The Nicolas Cage Effect

First off, in my real life, I sell myself off as a programmer, mostly because it would be too hard to self my real skills most any other way.  But I often find that people do not really think of programmers as real people, but merely as interchangeable cogs in a semantic way.  Here is my latest way to explain it:

Image you are a producer or director of movies.  A hot new script has landed on your lap - it is a recently found Shakespearean play and you own the rights!  Who is the first person you think to cast in it?  Nicolas Cage?  Probably not - probably a well known Shakespearean actor, even if you had to dig one up.

A second hot script lands on your lap - this one is an action movie with a quirky main character...  Nicolas Cage and you have a blockbuster on your hands, my friend.

So, say you have Nic's contract in your hot little hands, what do you do with him?  You know he is the only one for certain roles - you can see it in your mind's eye.  If you image casting him in other less Nic-like movies, you can also image not being successful in the movie industry and being drummed out of town like a common pygmy.  If you casted Nic in the Shakespearean movie and it bombed, would you blame Nic?  No, he is an expert at being Nicolas Cage in movies, so you would be the fool for miscasting.

Now, apply this to programmers.  I'm an expert in my field.  People see my resume and want me on their team.  Once hired, they try to cast me as a generic programmer, "It is code, why can not any programmer knock any piece of code out of the park, monkey boy?  And being a name in the industry, we expect you to excel at any piece of code we throw at you - you are The Edward!"  But really, it is the Nicolas Cage Effect.

Just because one is very good at something, extrapolating that something out to the most generic definition just screams of General Semantic errors.  It is like call certain things "junk food", the word "food" is there, so therefore I can use it as a substitute for the general class of foods.  If you are looking for Nicolas Cage and need Nicolas Cage and use him in a Nicolas Cage kind of way, I smell the sound of success!  If not...  doom!

The Edward