I was not saying that Unit Tests cover everything. I was just saying that doing them raises my enjoyment of testing... I still do other kinds of testing and so does the company's QA team.
The same is true in the company I work at, which develops products related to resource planning. Most managers and team leaders of my department are both managers and coders. They have a lot of valuable knowledge.
Domain knowledge is essential because it makes you more valuable. Specially if the products are complex, since the new guy will have to receive a lot of training before he can become useful.
If you work on generic applications or websites where you only need to know technical skills (like a Programming Language + SQL) you are easier to replace with a younger guy.
"I'd rather write half as much code, spend half as much time debugging it, and go home. "
Thats why I like Test Driven Development: when I'm writing unit cases, I'm doing test case design AND I'm coding. Then I also get to write the code that passes the tests. So I end up enjoying the testing part of the work a little more.
The uber coder could have batted that out in an afternoon, but instead spent a week ensuring that histogrammer behind the report was multi-core aware and could scale to billions of data points without dragging the system to its knees.
That is all good except that it may be totally useless. The solution may be scalable for millions of data BUT if the application never needs to handle more than a few thousands of data, then the solution is just over engineering.
The ubbercoder should have implemented a good, simple, correct solution that fits the data that the application must actually deal with. Instead, he just wasted time playing with himself.
There are limits...
I actually came across the video a week or so ago... watched a few seconds and dispatched the link to a friend of mine's that is a Zelda-addict.
And I probably wasn't gonna go to the site again.
Then I saw this on slashdot... and my interest went up and I started to look for it on torrent sites.
Funny stuff.
Memory fault - where am I?