From zee at ix.netcom.com Tue Jan 4 14:48:59 2000
Advances like structured programming (in the 80's), and
then object oriented programming (in the 90's), just made
programmers wildly more efficient.
Wildly unsupportable!
Rather than de-skill programming, object oriented programming
took out many of the mundane tasks that used to be a big
part of programming. With OO you create and share reusable
building blocks--so everything gets very elegant and fun.
I'd call that de-skilling; what I've seen is that because it's "more fun" people take it less seriously and thus introduce Object-Sized problems ... also, with tools like Access, "Everyone Can Be A Database Programmer" -- which means that everyone *does* become one.
Including those who have no idea what they are doing.
Until computers get to be like cars (you don't have to know how to build one in order to drive one -- though it still helps quite a bit), this will worsen the productivity problem.
But working in IT depts., you don't have the sense that
along with this gain in efficiency has come the usual work
speed-up. It feels like a massive slow down actually.
(At least you came to the right conclusion :-)
/jordan