[consulting] Drupal Skills Inventory

[Steven Scotten]

On Aug 24, 2009, at 11:53 AM, Jeff Greenberg wrote:

> Steven Scotten wrote:
>
>>
>> In my fourteen year career in Web development I have never been  
>> paid to do something I knew how to do ...
>>
> 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.



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?

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.

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?

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.