Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror has a great post about developers being isolated from their customers, entitled “Ivory Tower Development”.
His post strikes a chord with me. When I first started working for my current employer as pretty much a one-man coder (in with other business analysts who have great experience in databases and the health industry), I was more concerned about how I was going to do tasks from a technical perspective, and indeed if I could do certain things with my limited knowledge. 3 years later, I'm over the issue of how being the biggest problem, and more focused on the right way to do something from a end-user perspective (all my end-users are in-house...something Jeff talks about in his post).
For the first couple of years the end-user was me, and I guess I was satisfied with some hacked-together, string-and-wire Access database where I had to go and set breakpoints and change variables manually (yeeeech) to massage my data. I'm slowly starting to write more systems for others end-users instead of the hacky utilities I first developed for me, and this has made me question how I communicate with my “customers”.
Thanks Jeff for something to think about!
By the way, I first discovered Jeff's blog via an article of his on Code Project.