Something been bothering me

[suityou01]

My experience is that most projects would be way better off without the management.

And this has been tested in practice at one pension company where they had a big cull of permies due to the bank crash. Nearly all the permie management were immediately shown the door, but the contractors, as they were being paid for until the end of their contracts were kept on.

They had the three smoothest month ends ever.

Senior management being such extended everyone and gave some of the independent contractors management titles and a raise.

I've seen that too. I prefer projects were people are cooperative, competent, hard working and not hung up on titles.

Very few of these projects around though.

[Coalman]

Most BA's just get in the way. A good BA can save you a lot of time though. These are very rare, just like great testers.

BA has grown out of *analyst* programming because a lot of techies dont want to, or just cant talk to the business - because they don't want to learn the business.

BA's do a lot of testing - what ex-programmer wants to do that?

There are far more programming jobs than BA jobs. We have 15 programmers, and 5 BA's. The level of business knowledge a BA must have is far deeper than what a programmer can get away with. Most of the finer details of the business are boring. I'm mainly talking about banking here since thats my bag.

If you keep up your programming skills, you can build software at home and eventually sell your own applications. That's where i'm headed. I'm just about to release my first app. If you truly focus on BA work, you will lose your coding skills.

Couldn't agree more (except for the last para - I'm a BA!).

My domain knowledge is very narrow, but at the moment it pays well, and I get home to see my kids nearly every night.

Trying to diversify to cover not getting gigs in my niche is a worry so refreshing my old DB / Report Developer skills as a backup - will also be able to use/train on current project so woo hoo!