I was talking to a colleague who'd recently started a new assignment, and she remarked that while the work was interesting, she felt frustrated that she was surrounded by people who had no software talent. Her metaphor was drawn from the record industry where people either have, or lack, musical talent.

In times of yore, records were made by people who played the instruments, wrote the lyrics, scored the music, and cantillated the songs. They had musical talent and, like all great artists, stood the test of time as they continued to write and perform throughout their entire career. The basic prerequisite to being a good bet for the recording industry was that you were a good multi-talented musician who had mastery of all aspects of the music process starting with a blank sheet of paper and ending up with the finished sound on stage.

In the 1980s though the rules changed, ironically summarized in lyrics from the Buggele's classic song of the era; "Video killed the radio star." Selling a record now meant you needed a front person who looked pretty for the camera and for whom center spread magazine posters could be created for suburban teeny boppers to plaster on bedroom walls. The musicians found themselves performing in the shadows as Mr/Ms cheek bone strutted their stuff around in front of the mic long enough to keep the viewers mesmerized till the next commercial began. Some videos used professional dancers and complex choreography, often distracting the spectators so they wouldn't realize the music actually wasn't that good.

As the genre unfolded, musicians were pushed further and further back so you couldn't even see them and the ratio of dancing to singing ability of the front band members were increased to the point where a band is now simply a collection of cherry picked dancers performing to someone else's song played by unknown musicians.

Once upon a time, software developers wrote code and ruled their kingdoms. Good programs had few bugs and performed their tasks efficiently and with style. The elite programmers went on to become designers who would lead others in their wake, instilling in them good software practices in a master/apprentice relationship. However, someone was needed to sell the code, so software salespeople were hired who, like pretty boy band members, tended to spend their weekends at the mall browsing shelves of hair products rather than intellectually challenging books. Software is a pretty hard thing to sell because, unless your prospect is a brand new startup, one presumes they already have something in place. Your job as a salesman is to convince the customer that their old software is no good and/or that the new one is better. This involves a mixture of FUD for the incumbent and, like the music industry, creating a name for the new software, a new wave, a fashion they need to follow to be hip, and dressing up the software your developers lovingly coded with buzzwords and intrigue, convincing the customer that it'll make them feel better just by owning it. After a while though this charade starts to back up into the software house, which is now told they must follow the latest fad or fashion with their product to remain competitive and, before long, the poor developer, the only one left in the building who can actually write any decent code, finds herself pushed into the shadows and then off stage as the whole direction, strategy, design, and product line is now a slave to the industry's fashion whims.

As my colleague lamented with a sigh, paraphrasing the Buggle's lyrics; "They took the credit for your second subroutine, Rewritten by buzzwords and new technology; and now I understand the problems you can see. Oh-a oh. I met your breakpoints. Oh-a oh" - all together now - "PowerPoint killed the programmer star. La la la, do be, la la laa laa."