Totally agree. It is important to keep updating one's knowledge and be creative and innovative in problem solving approaches. To be able to do that, it is best to have some one who has the fundamentals of programming rather than some one who tinkled with drupal but with no programming or database knowledges. <br>
<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Steven Scotten <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:steves@splicer.com">steves@splicer.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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On Aug 24, 2009, at 11:53 AM, Jeff Greenberg wrote:<br>
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Steven Scotten wrote:<br>
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In my fourteen year career in Web development I have never been paid to do something I knew how to do ...<br>
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That's an interesting comment. If that were really the case, everything you do for pay you do as a novice. I've been doing client-facing development since my junior year 30 years ago, and I've always been paid for the same thing: truly understanding the requirement, approaching its resolution in an innovative yet maintainable way, and doing quality work the first time. The only thing that changes are the tools.<br>
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Yeah, we can get into chasing our tails with semantics, but by no means do I believe that I get paid for being a novice. I get paid to be inventive. Did Frank Lloyd-Wright ever build the same building twice? Maybe, but it's not what he was famous for. Do you think he stayed at the same static level of knowledge through his career?<br>
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My skills only improve when I take on tasks I don't know I can do. If I don't care enough to improve my skills, I should have a different career. Although that might be telling in and of itself because I took up Drupal because I really don't care about building content management systems enough to keep adding on to the one I built.<br>
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If I know all the answers a client asks, I'll tell the answers for free and walk away. There's no point in trying to be creative or inventive by rote. It doesn't work. If you want to hire a developer that is neither creative nor inventive, why not just buy software off the shelf to do what you want it to do?<br>
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But you do quality work the first time. That's something I'm deeply envious of. I'm constantly reworking things to make them better, and refactoring because I didn't see the best solution the first time. Clearly you're the better developer and I'm a fraud. I'm not sure I should let that stop me.<div>
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