[Mr. Douglas]

When I write a program, 50% of the code comes from me guessing what you want because you don’t know what you want.

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After 21 years as a COBOL programmer, I became a Business Analyst. My job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Having been a developer, I’m pretty successful at it. It’s amazing, though, how difficult it is to get the business to qualify what they actually want. But that’s why we “get the big bucks”.

[AppyPappy]

I suspect it is a fear of commitment. I started in COBOL in the early 80’s but now I code in Groovy/Grails. It has gotten FAR worse. Not only do they not know exactly what they want, they don’t know how it should look. But they know the design you implemented isn’t right. They expected to enter department code instead of employee ID. They wanted to see totals over here.

Every day I swear I’m going to throw in the towel and go back to COBOL.

[SandwicheGuy]

It’s amazing, though, how difficult it is to get the business to qualify what they actually want. But that’s why we “get the big bucks”.

You said it better than me.