Application Programmer

    Software programmers are about a dime a dozen. You can go down to the coffee shop (not Starbuck's), announce "I need an application developer!", and five or ten patrons will look up from their laptops and then promptly ignore you. It is true, software developers don't like talking to strangers in the cafe, but nonetheless, they can be found. They are ubiquitus these days, anyone with a text editor can make a web site. After a few lines of PHP code and a web site on the internet, a hobbiest become a web developer. You can try it for yourself.

When asked, "Do you know PHP?"

Say: "Sure do".

I have spent several hours using a sewing machine, but I doubt I could make you a pair of pants. The difference is, given a seamstress, lack of skill is obvious after the first thirty minutes. It may take a month to realize the same about your web developer. In fact, you may never find out. Is ignorance bliss? Not in this case.

An experienced application programmer, with a wide breadth of experience to draw from, can handle just about any requirement you can concoct. A good programmer designs an application that is scalable and inexpensive to maintain. Typically, a knowledgable and clever software developer will charge a premium rate, but deliver the goods in a fraction of the time. The man-month calculation does not apply to the best application programmers because they possess some high level cognitive organization skills to greatly surpass the benchmarks of the code-time equation.