One plus of the former is that you can add a new clause without needing to edit an existing line, makes for cleaner diffs during reviews and makes it such that you wouldn't show up as the last person who touched the existing line in git blame or any other source control equivalent.
No..you aren't talking about one specific time..or at least your article isn't. If that were the case than you'd be talking about why salespeople aren't STARTING companies rather than asking why they aren't RUNNING companies.
Without a talented engineering team, a product won't be able to change or adapt to customers changing needs and opinions.
Sure you can sell a product that isn't fully developed, and outsource your engineering but in all likelihood you're going to wind up with a clusterfuck of a codebase and so much technical debt that your customers aren't ever going to see anything more than the crappy first iteration of a product.
This is all just so silly. By your logic all that is important is that you have salespeople that can sell anything, including a crap product. Is that really how you want to drive a company? Salespeople would have an easier time selling a well engineered and functioning product no?
Spotify and iTunes may have similar UI but this site and Spotify are identical. One can assume Spotify was inspired by the design of iTunes, since well, lets be honest, its how everybody now pictures their music players. This site on the other hand had done nothing new at all, its blatant theft of Spotify's interface.
I just have to question the quality of the code one risks receiving when outsourcing; sure you can get lucky and find a great guy but in all likelihood it would take a few iterations to find someone worthwhile. All the while you'd be spending time and money finding a developer & losing precious time working on the product at hand.
The quality of the code is up to your requirements as a developer. Have the outsourced developer code exactly to the requirement and accept nothing less.
sure to a certain extent, but you could have all the requirements in the world and not have the outsourced developer ever turn in "quality" code, or if anything take way longer than it should take.
This is how we do things at ZocDoc actually (http://engineering.zocdoc.com/post/19991240421/winter-hackat...) and it really is great. We start thursday evening and finish on sunday, there are definitely late nights but plenty of sleep. The timespan is more than reasonable to finish a project. Definitely the best way to do a hackathon.
was tempted to stop reading when I got here. Computer Science is fascinating...and an incredibly broad field. The notion that the author could make the sweeping accusation that it is "unquestionably the dullest" of the mathematical sciences leads me to disregard his opinions in general.