After three months on the dole, I got a job offer from the IT director of a local non-profit healthcare association here in Orange County. I start next week. As Gerald Ford used to say, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

It’s a small IT group — 8 people, including the director. I’ve got to admit I’m a little burned out on big corporate IT shops.

I got out of hands-on programming and into leadership roles because I thought I could do a better job than the people I saw doing it. I wanted to develop teams that got things done using their skills and their collective intelligence, but in practice, you typically get locked into some corporate process standard.

A process may be good for delivering consistent results, but they may not be consistently good results. Like at McDonald’s, every Big Mac is just like every other Big Mac because they have a process for making Big Macs. But is a Big Mac a high-quality dining experience? Not really . . .

A friend and former colleague, who was also recently let go by a local mortgage company, emails to say

I’m doing well… still spending a lot of time in Bakersfield, spending time with my parents. I’ve been looking for jobs, but haven’t applied for anything. I guess I actually need to apply.

She’s single, she can afford to be sanguine.

I was in contact with at least 100 companies in one way or another – sent a resume, called, phone interviews, in-person interviews – and got two job offers. So the upside with her approach is that I could have avoided 98 rejections.

Did I mention the job is with a healthcare organization? I was laid off from my last job, with a mortgage bank, when the mortgage industry tanked. Prior to that, I was laid off from a dot-com consulting company when that industry imploded.

I’ve got a knack for getting into industries at their absolute zenith, then riding them down the drain.

But healthcare — it’s recession-proof! You can’t say, “I’m going to put off getting critically ill until I have a better read on the economy.” Well, you can say it, but you can’t do it.

My first 10 years in the software business, I had great managers. They did the management thing and I did the programming thing and we got great results together.

Then, after the dot-com boom torpedoed industry hiring standards, I got tired of working for managers who should not have been allowed anywhere near a software project, people who were not fit to direct a professional software developer to a table at the Olive Garden, much less direct their activities on a complex project.

I couldn’t possibly have continued to work for people like that — it just made a mockery of all the work I’d done over the years to actually learn something — but I still miss being a developer . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Warren Buffett published his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders this week:

Our gain in net worth during 2003 was $13.6 billion, which increased the per-share book value of both our Class A and Class B stock by 21%. Over the last 39 years (that is, since present management took over) per-share book value has grown from $19 to $50,498, a rate of 22.2% compounded annually.

Continue reading Warren Buffett Gets the Last Laugh

I guess I should have seen this coming when they eliminated free bagels on Fridays. Or when we stopped printing things on plotter paper because the paper vendor stopped coming around shortly after we stopped paying him.

The retention list was heavily weighted toward young women with big tits and the managers’ poker buddies. Two of the laid-off developers had to be hired back within 30 minutes of being let go, when someone in authority belatedly realized they were working on the company’s only billable project.

None of us will be retiring on our severance package, since there wasn’t one. We’re now faced with the one thing we all feared enough to stay with this company so long in the first place: trying to find another job in the worst tech market in 20 years.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Best one-sentence explanation of how the dot-com boom killed professional practice in the software business:

Improving operational efficiency is not a priority during gold rushes.

— Steve McConnell

I was a big fan of the original vision of this company . . .

• ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up
• Diary of a Start-Up
• Goodbye ArsDigita
• The Dot-com Deadpool: ArsDigita

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?