Developing new programs is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The need is to solve problems. Sometimes the best solution is to write new programs, sometimes the best solution is to modify existing programs, sometimes the best solution is to tweak off-the-shelf programs.

If you select for people who are good at, and like, writing new programs, then every solution becomes a new program. That isn't the best way to run a business.

> Developing new programs is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Yeah, so this is just another case of the principal-agent problem. The thing which is best for you as a programmer may not always be the thing which is best for the company paying you. You'll have to find a balance between the two, and so will your employers.

This is a good point. I think the need for new programs has actually decreased relative to the overall need for software solutions over the past, say, twenty years. Between the rise of open source and the fact that lots of software products being built aren't very technically innovative I suspect the relative need for new code has decreased. It's more often about broadly figuring out how best to solve problems.

I wouldn't be surprised if, in response to this trend, we see the formalization of a new "product developer" role at startups that is kind of a hybrid engineer / product manager. This person can code perfectly well, but is also scrappy and really good at getting shit done. The Alice character in the story above would fit this role perfectly. These people can drive way too much business value for their role not to become a defined hiring target eventually.

So what you're saying is that its better to ultimately move into management ?

for Alice, and possibly also Bob, yes, their career advancement is most likely from software developer to product manager or technical lead, to VP of engineering somewhere.

for Clyde, definitely not. Clyde really loves coding as an end unto itself. his career advancement is probably getting picked up as a "unicorn" at a quant trading hedge fund, or joining a project that is coding low-level technology infrastructure at a big tech company like Goog/Msft/FB/Oracle/whatever.

why on earth would you let your developers decide what to develop? Isn't that the role of the product owner/client/management? There should be some back and forth between stakeholders.

I say this as a developer who, if it were up to me, would just spend all day refactoring existing code and not implementing new features or fixing bugs.

Actually, since we all have a finite amount of time, it's entirely possible Alice has solved real problems with the rest of hers whilst Clive is reinventing the wheel.

For the 99% business he's an expensive liability. Sure he might get jobs, but he'll hardly have a career backed by success.

> Clyde has better experience of actually developing programs.

Agreed. In this specific case Alice was in the right, but there are only so many problems that can be solved by installing Wordpress.

You don't have anything to back that up, though. You know Clyde will make work when he doesn't have to. You don't know what Alice does in the time she has not spent creating a redundant CMS.