Ask most developers what they do for their job and they'll tell you that that they write software.  Well, technically that may be the major function performed in the execution of their job, but a developer's goal should not be to write software, but to write software that meets someone's a needs or wants.  To give you some examples:

  • If you write business software, you're trying to help people perform their jobs better.
  • If you write games then you're trying to meet someone's desire to be entertained.
  • If you write security software you're trying to help people keep their information secure.

I think you get the idea.  It's might seem obvious now that it's said,  but it's not something people normally think about.  When spending the major part of your working within Visual Studio then it's very easy to focus on the low level details and forget the high level goals of what it is you're doing.

 

Now if we extend the idea that we are trying to help people through the software we create then we realise that we are trying to service their needs. Any industry that exists to satisfy an individuals needs and wants is a service industry.  What this implies is that the I.T. industry is not a manufacturing industry or a retail industry but rather is a service industry (in fact if you dig to the bottom of any industry you'll see that everything is a service industry).

We have jobs as developers because we are servicing the needs of our customers, and the better we service their needs the more work we get.

So what does this mean?  It means that the customer should be Number One, not us.  We need to remain focused on delivering top quality software that satisfies our customers.  The process of writing code is just one small part of our service and, believe it or not, very few customers care about the internals of our code.

What they want is software that is fit to purpose, easy to use and well supported... with no bugs.  These are the critical elements we need to focus on with software development.  Everything else we do exists only so we can to deliver a service to our customers in a more timely manner.

 

So, the next time you sit down to write some code, think about who you are writing it for and do your best to meet their needs.