A work colleague tweeted about this article written by Bill Taylor, and he (my colleague) asked me what I thought about it.

While the article is very well written and the author raises a few very good points, I disagree with part of it. Perhaps, I have a slightly different point of view about the subject.

Let me quote a couple sentences from it to analyze them in context:

“Five great programmers can completely outperform 1,000 mediocre programmers”

I completely agree with that sentence (told by Marc Andreessen to the article’s author for his book).

Mediocre programmers don’t add value, they usually subtract from it. They’re usually also mediocre Team players, making things worse.

Later, he contrasts that sentence with this one:

“If you were launching a technology or developing a product, would you rather have five great engineers rather than 1,000 average engineers”

While contextually they seem to be mutually exclusive, I happen to agree with that sentence as well, because I think there’s a not-so-subtle difference between “average” and “mediocre” that the author is simplifying. In my opinion average and mediocre are not the same.

Average engineers add value. If they’re also good team players, they can add a lot of value and they can surely outperform a smaller group of “Rock Stars”.

There’s an important concept that the article also doesn’t quite grasp or at least it’s not presented with the relevance it deserves: Teamwork.

Non-team-players are a bad idea, no matter how great as coders they are. The only way to overcome it would be to get them doing one-man projects, and those are an even bigger very bad idea company-wise.

However, the article links to another article that analyzes Barça’s (the Spanish soccer team) case. As a Barça fan and Barcelona resident I fell particularly identified with the example. Let me add a little bit of my view to the article:

Barça has the best soccer player in the world (Lionel Messi, I’d call him a “Rock Star”) and a lot other players that are way above great (Xavi, Iniesta, Pedro, Villa, to name a few). Most of them were raised on the Club, not bought from other Clubs. Barça also have a few more “average” players in comparison, but most of them are really, really good ones. I wouldn’t say that there’s any mediocre players on the Team.

Curiously enough, Messi played his share of matches with the Argentinian selection (also with a good deal of the best soccer players around, most of them currently playing on the best European Clubs and being extremely successful at it).

The outcome? Completely unremarkable. Messi didn’t score a single goal on the world cup and the team didn’t make it past quarter finals. Why? Because they weren’t a Team, just a bunch of -extremely- talented players doing a mediocre job as a Team.

You can assemble a team of great people if they’re good team players, there’s nothing wrong with it and it will outperform much bigger teams. Barça is a proof of it, but I’m sure there’s a good deal of other examples around.

I consider myself extremely lucky of working head-to-head with a lot of great people (both as Engineers and Team players) at 3Cinteractive and I can’t imagine a better working environment (BTW, we’re hiring). It proves to me that you can assemble a team of great people and accomplish a lot, as long as they’ve got what it takes to work together as a team.

In contrast, mediocre Team players will ruin any team as much as mediocre coders would slow it down.

I think one should aim for hiring at least average programmers that are above average (no concessions there) team members, or average team members that are above average programmers, but I’d ban mediocracy from one’s working environment completely. Oh, and average as in decent, not less

Note: the later article got it all wrong about the “Catalonia is not Spain” part. Those banners are a display of extreme nationalism/separatism with which I’m completely in disagreement.

This is what I’d call my “Programmer’s Grid”, depicting in an image what I’d tried to describe with words above.

And this is my perhaps biased opinion, based on my own experience. What do you think?

Alex

During the last few days I’ve been posting a good deal of patches I’ve been working on. I hope you like them.

Also, I’ve added a multi-lingual plugin and started translating my latest post to Spanish. It will take some time to get all the older posts translated, but I’ll eventually get that done.

I hope this will help the Kannel spanish-speaking community of users. I know a few of them

It was about time to get my blog up to speed again.

Regards,

Alex

Is that time of the year again, and MWC is just a few days away. I’m sure a lot of new stuff will be showcased this year as usual (I’m particularly curious about augmented reality since it gained a lot of momentum lately, but I’m sure we’ll se a full lot of social apps, mobile web portals, LTE ,WiMax, etc, etc.).

I hope is a good time for Kannel developers and users to assemble and meet having a good time together as well.

If you happen to be at the Fira this year and want to meet with me just drop me a note in private.

My kid Juan wrote this wonderful article about the mostly unknown caveats of sharing content on your Facebook account.

Read the full article HERE

NOTE: This patch is already committed to CVS, so if you download the latest CVS version, you’ll get it included.

Here’s a new version of my former patch to add support for custom MO parameters on the “generic” http-smsc.

This new version adds a few extra features:

• Support to set the response message (nowadays is fixed to “Sent.”).
• Support to use escape codes on the response message. You can now show the internal message id (or any other message field for what matters) when responding to a successful request.
• Support to set the response code for successful and failed requests.
• Documentation!

Download the patch from here.

As usual, please try it and let me know what you think.

-Alex

My kid Juan (13) did this video along with 3 friends as part of a schoolwork assignment. He wrote the script, did the greenscreen and also did the editing. Watch it, it’s lots of fun!

I don’t have to say how proud of my kids I am. They make life worth it.

Alex

I’m attending GSMA’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It’ll be a great opportunity to meet fellow developers and companies. If you’re attending and wish to arrange a meeting, just drop me a comment and I’ll answer in private.

Regards,

Alex

I wanted to share a short story about one of the many benefits of buying good hardware from serious companies.

My almost-2-years-old MacBook Pro battery was having serious performance issues: After a full charge, it only lasted about 20 minutes (even with the display dimmed to be barely visible).

Resisting the idea of having to buy a new battery, I’ve googled a little and found an Apple page about problems with MacBook Pro batteries. Turned out that my battery was eligible for a free replacement.

With nothing to lose, and after unsuccessfully asking in-person on a couple of “official” resellers, I’ve been directed to the AppleCare phone number in Spain. After about 15 minutes of music on hold and about 30 of Q&A with a nice and knowledgeable operator, I’ve been told that they’ll mail me a new battery on the next 4-7 days. I’ve also been given specific instructions about  returning my old battery to the same messenger for recycling. Good!

This was yesterday. Today, an UPS messenger brought my new battery and took away the old one. Right now it’s happily being charged while I’m writing this.

Just one more reason to be a happy owner of a Mac. I’ve no doubts about what I’m going to buy next time.

Alex

So, the day has finally come. I’m living on Barcelona again.

The trip was long and complicated (planes delayed, all my luggage went lost) but this morning my 5 pieces of luggage arrived at home and everything started to fit into place.

I love this city and its people: It boils with art, music, architecture and all sorts of culture expressions. I love people’s open-mindedness as well.

So, new times are coming. I know it will be good times.

Alex

I’ve married twice to the same woman.

I’ve rented my apartment to the guy that sold it to me.

Now I’m moving to Barcelona again.

Life always seemed kind of recursive for me. I wonder what comes next.

Alex.