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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing.   Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb[/quote]

This person has no idea what they are talking about.

I’m a 56 year old US born development manager and was just hired for a new role. Also, I’m actively hiring developers and happy to talk with people of any age. The reality is that 95% of the applicants we get are not US born, and those that do apply are often wildly unqualified (e.g. can’t answer the question “what’s a relational database”).  [/quote]

Culture has changed though.  Work has devolved into an "assembly line" type of situation where you are timed and constantly pressured to develop things as fast as possible at the expense of creativity and quality.  This has even penetrated consulting which used to be expertise driven field.  Agile and "sprinting" took all the joy out of being able to engineer interesting solutions and have time to solve problems instead of patching things up.  And this has become tough for older people to keep up too.  Many younger developers are on a fast moving treadmill and take ADHD drugs and anxiety meds.[/quote]

This notion of Agile “taking the joy” out of software development is entirely a reflection of people who know nothing about Agile claiming to apply it.

Robert Martin is great on this —- Agile is a tool for teams of 8-10 software developers to write software.  Non technical people don’t and can’t meaningfully understand it and shouldn’t be allowed working 50 miles of a software development project as so called “scrum masters.”

Agile is a way for self-organizing teams of software developers to manage their work.  Automated testing, pair programming, and protection from clueless non-technical middle managers tearing for control are essential components. For example, story points are not a metric to be used by manager la to try to squeeze more productivity out of developers.  They are a tool for ongoing learning by the team, period.  Managers’ job is to manage scope. Period.

When practiced this way, Agile leads to craftsmanship, quality, clean code, clean architecture, and always deployable code.  Unfortunately, all of the non-technical IT bureaucrats with PMPs who feel threatened by tech people make it’s their life’s work to coop Agile into a tool for managers, and thus guarantee awful code and continual failure. [/quote]

This is why the foreign workers are better, never had one argue with me about methodology.[/quote]

PP you’re responding to.  Not sure what this means.  On the teams I lead, we have a mix of US and foreign born developers, and we talk methodology all the time.  Then again, we all have CS degrees, aren’t as wildly ignorant as most of the posters on this thread, and don’t hire non-technical people to manage software.  [/quote]

Yeah, we're pretty much the exact opposite, just getting things done instead of worrying about roles and ceremonies and burning through budgets while under producing.[/quote]

Bless your heart.  As people who actually know software development know, in the long term, you ensure productivity with automated testing, pair programming, and clean code.  Agile is critical to that mix.

What ALWAYS happens to people who "just get things done" is that they end up with unmaintainable code that consumes steadily more cycles just on O&M and that everyone is terrified to refactor because they have no idea what they will break.

I love those companies though, because they make great customers when we are brought in to replace the old mess and (try to) train the dinosaurs that created the mess.  By all means, keep "just getting things done" -- I could use a bonus!  [/quote]

What employers use pair programming?

Agile is wholly separable from testing and code quality. [/quote]

Who has resources for paired programming? We're too busy squeezing water from rocks.[/quote]

People and organizations that haven’t ever done software development right (including pair programming, automated testing, and Agile) think that doing things that way takes more time.  In fact, over time it’s MUCH quicker because you avoid the steadily growing mountain of tech debt that projects done the other way have.  There’s a dynamic in those projects where the effort to make change goes up exponentially - from tiny at first (“no tests to write, no coordination with others!  Woo hoo”) to slowly more (“WFT is Joe’s code doing?”) to a locked up mess that everyone is afraid to touch.

Doing things right actually takes less effort in the long run. [/quote]

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