Kevin Rohrbaugh

A few weeks ago, I attended a talk given by Daniel Pink, who frequently speaks about the  value of “right-brain” thinking and its increasing importance in the future (see his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future). By right-brain, he typically means creative thinking skills, or the ability to identify patterns in less-than-obvious situations. In case you haven’t seen it, the talk he gave at TED will give a better flavor about his main points:

I tend to agree with many of Mr. Pink’s core ideas, but during the talk I attended, he mentioned “computer programming” several times as one of those tasks that’s more routine than creative, which is why it has proven to be easy to out-source. Here I disagree, as the creative part of software development tends to be my favorite aspect to the work. Given all the problems a typical software project encounters, it’s always surprising when people view development as a formulaic factory where requirements go in one end and software comes out the other.

Of course, it’s not just business authors who sometimes miss the boat on the creative parts of software development. Microsoft itself went through a phase of cranking out “software factory” patterns. More recently, they also seem to have latched on to right-brain/left-brain segmentation, as best seen with the Expression line of products.

It’s great for Microsoft to enter and compete in a market that is utterly dominated by Adobe, but they also seem overly eager to target WPF and Silverlight UI development at the “creatives,” eschewing their traditional strong-hold of “developers, developers, developers”. This seems like a risky strategy that has contributed to the lukewarm adoption of both of these technologies. Designers have been building things using Adobe products for years, so getting them to switch isn’t likely to happen overnight. Meanwhile, Microsoft developers are almost constantly being told that WPF is awesome, but it’s intended for designer/developer teams. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of development teams (such as those building line-of-business apps) without dedicated design staff, making this messaging and strategy a non-starter.

We humans are just starting to understand how our brains work and the entire notion of “right-brain people” might turn out to be a modern phrenology. There are many aspects to development that require creativity, just as there are many aspects to design that are analytical. It’s best to judge people based on their actual performance and contributions, rather than a role-based notion of right- or left-brain preference. After all, if developers were all total left-brain people, they would have left for Vulcan a while ago, and if designers were all right-brain, ActionScript would be a lot less popular.