I was listening to .Net Rocks #476 and I heard multiple times that they're leaving the one man shop behind and so on and so forth and complaining how they've been left behind and its too complicated for someone to pick up.  I whole heartedly disagree on every single level.  Software isn't more complex, its more about software envy and oversimplification that's the rudimentary problem. 

A few years back I was that 3 man shop.  I, like a lot of others, would go to the microsoft conferences and watch all the gee wiz bang cool stuff and would genuinely WANT to do what I had just learned about.  Then reality set in once I'd get back at the office... In order to take advantage of 90% of the stuff, there was a huge up front resource cost.  From downloading, installing, configuration and THEN getting it to work like I wanted there's a huge learning curve ... none of which was talked about at the conference.  Not ONCE did someone say "oh by the way, this took two people 3 months and 7 tons of coffee and 15 attempts of my own to put this together".  Would that make a significant impact on my perception?  Of course.  Would it make an even BIGGER impact on the perception of people approving it?  You bet.  Would I even had tried it?  Mmmmm maybe.

Quote time -- "Everything is hard before its gets easy".  Think back to basics -- walking.  How many times do you think it took before you could walk?  How many years of practicing did it take before you could run without falling?  Then why do we expect to jump in a fighter jet and instantly know how it all works?  Developing software in and of itself, I feel, is not complicated.  It's using the latest newest whatever that is.  I can write a vbscript to quickly toss out some info and do x, y and z which looks great and can write out some c# code to take stuff from a database and spit it out to a web page -- BUT how long did it take me to learn that?  How many times did I fall on my face, trip stumble and have to try again?  Just like walking, I still have problems staying upright at times.

I am by no means advocating someone shouldn't learn a particular technology, quite the opposite, but an understanding of up front cost will greatly influence a discussion of "do I need this, right now, today and should I spend time and resources on it?".  So in my opinion, and I'll do this as well, there needs to be a disclose before any talk, any blog post, article, etc that outlines the length of time to create said demo/product/functionality along with all the necessary resources on how you got to that point ... starting now.  This probably took a solid hour plus to write this along with 2-3 hours to listen and re-listen to the .net rocks podcast.