To all you coders out there....
How do you feel about several people working on one software project? My colleague complained today that we have too many people working on the same software set so when something isn't working you have to wait on someone else. He would rather have just a few people know the entire code structure. That is freaking ridiculous. How can you expect to get anything done like that. Our current coding platform is huge, because it is very reusable. Many projects use the same classes because the work is similar. There's no way one or two people could maintain it, though there are a few that know the software well enough they probably could, but it would take way too long and they wouldn't be free to do other things with their time.
This guy has complained multiple times about this, but from what I hear the code they had before we converted them to our platform was horrendous, very bloated and hard to understand. Besides if just one or two people know the code, what happens if they leave? Then the company gets screwed because half your knowledge base just left. (which has happened before, luckily never the lead). Another reason we have this is so that each person doesn't have to worry about low level things like hardware drivers, etc. This allows you to focus on the real task without worrying about the low level stuff.
This all started when we had some CAN software problems and the guy who ported the driver happens to be in Ireland for his honeymoon. I don't know what this guy's problem is, I managed to dive into the code and change a few things, it just happened to take me a few hours to figure out what was going on instead of the "expert" doing it in a couple minutes. argh or something.