A few weeks ago I met a friend of a friend at a party who started to work for Accenture as a programmer a few months a go. After some talking we started discussion jobs, and I was wondering what she did at Accenture; what kind of development and projects. As a programmer I was eager to know what she was programming and stuff like that, I know that she had studied C++ at the university and that she had worked with that for a while. At Accenture she had entered the Java world and now she was developing a SOA application - interesting I thought and started to fire some more questions.
She started telling me that she used some tool and drawing up the services, a bit disappointed that a lot was automatically generated and she did not understand what happened under the hood. I asked what tools are you using? Uhhh, something with Websphere she told me. Do you use Eclipse as IDE, was another question. Uhhh, it says Websphere in the window title. The discussion went on like this for a while…
This talk really surprised me; first of all, she is a really nice and smart girl and she probably have a bright future, but I think that a programmer/developer must know their environment, what tools they are using and why they are using it. If you are going to be a good programmer, not a bread-and-butter programmer, the first thing you should do is dig in to the automatically generated code and check what’s happening behind the scenes.
Then, at least me, had high expectations on Accenture programmers, I thought they were more drilled and skilled than this. Accenture uses Tiger Woods in their commercials and stating We know what it takes to be a Tiger - I think Tiger Woods knows the brand and model of his clubs.