Maybe we need Incompetent web developers

For the past couple of days I haven't blogged very much, mainly because I've been very busy with Peupe from a development point of view as well as from a business angle. So today on my way to our company executive meeting I decided to carry a book to read, if you've experienced public road transport in Kenya then I'm sure you'll understand why I carried a book to read but that is another story for another day, the book I carried was Small is the new big and 183 other riffs, rants, and remarkable business ideas by Seth Godin (I suggested you buy this book as a gift to yourself this christmas). It proved to be a very interesting read but what really caught my eye was one of the rants entitled Competence, according to Seth Godin "....Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems. They solve a problem the same way every time...In the face of change, the competent are helpless..." Those few statements really got me thinking about what we at Multiple Choices are trying to do.

A large number of web developers in Kenya have developed competencies (specialised) in a specific programming language, now don't get me wrong specialising is a good thing in fact it just may land you that specific job that requires that "specific skill" but in the landscape of changing technologies (AJAX, Flex, Adobe Apollo, Ruby on Rails just to mention a few) specifics will not cut it. Technology companies are constantly changing and adopting new technologies and as such require a versatile and forgive me for saying this "incompetent techies". Take for example a company that develops primarily in Java (shivers down my spine), 3 technology managers down the line they decide that to do a radical shift and decide to head towards the Ruby road (excuse my bias towards ruby, what can I say I'm a believer), what happens to all the specialists who cannot or will not change in order to adopt the new technology? Like the wooly mammoth they are rendered extinct.

Specialising dictates that adaptability to change be engrained in the very DNA of the technology enthusiast, if we are to compete with the likes of Google then we must be able to bootstrap new technologies easily and quickly. The incompetent developer looks at new technology and sees it as a challenge to his very existence that they must face head on, the competent developer sees it as a threat to their pay cheque and would rather move to the next specific company then adapt.

When Multiple Choices decided to adopt Ruby on Rails as a development framework we faced quite a few competent developers, in fact most of the people we hoped to be part of our team were very competent in their fields and time and time again they proved to us that change was not to be embraced. A few months and several interviews later we changed our view (we became incompetent entrepreneurs) and decided that incompetent developers was probably the breed of people we wanted. Needless to say we changed our interview approach and decided to focus on building a team that consisted of "Change-Aholics" for one main reason, they challenged the very approach we had taken to application development and offered valuable insight into which direction we should take as a company. Now if that isn't a powerful case for incompetent developers then I don't know what is.

The current breed of web developers in Kenya is still young and can now make the informed decision that competency isn't the way, adaptability, change mentality and focus on challenge is what we need as country and as a continent. To learn more about this author, visit John Wesonga's Website.

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