de tomKronieken

Mr Roller:

I have to admit that the idea of a guy who sucks at programming doing analysis and design frightens the hell out of me. I hope Tom is just being self-deprecatingly modest.

Thanks for the addition of the last line :-) Rest assure that I feel the same: you can't be a good analyst without being an (at least) decent programmer. The "suck at" was a bit exaggerated, but I've accepted the fact that I will never be as good a programmer as the guys who drop an RSS feed implementation out of their sleeves in one night. On the other hand, if I wrote the RSS spec, it would be good. Those two things just require very different skills, but an analyst and a programmer have to have a bit of both.

Actually, when I finished college, I wanted to go in the analysis direction. I never understood those guys who were getting kicks in C by removing 2 CPU cycles out of their algorithm. But since I didn't (and don't) believe you can be a good analyst without knowing how to program, I started as a programmer ("Software Engineer" was the term at the time). And while working as a programmer, I've often had to work with analysts who didn't live to this rule. It wasn't them who suffered from this...

BTW, Steven seems to think I know Java. Perception is reality. He has been my boss for some time ;-)