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An old joke

A man bought a new suit from Levine the Tailor, but when he tried it on, it didn’t fit him at all.

The jacket was too big in back, one sleeve was too long, one pant leg was too short, but Levine showed him that by hunching his back, leaning to one side, stretching out his right arm, and pulling up his leg at the hip, the suit could be made to fit, although he ended up limping rather badly.

As he hobbled down the street, he was stopped by a stranger, who said, “Pardon me, but where did you get that suit?”

“Levine,” he replied. “Just up the street.”

“Why, I believe I’ll go to Levine for my new suit,” the stranger said. “He must be a genius to fit a cripple like you!”¹

From a consulting company’s marketing literature:

We approach enterprise-class technology implementations with a simple philosophy:

• Use COTS whenever possible
• Leverage existing technology whenever possible
• When custom software is required, make it as modular and generic as possible

If I’m a potential client looking at that, I have a couple of concerns:

1. Web development was a lot faster and cheaper a few years ago before we started building around all these COTS products; and

2. Your philosophy seems to indicate that you lack the confidence, or the initiative, or the ability — or all three — to come in and model my business processes and build a system around them. Instead, you’ll bring me a generic, one-size-fits-all model and force-fit it to my business, or more likely, force-fit my business processes to the model. And at these prices, I don’t like it. I see the advantages to you of generic solutions, but I don’t see the advantage to me.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

1. Gerald M. Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting [back]