For details about what i-become.com is, refer to this link.

Where will you work? Here, in Career Knowledge Resources.

Now about the role itself

Key Outcomes

1. Communication and Information clarity between Business team and IT
2. Anticipate problems and bottlenecks that IT team may face and enable resolution so that integrity of the i-become vision is not compromised
3. Search for new solutions for developers and / or new ideas and possibilities for the business team
4. Make cost estimation & suggest business cases
5. Create freedom for the business team to envision new models without being constrained by lack of technological capability to actualize these models

Notes and Remarks
Possible profile of persons who may be able to deliver the above

1. Minimum 5 years experience with at least 50% experience in working in medium to large IT projects
2. Typically in an interface position where responsibility for integrity to business vision and responsibility to efficient and quality of delivery converge
3. Has had business responsibility in terms of cost efficiency, profitability, investment decisions, etc

Preferred capacities

1. Keeps up to date with the latest technologies and is able to share possibilities in simple / business terms with others
2. Able to understand a business vision and take ownership of its technological actualization (Making it happen)
3. Able to enable and drive IT developers / vendors effectively

Anybody interested write to hr AT illumine DOT info

Say financial innovations like credit-default swaps et al indeed was the primary cause of the financial turmoil. Also, let us assume innovation is an inherent feature of capitalism. By definition ‘innovation’ is something new, a product or technique that didn’t exist before. And supposedly existing government regulation failed because it was meant for yesteryear financial system, not CDS. And by the same logic future crises will arise from innovative products that don’t yet exist. How will regulating CDS et al help if a future crisis is to come from an entirely different innovation? And how will government, with the greatest of intentions, regulate something which doesn’t not yet exist, i.e. future innovation?

There’s a larger question that goes beyond financial markets and this specific context. Innovations generally have a positive and a negative impact on different groups of people. The group of people who are negatively impacted cry foul and demand intervention of some sort (regulation for example). This actually stems from the general resistance to evolve or change. People love status quo and they expect the world to maintain status quo, and if some “mad guy” wants to innovate, let it should not affect their lives.

I guess protectionism and the expectation of people that they will be protected by some system put in place by government is also biological in nature – very similar to human health which becomes dependent on drugs and medicines for survival. Hopefully, it won’t be genetic.

Henry Mintzberg (McGill University) says, “conventional MBA programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences.“
…
Mihnea Moldoveanu of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management maintains that the MBA is in crisis “because it selects for and cultivates traits and skills [tied to specific disciplinary knowledge] that are increasingly vacuous and superfluous.“
—
HBS professor Rakesh Khurana contends that many business schools have been complicit in creating recent corporate scandals by turning out graduates fixated on shareholder value at the expense of all other stakeholders in society.
…
“As organizations have become flatter, those running them are looking for leaders who can see opportunities and address problems that cut across functional boundaries.”

HBS has gone into some serious curriculum reform with renewed focus on leaders, people who make a difference in the world. Globalisation is another big buzzword with students going abroad i.e. outside of US for work and study.

In India, the high cost of hiring MBAs from leading business schools is rebounding on an economy in crisis. These are times when the true contribution of an MBA is manifested. Should “highly-educated elite business minds” that is an MBA fail to make a difference in whichever context they are currently in, will only hit more nails into the business education coffin.

But, putting a team in place to solve a critical business challenge is difficult. There is no JD (job description), only deliverables. There is no preferred qualifications – multi-disciplinary thinking in fact can open new doors in solving the problem. No wonder, even in such a flux, we are unable to find any one suitable for our work.

What are we doing?

We are working on a sustainable business platform to scale career design on the web.

Reference: What is career design? All the relevant material in our i-become blog 

Whom do we need?

We need professionals or practitioners, not doers or workers. We want people who look at their life as challenges and work towards solving or innovating. We need professionals to work with us on the Career Design Challenge which we have described in the following pages

The Web Challenge
The Content Challenge
The Community Connect Challenge

Join the challenge

Write to me by either leaving a comment with some contact details or send me a mail at anannya AT illumine DOT info

A large design collective of teachers facilitated by V Srinivas probed this question. An interesting insight thrown by one teacher: 

The greatest insight that I have got in by 29 years of teaching is that we come with preconceived notion and attack students; but we must think and analyze the situation in its own context before jumping to conclusions.

Check the website “assimilationmodel.wordpress.com” which was launched yesterday, on Teacher’s Day (5th September)

Guest Participants

Mr. Jasbir Singh Sokhi
Mr. Sujit De

From Illumine

Mr. Kiran Gulrajani
Mr. Biren Anand
Mr. V Srinivas

Mr. Sokhi and Mr. De are engineers presently working in Fortune 500 companies. They participated in this design session in their own personal capacity.

The output of this design session was a list of seven master orientations that make up the generic engineering practice. It is now part of the i-become Contribution Affinity Mapping(TM)

Have got lots of answers. For those who are not on LinkedIN, can respond through here.

What is the difference between an application developer and a software programmer? Can you explain in terms of contribution, not tasks?

I got a tremendous response from around the world.

My observations based on these answers are:

1. An application developer has a larger responsibility than a software programmer. Thus it is a responsibility based job description rather than process / activity based
2. Depending on the work, the application developer and the software programmer can merge / split. A large product development project may have many programmers focused on writing code with an application developer managing the higher responsibilities. In a smaller project or even an SME, the person may be the same – designing the software as well as doing the coding
3. As the IT industry has grown in complexity, application developer is essentially an evolution over software programming. It incorporates management thinking into the basic craft of writing a software program
4. Application developer develops application; cognate to that is the system developer and / or embedded systems developer
5. For a programmer to become a developer, he has to be aware of the overall development in the IT industry – latest methods, objects, technologies, etc – thereby value adding to the product development through efficiency and effectiveness

I wish to thank all the people for helping me out. The detailed answers are given below.

Mayank Vig wrote:

I think an application developer would be more of an architect who would be responsible for the design and architecture of the application whereas a programmer would be a person who would actually implement that design in coding.
In terms of Software Development life cycle, if a software developer or an application developer is involved in that life cycle, he could have various roles like designing the architecture, gathering the requirements, coding… and so on. Whereas as when we talk about the word programmer in lay man terms, it’s just someone who programs some machine, so i think a programmer would only be associated with programming or coding.

Taruna Verma wrote:
Heading dotNET services division at OutSmart360, Bangalore, India

There is no difference between Application Developer and Software Programmer, I would say applications are nothing but software and developers are nothing but coders/programmers, the difference is counted when you use the terms “Software/Application Developer/Programmer and Software Engineer”
Programmers write programs. With the ease-of-use of modern programming tools, anybody can be a programmer, including the high-school student. When applied to a job category, anybody who programs computers can be designated as a programmer. Titles such as Programmer/Analyst are used in the financial industry.
Software Engineering is a term used by those who believe software development is an engineering process, which can be performed in a systematic, quantitative way. In industry, Software Engineer as a title is given to professionals working in engineering and manufacturing industries, especially for large systems or embedded systems where high-reliability is required. Whether an engineering approach can be applied to software is a topic still under intense debate.
An Application Developer or Application Programmer applies to programmers who build software applications as opposed to systems. A software application refers to software that are used by people, as opposed to systems software which talks to other systems.

• Programmer/Coder – one who writes code, and that is it
• Software developer – one who writes code, takes care of graphics or GUI requirements, handles testing etc
• Software engineer – one who designs, composes specifications and plans tests for software

A simple example is of building construction, there are many people involved into the construction such as Builders/Contractors, Architects, Civil Engineers, labors etc. Having a programmer build software, is like hiring general contractor/builder to build your house rather than architect & engineer.

Ral Purina wrote:
Manager, Houston, USA

These titles denote to the same type of position. “Developer” is a more recent term, while “programmer” has been around since the 1960s.
Developers and programmers typically perform most, or all, of the functions in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). From helping clients refine their business requirements, through functional specs, tech specs, coding, testing, training, install, and follow-up.
Some companies have specialists called “business analysts” who do everything except tech specs and coding. Others have specialized “testers” for unit, mod, and integration testing. There are even “trainers” in large organizations, who only perform that task.

Himanshu Khurana wrote:
Co-founder at iStrait, India

A programmer is told how something is to be done.
A developer is just told what is to be done and he/she supposed to figure out how.

Rodrigo Fuentealba wrote:
Analyst/Programmer, Software Developer, Database Administrator, Developer and Researcher in Linux, Chile

A programmer is an old term (1960 to 1989), related to people who does everything in one language, e.g. a Cobol programmer has to do interface design, data management and networking (if applicable) in Cobol. It’s not flexible; he has a method that someone (probably a software analyst) passed to him.
With the new programming languages and frameworks, programmers spent less time in perform the same tasks, so they started to be analysts too. They study which tasks will be performed by the application, then model the database and program something which uses the database.

In this point, we can say that an application developer is the natural evolution of an analyst and a programmer, because he/she has to manage the same concepts that both a programmer and an analyst does, but with different tools, designed for different tasks, e.g. MySQL with PHP and HTML.

Computing and Data Processing (sorry, my english is not good) as a career is relatively new compared to others such as medicine, law and architecture.

From this point of view, the next step (and it happens now, because of the early stage of the Web) is for the society to recognize the tasks that have to be done to get a successful development. To clarify my point of view,

1. Hardware Support.
2. Networking.
3. Software Analysis.
4. Database-related: DBA.
5. Software Development.
6. Interface Design.

When you get the flu, you don’t go to an orthopedist. The same doesn’t apply in software: if you need simple software, you talk to a programmer and he has to do everything from hardware to interface design.

In developed countries such as United States, England, France and Japan, these practices are recognized, but in a global world it has to be a generalized behavior. I worked with others and could see how different is here in Chile.

The two concepts of program and application come from a different point of view: a program can be written without linking to external dependencies, but just the ones provided by the language. It’s “programmed” to do a task.

An application can get some information provided by the operating system and external dependency libraries. It’s “applicable” to make a database/server/system to do a specific task.

The same way classes are groups of functions (called methods) and variables (called attributes), projects are groups of applications and rules, something a program cannot do (or if it does, it results in a very poor software design and a software which results to be very expensive to maintain).

Mark Gebbie wrote:
Information Technology and Services Professional, Melbourne, Australia

In fundamental terms, software programmers write code in whatever language is involved, to transform inputs into the required outputs. They don’t necessarily need to know where those inputs come from, or how the outputs will be used. Their concern is that the program created meets the requirements definition they have been given.

Application Developers need to see the bigger picture, they need to understand what business processes are involved, what components are required to go into the application as a whole, to create an application to suit the business needs. These pieces include the components created by the software programmers.

On small systems, the application developer and software programmer may be the same person, but on larger projects, they will more than likely be different resources. It is quite possible that the application developer will never actual program any code themselves, but oversee the programs being written by others.

You couldn’t be an effective Application Developer without once having been a programmer if not still already a programmer. It is quite possible to be an application developer without being an expert in the language or the software being used, so therefore not really able to be a programmer in the application being developed. But certainly a good developer would need to know how programming is done in order to write high quality requirements definitions to be used by programmers.

I have worked on applications were there has been no actual programming, we have taken 3rd party components, “plugging” them together to make up the application or the system we were building. But when we needed customisations to be done, it helped to be able to go back to the 3rd party and explain in their terms what needed to be done to deliver what we wanted.

A very good question, very fundamental to the field we are in, yet there can be so many different interpretations. It probably very much depends on the circumstances involved.

Peter Kassan wrote:
Senior software executive and interaction designer, New York, USA

As you can see from the variety of answers already been given, there’s no consensus regarding what these terms mean, or whether there is any real difference between them–and you can add the terms ‘software engineer’ and ‘software architect’ to the mix of the equivalent terms.

A distinction that I didn’t see previously raised that I think is a meaningful one is that between application programmers and systems programmers. An application program is something that a user uses directly to accomplish a business goal–for example, Microsoft Word or a CRM system. An application programmer, naturally, is someone who writes application programs. Systems programmers write the programs that users never (or rarely) see or use themselves–for example, Visual Basic, MAC OS, or a relational database. Applications programmers make use of the programming tools that have been provided them; systems programmers write those tools.

Another category of program that wouldn’t be considered an application and wouldn’t be written by an application programmer is what’s known as a utility program–for example, a disk defragmenter, a file conversion program, or an installation utility. (Even if these programs have a user interface and aren’t completely hidden from the user, they’re necessary evils rather than programs that help users accomplish real business goals.)

Steve Cohn, MBA wrote:
Project Lead, Seattle, USA

I believe it’s the same. “Programmer” is a term I heard more often when I first finished undergrad, 20 years ago. application developer is a more common term, but they mean the same thing

Vincenzo Guastella wrote:
Software Integration Consultant, Eindhoven, Netherlands

There is a great difference in these definitions. Not because of the roles, but because the way of making this work changed a lot.

Until 20 years ago the programming meant rewriting almost everything from scratch.

Then the use of software libraries increased and to know coding rules was not enough to build an application. The knowledge of tools and libraries became so important that the programmer became the software engineer – someone able to mount together pieces realized by other people.

But realizing software is never the same job, it hardly fits the idea we have of engineering. That’s why the software developer has been defined.

He is someone with a deep knowledge of the latest libraries, IDEs and other tools. He is someone able to put together very common pieces, widely used, to realize something unique.

Tarun Mishra wrote:
Director at SLM Infotech, Mumbai, India

Application developer’s contribution is in terms of ensuring synthesis among various components of an application or solution. The synthesis among various components ensures the appropriate integration, robustness and reliability within and outside the application. They are more like designer’s type.
Software programmer’s contribution is to ensure the compliance with various standards, protocols, conventions and process outputs defined while developing the application.

This is a free flowing blog, there may be huge amounts of stuff on one day, absolutely nothing for a few days. Some of our initiatives will be explained here. Due to certain constraints in some of our engagements, we may not be able to divulge too much details upfront.

However, in case you are interested in exploring deeper into any aspect of our work, please do write or let us know and we’ll figure out a way in which we can help you find your answers.