In the last week, I've talked with two very smart, highly motivated programmers. Both are making plans to leave the Cincinnati area.

Why? Both say that there are no interesting programming projects going on here. All they see is old-style java and .NET projects that are missing the wave of new approaches.

And they feel that they would put their career at risk by staying here.

The questions we have been discussing on a local mailing list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/growcincysoft/) are:

(1) Why are programmers leaving Cincinnati? And (2) How can we keep and attract more?

If we conclude that they are leaving because Cincinnati companies are not offering them interesting projects, why is that??

Some say it is because Cincinnati is somehow "Conservative". That doesn't answer anything really. Is WalMart (which considers IT as part of their core competency) somehow "Liberal" ?? I don't think so!

It's not a about being "Conservative". It's about seeing IT as either a competitive advantage or as a cost center to be minimized.

It's a fundamental VALUE choice that each company has to make.

And the question shifts to: Why don't Cincinnati companies embrace technology as a competitive advantage?

If you see technology as a competitive advantage, and invest in it, the programmers will love to stay and work on the important projects.

ITS THAT SIMPLE.

If you see IT as a cost center to be minimized and out-sourced, then don't be surprised if the good programmers prefer to move away from Cincinnati and work for Google, or ThoughtWorks, or someplace that wants to use IT to MAKE money.

As they said in the movie "Field of Dreams"... Build it and they will come.

• Mark http://leansoftwarecincinnati.blogspot.com/

Accounting has different problem solving schools of thought just like software development does.

If you want to measure the effectiveness of a management decision you want to count the costs and benefits of that decision. The traditional way to do this is with Cost Accounting. In the Lean-Thinking approach, Cost accounting blamed for guiding companies toward inefficiencies.

Instead an approach called: Throughput Accounting, measures end-to-end benefits on a system wide basis.

One difference is that with Cost Accounting inventory is valued as a good thing - an asset. The more inventory you have on the books the more your company is worth (on paper anyway).

Using Throughput accounting, Value is only recorded when a product is actually sold. The piles of out of date parts carried in inventory are seen as a liability. The more incomplete work you've got in the process the lower your value (on paper).

Thoughput accounting seems to me to reflect the real word a bit better. Your company sells a product, you record value. Not before.

But there seems to be a struggle in the accounting community between these two camps. Partly, because they are advising management to take different paths toward success.

It reminds me of the struggle between the Data Processing and the Object Oriented approaches to software development. More on that later.

I just got a Lean Case study published in chapter 25 of Lean Software Strategies: Proven Techniques for Managers and Developers .

And for a Recap of Lean Software Development see this previous posting.

Well, I didn't give as many "updates from the front" as I intended. But here is my rapid-review of the day of coding.

Wow !

Ok, now more detail...

It was the quickest 18 hour period that I've experienced in a long time. Everything I looked at the clock it jumped another 2 hours. Among the 6 coders we all seemed to feel that way. After an 8 hour day at work we usually feel tired out. After 17 hours in the contest and at 1:00 am, we were all still wishing we had another hour or two, to squeeze a little more functionality in before the deadline. I did not see one single yawn the entire time. As the evening was getting late, we inadvertently missed dinner entirely. We did have plenty of snacks to keep us going.

The Contest

About 120 teams were signed up. 100 competed. This contest was world-wide. More details at railsday.com

The Application

It was a very good start on the app. It was usable and functional. The PhotoDepo sets up user accounts for Photographers, Guests, and Administrators. Photographers can upload Photo's, arrange them into albums and add "tag words" to them. Guests can browse and search the photos by the "tag words". Administrators set up and manage the accounts. And other users can browse without signing on to the application. We do wish we had another few hours to add some of the cool AJAX features and polish it up a bit more.

Lines Of Code Produced

That's about 20 lines of code per person per hour

More Railsday Review's