There is one thing that continues to rear its misinformed head at me no matter where I seem to work, and that is fear of technology for fear’s sake. its Intriguing to me because a lot of the times, Companies are aware of technologies that could potentially make them more money, but also, I’ve run across others who don’t understand or properly comprehend the technologies enough around them to realize the benefits, but they turn a deaf ear to it.
Its understandable that some of the fear is driven by cost. The cost to learn, the cost to maintain, and the cost of dignity to admit you don’t know everything, and that there might just be something out there for a senior engineer to learn. Companies are more willing to “just do what works” because it makes them the fastest money. They are more inclined to stick with the quickest moneymaker, their “foundation of code” that may be outdated and brittle, but the client won’t know that till its too late, and their checks clear, right?
Unfortunately, thats a very scary reality. It makes me cringe to think how many shops out there (especially older CF shops) work with this mentality. Something that I’d like to bring extra attention to is the fact that I stated older. I think its safe to say that a lot of people who got into ColdFusion 6+ years ago have a much different mindset than ColdFusion developers who’ve gotten into it say, 3+ years ago, maybe. I think that that 3 year shift in mindset has a lot to do with the types of solutions we were writing for the web then, to the types of advanced applications we do today with ColdFusion.
The inherent issue is the fact that our solutions have evolved to this meet more advanced needs, but as developers, our methodologies may have not. we may be building larger-scale, more advanced applications that rely on “action files” for our forms, or our code may be sprinkled with queries throughout. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this approach, but as applications grow and become exponentially more and more complex, that code may show just how brittle it truly is in the face of enterprise needs and growth.
But it makes money, the processes may have not stood the test of time, but the money it produces is just as green. I have heard that argument thousands of times, and I’ve never myself thought it really stood any ground because the fact is, eventually, bad code will come back to haunt you. You’ll get an e-mail from a project you cringe when you think about having to fix, or you sit back and realize what you’ve written is poor and not really you’re best, but you move on because time is money.
The other strange approach that older shops take is to rely on “how much experience” they have with CF and how they have never needed these new practices and methodologies in the past. Again, I find this to be an argument that doesn’t hold any ground because as I previously stated, we have found ourselves building applications today that have become much more complex than before, but since that “cf guru” we all know “has been doing this for years”, they don’t think things have become more complex, they fit the same shoe on everyones foot.
I see this as yet another more dangerous approach to development, people who “been doing things this way for 10 years” have a much lower chance of being around for another 10. I think its safe to say that virtually nothing has stayed the same on the web for the last 10 years (hell, even the last 5 years). New approaches, new technologies, new this and that are coming out all the time, and to pretend it doesn’t exist is just foolish and inevitably an extremely dangerous mindset for a company to maintain. Not that I am saying its our responsibility to adopt any and all technologies that came out, but at least to be aware of them, do some research on them.
I feel that at the end of the day, it comes down to this, contracting tends to work this way, Developers figure they “don’t have time” to crack open a book, they need to get work done and satisfy a client expectation, and we can bet that no client is paying anyone to crack open a book (unfortunately). And that same developer doesn’t attend conferences or training because “it takes away from money I could be making”, when the real truth is, its investing in you’re knowledgebase and increasing the amount of money you’re worth. But for that developer, its hard to make that sale because they’ve done things the they’re way for so long, that thats just the way it is.
