Comment Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession (Score 1) 233
We found it much more productive to take existing employees who understood the various tax procedures and workflows in the department and train them to program versus hiring CS graduates and train them in tax policy and procedures.
I write software in the retail industry. Aside from having worked in retail in my younger years, I know how to write quality software. What I have learned is that to get the best software, I need to sit and talk to an expert in the problem domain. If I were writing tax software I would spend a day or two talking over how tax procedures work, not even talking about the software. Then look at the existing software (if any). All of that background ensures that when I design a system I understand what it is trying to achieve. I would rather "lose" the 12-16 hours of coding up front but spend far less time fixing bugs or redesigning features at the tail end of the project.
We do have non-developers writing code, typically our customers. While they understand their business and we have enough guardrails up in the code to prevent completely assinine code from working, it often ends poorly. We are still better off spending the time to discuss in-depth what they are trying to do. Even if it means getting on an airplane and paying for a hotel, it still ends up cheaper than the complete clusterfuck that occurs at the end of a project where you have either developers not understanding the problem, or non-developers not understanding software development.