Developers and Privacy Questions: code quality and business process

RedMonk is a developer advocacy company. Plenty of other firms focus on CIOs or lines of business, but we tend to give most attention to what I call the Make Side – the people that do the work and decide on implementation rather than those that sign the cheques.

I really dislike the characterisation of software developers as low in people skills and business savvy – after all there are plenty of people with terrible interpersonal skills in management positions, and people running businesses that really don’t know what they are doing. Many developers can and do get it. They understand the business and its needs, and develop accordingly. One area however where knowledge tends to be pretty sparse, in both business and IT, is privacy, which is why I am happy to help my old mucker Thomas Otter with a survey he is currently running into developer issues- and whether they can and should bake privacy into the code they write.

In a week in which Twitter was hacked by a relatively simple dictionary hack (especially strange given Twitter’s approaches to rate limiting on the API… but not authentication) the timing seems perfect. So if you’re in software development please help Tom out. He works for Gartner, but this is an independent piece of work for his PHd.

Here is the survey. It doesn’t take long to complete. I will let you know the results when they come in.