The Development Abstraction Layer

I just read this really great article by Joel Spolsky (which I found a link to on GeekRant). It's about the Development Abstraction Layer, and how to get the most of out programmers. It's something that every programmer should read, every manager should read, and pretty much something that everyone in the IT industry should read. I'm not going to do it justice by trying trying to summarise or get across what it says, because it's written really well - the best thing is to just go read it yourself. I really, really recommend this.

Okay, you probably aren't going to go read it unless I show you why you should, so here are a couple of quotes:

Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user. But for that conversation to happen requires a lot of work beyond the software development. It takes marketing, yes, but also sales, and public relations, and an office, and a network, and infrastructure, and air conditioning in the office, and customer service, and accounting, and a bunch of other support tasks.

and

Any successful software company is going to consist of a thin layer of developers, creating software, spread across the top of a big abstract administrative organization.

The abstraction exists solely to create the illusion that the daily activities of a programmer (design and writing code, checking in code, debugging, etc.) are all that it takes to create software products and bring them to market.

and one of my favourites, because it has a personal resonance for me:

If a programmer somewhere is worrying about a broken chair, or waiting on hold with Dell to order a new computer, the abstraction has sprung a leak.

But just go read the whole thing yourself ;-)