Brent Simmons: “My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers.” Great blog post from Brent, who I had a beer with once, long ago, in Seattle, and whose work in the early days of this blog I frequently followed and linked to. (I had written an AppleScript based blog posting client for my old blog platform, which he had worked on, and he wrote a modern blog posting client (MarsEdit) and blog aggregator (NetNewsWire), so he was on my radar a lot. Also he’s a nice guy.)
I don’t actually have a ton of experience being an indie developer, nor have I worked with a lot of them, but I can say with 100% certainty that his description of corporate developers rings true. They’re not all as great as Brent describes, but the ones who don’t rise to the level of excellence don’t tend to stick around—and if your company prioritizes good management as well, you won’t see many of the bad ones because good interviewing and hiring tends to weed them out.
Congrats on your well-deserved retirement, Brent—though is it really retirement if you’ll “have a lot more time for working on NetNewsWire”? 🙂