Thursday, September 06, 2007

Programmers and software companies

Paul Graham said:

... it's not merely true that organizations dislike the idea of depending on individual genius, it's a tautology. It's part of the definition of an organization not to. Of our current concept of an organization, at least...

...
there is a contradiction in the very phrase "software company." The two words are pulling in opposite directions. Any good programmer in a large organization is going to be at odds with it, because organizations are designed to prevent what programmers strive for ...

The irony is that organizations may end up depending on other organizations, that are potentially considered geniuses on the market. They try not to get to a point to depend on such, this is almost impossible to achieve - although that is the goal.

Read the whole article here on what a good programmer is as opposed to code-producing-replaceable-individuals working in a large organization.