Grady Booch calls it “one of the dirty little secrets of software engineering”: Success in software development depends most upon the quality of the people involved. It is, in fact, the heart of the real software crisis: There is more software to be developed than there are capable developers to do it. The conclusion I have reluctantly come to after more than 20 [and now nearly 40] years of software development is this: Excellent developers, like excellent musicians and artists, are born, not made.