Most people learn to be programmers the same way I did: take some classes, write some code, compile it, hand it in . . .

The kind of projects you get in a programming class are pretty homogenized, and a lot of things that are very important in real life are either simplified or ignored: scope management, risk analysis, time/feature/resource tradeoffs, and so on.

So when I got my first job, I could write code in several different programming languages, but I hadn’t developed the discipline or attention to detail required to write software that companies could actually rely on to run their business.

Fortunately, I was able to work with managers and senior developers who had developed a professional discipline and were able to pass it along to me through training and mentoring.

There was a seasoning process that new developers went through, and in a few years, I had learned enough to be able to mentor junior developers myself, and the cycle began anew.

At that time, a senior developer might go on to become a lead developer, then a project manager, then a software development manager, a process which, unless you were some sort of a prodigy, would take about 10 years.

That Was Then . . .

A few years ago, there was a tremendous boom in the software business caused by the fact that every business, group, organization and enterprise in the universe suddenly had to have a web site.

The demand for developers outstripped the supply, professional barriers to entry were lowered and new people poured into the industry.

This influx of people at the lower levels pushed everybody up. People were promoted at a wartime clip and unfortunately found themselves in positions where they were expected to mentor others in a discipline that they had never had the opportunity to learn themselves.

So they did what they knew how to do — what everyone starting out knows how to do — write code, compile it and hand it in.

Professional software development became one big class project, with sadly predictable results.

It took clients a while to catch on to that, to stop funding it, but when they finally did, the industry went into a death spiral that we haven’t yet been able to pull out of . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Transcript of Andrea Yates’ confession
This is very, very sad and hard to forget. You may want to just skip it.

Having students write essays about books accomplishes three things. It makes them hate writing, because it’s such a fruitless, uninteresting assignment. It makes them hate reading, because even books they enjoy are turned against them. And it probably makes them hate thinking, because the kind of analysis they’re forced to do is so strained and dull.

— Joseph Weisberg

Continue reading Teaching Kids to Write

BitterSweets

As I was walking to the coffee machine, I overheard one of our developers trying to explain to a development manager that acceleration due to gravity is independent of horizontal motion.

He was illustrating the concept with a well-known example: that a bullet dropped from a given height will hit the ground at the same time as a bullet fired horizontally from a gun at the same height.

“I don’t agree with that,” the manager said.

“Agree with it?!” the developer said. “The law of gravity doesn’t depend on you agreeing with it.”

When I got my coffee and walked back, the manager was starting to waver.

“Okay, I believe that they would hit at the same time,” he said, “assuming there was not a lot of wind affecting the bullets.”

Not surpisingly, this is completely consistent with his management style, in which he forms opinions independent of physical reality, and then tries to bluff his way through the resulting chaos.

Ironically, one of the reasons I got into software development in the first place was the opportunity to work with bright, educated people . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

This is Weinberg’s Zeroth Law of Software: If the software doesn’t have to work, you can always meet any other requirement.

— Gerald M. Weinberg, Quality Software Management, Volume 1: Systems Thinking

The last two development projects I’ve worked on had one thing in common: We charged the client a pile of money and delivered basically nothing of any utility.

Another way to look at it: We met all the requirements by delivering software that didn’t work.

In one case, the client was big enough and flush enough to be able to weather a multi-million dollar misadventure and remain solvent.

In the other case, the client was a dot-com startup, wasn’t able to take the pounding, and had to go out of business.

That summarizes my recent contribution to the software industry.

Mediocrity is Seductive

The quality of the work being done at our shop — and at many other shops — is very poor, our project success rate is approximately 0.0 percent, the tools and techniques we’re using have been proven not to work, at least in the way that we’re using them, and yet any suggestion that we might want to try something different, with an eye towards improvement, is met with incredible resistance.

Why is that?

Well, I have to admit that even I feel a certain comfort level from the abysmally low expectations we’ve established for ourselves, both internally and on the part of clients.

The fact that no one really expects the software to actually work is, as Weinberg’s Law predicts, an incredible simplifying factor.

Clearly we could do better, but there might be some actual effort involved — and since no one expects better anyway, why bother?

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Related Links

• High Failure Rates on the Web
  In what sense can something be said to “work” if it fails 35 percent of the time?

The white supremacists’ guide to dating

• Joey Bishop - TV host
• Ernest Borgnine - actor
• Red Buttons - actor
• Kitty Carlisle - game show panelist
• Alistair Cooke - TV host
• Buddy Ebsen - actor
• Glenn Ford - actor
• Eugene McCarthy - U.S. senator
• Jack Paar - TV host, “The Tonight Show”
• Don Pardo - TV announcer
• Artie Shaw - clarinetist and bandleader
• Byron White - U.S. supreme court justice
• Richard Widmark - actor

Updates

• Joey Bishop - died 10/17/2007, age 89
• Red Buttons - died 7/13/2006, age 87
• Kitty Carlisle - died 4/18/2007, age 96
• Alistair Cooke - died 3/30/2004, age 95
• Buddy Ebsen - died 7/6/2003, age 95
• Glenn Ford - died 8/30/2006, age 90
• Jack Paar - died 1/27/2004, age 85
• Artie Shaw - died 12/30/2004, age 94
• Byron White - died 4/15/2002, age 84
• Richard Widmark - died 3/24/2008, age 93