I’m not sure it can be countered. It is a valid argument. Perhaps one of the most valid ones he could come up with. Your knowledge base is your most valuable asset in any project, much more valuable than any tool you are using. You work with what you know and honed yourself into. That’s how you do your best work. If you don’t, then you are just not that good at it in the first place.
I don’t know who Stephan Burke is, or what he does. But the factor time is also of great importance in today’s environment. And not just because of its relation to cost, which is of utmost importance in businesses because it has a direct impact on risk and benefit calculations (*). But also due to the rapid development of the technologies we use and how we can be locked in a perpetual race against better technologies if we don’t already dominate the scene.
I often tell my students you don’t port your system to another language to improve its performance by 10%. You just buy a computer that is 10% faster. This is good engineering.
(*) We programmers like to think of ourselves as having all the knowledge (particular about what is best for the company and the users, when in fact, behind their backs, we trade among ourselves some of the most cruel boss and user jokes in any profession). But in fact we know very little besides how to code. We are that much idiots. And we have an hard time grasping the concepts of finance and accounting, which prevailed for far longer than our profession and helped establish the grounds for all the business and technological development that we enjoy and share today. The coder that finally understands their code is far less important than the historically proven methods to calculate cost, benefit and risk in the ancient discipline of economics, has finally achieved Nirvana and can spread the Tao of Programming.
