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Driven.
Don Marti wonders why corporate developers just can't keep up with open source coders:
Are wild and wooly hackers roaming the planet's surface somehow managing their projects better than Professional Software Development organizations do? ... For some reason, as soon as a budget and a deadline are involved, all of the lessons we've learned over the years and applied successfully to open source projects seem to fly out the window.
Having lived in both worlds I've noticed a couple of possible reasons. Corporate developers spend far more time planning and managing the project than they do building the thing. For a while I worked for a company where the project managers had cell phones and BlackBerrys because they were considered critical. But the projects took months and even years. Just how critical is a project manager in that case?
I've also noticed that bigger budgets just lead to more waste, and better tools don't always make the work easier. My little flirtation with Microsoft Visual Studio this past week showed me that professional tools aren't so much better than free stuff like Netbeans. Visual Studio caused me no end of aggravation. I couldn't do a final static release build because I was getting link errors. An obscure Microsoft technical bulletin explained that I had to ignore several libraries and then make them dependencies so that they would link in the right order. A few hours gone right there.
Most of all though I've noticed that corporate developers generally don't have a vested interest in the project; it's just a job to them. Hackers are driven - to solve a problem, to hit a target, to reach a goal. Unless you can find a way to infuse that drive in people, corporate developers will always lose.
I could never be happy in that kind of corporate environment. That's why I seek out cool little companies that are driven to do something nobody has done before. And I've found them in spades. You can take the corporate jobs. I want to be part of a religion.
Tip of the hat to Doc Searls.
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