasks ”automating business functions and helping end users access corporate IT systems. Why, then, do so many business programmers turn out convoluted code, as if they were visionaries hired to guide spaceships around a galaxy?

They do it, I suspect, for the same reason that academics turn out unreadable prose ”to show how intellectual they are. This is bad writing, both in English and in computer code. My counsel to all corporate programmers is this: Do not try to make programming into a mystique . Focus on increasing your understanding of corporate business processes (applications) and then do your programming with minimal complexity. Indeed, make a conscious decision to write your code as straightforwardly as you can.