That Is Not My Job (?)
I wish to reconnect with a short post of a few days ago that sparked some interesting opinions (that I don't agree with), to expand on that discussion. The post was an half-joke related to the fact that modern Web Developers (and probably other type of developers too) don't really understand or know the basic of database design and in many cases, the basic of almost anything beyond what is strictly their field of expertise. And more important, they don't seems to care about.
Now, the idea that you should be fully competent in your field is nice, and nobody (especially me) can't say that you SHOULDN'T be competent in that area. My problem is when the "area" become very very tiny to the point that everything that is not strictly defined is outside and as such is no longer "your job".
It is impossible (or simply not advisable) to be a "Jack of all trade", simply because the time required to become a "jack of all trade" is prohibitive and the results would be dissappointing (at best). Some people manage to do just fine by performing different activities for some times, collecting experience in different fields and performing quite well in all of them, but most of us tend to gravitate towards few things and acquire more and more experience in them, while actively avoiding or barely checking whatever doesn't spark our interests. And that's fine, as long as it doesn't hurt our ability to do what interest us.
However, we should note that in the "modern" IT world, it is very rare that a discipline is completely disconnected from everything else, in fact, every single part of an IT infrastructure is tightly interconnected and a problem in one part reflects in the whole thing. Let's say that you are writing some code for data-entry, these 'data' are supposed to be used by other parts of the system, as such, the way you treat them in the data-entry phase will have consequences in the way they are stored and the way they can be treated in the other parts (just think about treating all data as 'string' instead of differentiating between numbers and text, or performing various sanitization instead of just storing all kind of junk).
With this, I don't want to say that everybody should know everything down to the smallest detail, but having a grasp of the basics of the whole, can help a lot in understanding what is the best approach to solve a specific problem that will not cause a larger problem later in a different area of the system.
In the "old days" (geez, I hate that term), there were Project Manager, Analyst and Architect that were supposed to the take care of the "big picture" and then split it down to the detail level, providing everybody with a clear design that should have avoided problems in the long run. However, the "old days" are long gone, and the term of the day is 'agility', that basically means put together junk as fast as you can and don't worry about nothing because anyway it won't last more than a few days and then you'll have to put together something else. And then we wonder how the fuck we ended up with a bazillion bugs and stuff that doesn't work more often than it does.
Given the fact that nowadays everybody is supposed to be a "designer" and be mostly responsible for a portion of what they do, it should be their interest (and their duty also) to actually *KNOW* at least the basics of the parts they don't actively develop but interact with.
As such, a developer that uses a database, but has no idea what are the basic concept behind the database itself (in term of design and structure), by definition will ends up not using the database at its best capability and at worst using it in such a way that actually deliver the worst possible performance. At that point, normally, the ball is dropped to the system administrator (or the network administrator) for "fixing". And the "fix" is to throw more hardware resources. When it works, is a waste of resources and when it doesn't... well, it doesn't.
So, no. Saying "that is not my job", is not acceptable. Not from my point of view at least.
Davide Bianchi
13/11/2018 11:40
