RE: [xml-dev] DOM or SAX: Sense and Sensibility

[Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@Allegis.com>]

> From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:clbullar@ingr.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 12:15 PM
> To: david.hunter@mobileq.com
> Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] DOM or SAX: Sense and Sensibility
> 
> 
> Another reason seems to be the "buddy effect".  Some 
> people are afraid to be the first penguin in the water 
> because of the hungry walruses.  So they wait until 
> a penguin gets hungry enough to go in after fish, 
> and if it returns, others follow.  That story is a 
> cultural metaphor for companies that have badgered 
> their employees into "do only your job inside the 
> box I give you" thinking.  These types wait until 
> the pilot implementors or pioneers come back, then 
> get their code or pick their brains and do only that.
> 
> <offtopic>I see a lot of that these days as the layoff disease 
> spreads and the panic goes deeper.  Of course, that 
> kind of thinking might be said to lead to conditions 
> where a shrinking market share is inevitable, but 
> that also might be wrong.  It depends on how one 
> views the notion that well-focused employees are 
> productive employees.  Both ends of the argument 
> are right and not mutually exclusive depending 
> on conditions.  Yet, failing to know how to pick 
> the right API for the job, worse, failing to be aware 
> there are options seems to be inefficient in the 
> first case and not survival-oriented in the second.
> 
> It is very hard to fix a culture that is inward-facing 
> out of fear because the typical response is to pretend 
> to superiority as a means of masking the failure to 
> understand the situation.</offtopic>

I agree. But I also think it stems from cultures that are timeline-focused
and where every task is approached in a myopic fashion with an artificial,
sustained sense of urgency. They don't see the benefits they can gain from
this without investing some time in understanding it, and they don't want to
invest the time in understanding it because they are "too busy" and there is
no ROI in chasing the "latest and greatest" XML technologies. So they waste
time reinventing the wheel, instead, or doing things in a far less
productive manner than they could.

I don't think this is unique to XML technologies. It's an endemic problem in
the IT world. Hell, I'd be happy if every place I worked they actually took
the time to design before coding and followed sound SDLC principles, much
less invest some time in learning from the experience of others who have
already found elegant solutions to similar problems. Most developers (and
most IT shops) just don't work that way, unfortunately.