winscape 2330

snip

That may be, and I'm not claiming otherwise. What I'm talking about here is not specific technical knowledge, but .... It's two things. One is some understanding of how various groups (the people who write the code, the people who test it, the people who sell it, the customers who use it) interact. The other is some technical skills that I think might be broadly applicable. The example that comes to mind is an ability to work with large amounts of other people's code -- figure out what subset of it you have to understand in order to solve a particular problem, and then solve the problem without breaking anything else. What I'm saying is that these two things are apt to be learned by anyone doing maintenance-enhancement on commercial software, whether it's application-level or bit-god stuff. I'm not, repeat not, claiming that a year's experience writing code in Visual Basic for PCs makes a person capable of even understanding the technical problems involved in writing an operating system. What I am claiming is that that year's experience teaches things that probably cannot be learned in school and that the bit gods also know.

And fixing a bug that affects some users of a large application-level program can introduce bugs that affect other users.

An ability to imagine uses for one's work outside one's own experience -- surely this is useful for anyone who writes software, whether it's a timesharing o-s, a primitive single-user o-s, or application-level software? Even lowly writers of application software can find that customers come up with ways of using the software that its writers hadn't imagined.

Maybe people whose work targets a not-very-diverse market don't develop this ability. Broadening one's horizons is a good thing; one of the reasons I took that job working on application software was that the company's products were intended to run on a fairly diverse range of platforms.

And I would claim that a knowledge of this side of software development is common to different kinds of development.

splitting the rest off into another post since it seems to be almost another topic

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.