That’s total BS. Development is full of boring mediocre tasks such as fixing spelling mistakes in UI controls, updating help messages for dialog boxes, or porting the product from one build system to another. In many tasks, there’s a huge gap (a chasm sometimes) between manual intervention and complete automation. I’ve lost count of the number of times a clever programmer has tried to automate the process and completely mucked things up, forcing me to go in and fix things manually.
>Incremental changes are hard. Incremental changes to large and unwieldy systems while leaving them in a maintainable state are very hard (actually, from what I've heard, Google Adwords' code base is a mess).
That’s exactly where a great product manager can mentor a mediocre developer in making a sensible change. It’s a great learning opportunity that we’re depriving people of because software founders want to retain all the revenue for themselves.
>It's vastly better to have a really good product owner/manager who knows the domain working with a really good coder than a mediocre coder with mediocre domain knowledge.
Of course. It’s also vastly better that to be born rich so one doesn’t have to work at all. Ideally, all developers in the market would be great developers. But they’re not. So I ask again, what are the mediocre developers supposed to do?
