I’m still digesting the information from the Forum last week. However, a couple of posts over on Coding Horror got me thinking (here and here)
Jeff”s first post talks about how he feels there are two types of programmers he splits them into the 20% group and the 80% group
The 20%ers are the leaders, trailblazers and trendsetters who are always pushing to move forward the “art of software development” whereas the 80%ers are “9 to 5 programmers” who collect their salary and go home and forget about computers over the weekend
The first post got quite a lot of comments about people who felt insulted they were being pidgeon-holed into the 80%ers since they don’t write a blog, or run an open-source project
Jeff’s second post goes on to say the following (quote)
“Many of the commenters were offended that I somehow lumped them into a vast unwashed eighty-percent sea of vocational programmers. Here’s what’s particularly ironic: the very act of commenting on an article about software development automatically means you’re nota vocational eighty-percenter.”
Sounds oddly familiar to me
So my point? –warning, i’m going to be massaging figures here to make my point 🙂
There are about 930 small business specialists in the UK
about 120 of them turned up for the forum. Now i’m not saying that just because you didn’t attend the forum your not included so lets add another 20 onto that figure for the people who wanted to attend but “other commitments” stopped them
It’s about 15%
Not that that far off the figures mentioned by Jeff
So if your attending user groups, commenting on blogs (or writing one!), contributing to mailing lists or helping out your fellow IT pro you can feel all happy that you fall into that 15% and your showing a willingness to learn and improve the community as a whole and not be just a “blue badge collector”
I’m hoping that last weeks event will have created lots of enthusiasm, maybe re-energised some people and hopefully there will be some ongoing momentum and we can get that 15% to be 20% then 25%
By getting more people involved in the community the higher we can “raise the bar”.
Surely this is better for us and for our clients?
As always your thoughts are most welcome
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Hi Andy – fair comment, well made. I touched upon the same topic myself a few weeks back (http://tinyurl.com/34vq8d) after bristling about someone saying they “didn’t have enough time” to get involved in User group meetings. Like everyone who says they don’t have enough time to do something (whatever it may be) what they really mean is that they don’t feel that particular something is important enough for them to *make* the time for it. Here’s to “raising the bar”!