watch this  

O’Reilly has a terrific interview with 37 Signals’ Jason Fried. I want Jason to come to my office and repeat the following paragraph to all of the Project Managers (some of whom are PMI-certified and all of whom are infatuated with CMMI) and IT decision-makers:

The way I look at it is this: I want developers to be comfortable with their development environment. I’m a designer and a business guy, not a developer. I’m not going to push PHP or Java or whatever just because I’ve heard of it. I’m going to defer to David on this. And if David chooses Ruby, then Ruby it is. It’s all a matter of trust. If you don’t trust your developer to choose the right environment, then how can you trust him to build the best application? Trust is critical here. And, further, why would you dare impact your developer’s morale by throwing him or her into a language where he can’t be as productive or as satisfied? You only get good work from people who enjoy doing the work. I’ll take a happy average programmer over a disgruntled, frustrated master programmer any day.

I think that sums up my feelings quite perfectly.