From Bertrand Meyer: You know the feeling: You’ve accepted to chair a session at a technical conference, you’ve managed to keep the speakers on time, and a talk has just finished. “Any questions?” asks the speaker, met only by stunned silence. It’s your job as Chair to fill in, and you have no idea what to ask. Here, as a service to the community, is the list of the Ten Best Questions To Ask At The End Of A Talk When You Absolutely Have To: 10. When do you come up for tenure? 9. This doesn’t look like PowerPoint. What presentation software are you using? 8. Very interesting theorem you just proved on the last slide. It’s lemma 2 in chapter 1 of my 1977 thesis. 7. I like your accent. Where did you learn English? 6. Who does your hair? 5. On slide 2, what did Lambda stand for?… Read more →
Hey, Fat Ass!
I’m 46 years old. I’m no longer young. I hate it when people ask how old I am, but it’s only going to get worse. So far, I feel like I’m aging more gracefully than a lot of people — without the use of hair coloring, ponytails, earrings, sports cars, and cosmetic surgery. I’m still married to my first wife. To the dads of several of my son’s friends, I pose this question: If you are in fact a bald, middle-aged fat-ass, how long can you pretend to still be young and hip? Read more →
I Know Lots of Different Languages
My son is looking over my résumé, including the part where it says I’ve worked with lots of different languages. “You don’t know a lot of languages,” he says. Read more →
My Dog Sends a Bark Out to His Mom
Hi Mom! Happy Mothers Day! I know you were sad when I left, but I live with a loving family now, so you don’t have to worry about me. Say hi to Dad. Love, Lightning P.S. Here is a picture of me with my owner. — Lightning Read more →
The Waterfall Approach Persists as an Urban Myth
Much of present-day software acquisition procedure rests upon the assumption that one can specify a satisfactory system in advance, get bids for its construction, have it built, and install it. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong, and that many software acquisition problems spring from that fallacy. — Fred Brooks, “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” We were doing incremental development as early as 1957, in Los Angeles, under the direction of Bernie Dimsdale [at IBM’s Service Bureau Corporation]. He was a colleague of John von Neumann, so perhaps he learned it there, or assumed it as totally natural . . . All of us, as far as I can remember, thought waterfalling of a huge project was rather stupid, or at least ignorant of the realities. I think what the waterfall description did for us was make us realize that we were doing something else, something… Read more →
OC Real Estate Report
I recently sold a house in Laguna for $3.5 million. It was on about 2,000 square feet of land, maybe a twentieth of an acre, and the house might cost about $500,000 if you wanted to replace it. So the land sold for something like $60 million an acre. — Warren Buffett Read more →
My Son Points Out Something . . .
. . . that I’d already noticed: You know, nobody really cares what you have to say about anything. Read more →
Sports Parents Are Ruining the World
To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are very naughty — much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority . . . This is called moral influence . . . — Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh One of the moms from my son’s hockey team tells me that there’s too much “silliness” on the team, that the kids need to prepare for games with a little more seriousness. Read more →
99 Rules
Here’s a short excerpt from an article called “Ninety-Nine Rules for Managing ‘Better, Faster, Cheaper’ Projects” by Alexander Laufer and Edward J. Hoffman: In a dynamic environment, project management is not about performing according to plan, with minimal changes. It is about meeting customer needs, while coping successfully with unavoidable changes. Therefore, the planning system should be capable of coping with changes. Jesus Christ, if I could articulate even one rule that perfectly, I’d publish it and call it a day . . . but there are 98 more of these! Here’s another one: More paperwork does not ensure greater information reliability or accuracy — it only adds to the non-value-added cost. It only seems that adding more measurement and reporting means better control. The illusion of control may partially explain an obsession with control. A must read! Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Job Posting of the Week
6 Programmer Analysts with Java, J2EE, Weblogic, Websphere (before Java you should have programmed in C++ not VB or Visual Basic) I don’t entirely share the author’s view that programmers can be ordered up like pizzas — Java, C++, hold the VB — and I would point out, sadly, that the hiring path for developers is now littered with jackasses who don’t know that VB and Visual Basic are the same thing . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Women Leaving IT Considered Discouraging?
Women represent nearly half the workers in the U.S. — 46.6 percent. However, they always have been underrepresented in I.T. Even more discouraging is the fact that the percentage of women working in I.T. jobs is not growing but dropping. — Why Women Leave I.T. Why is that discouraging? Who exactly is discouraged by it? Here’s a simple explanation: Maybe women don’t want to work in IT. Is there nothing more rewarding that a woman can do with her life than work in IT? IT in the post-dot-com era is a stagnant industry. A lot of people in it would like to get out of it, but they need the money. I don’t encourage my son to get into it, nor would I encourage my daughter to get into it, if I had one . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
I Feel This Guy’s Pain
Misspellings are in the original document: I am not the most organised person in the world. I have a poor short-term memory, so I write things down. But because I have a poor short-term memory, I loose the paper. I tried to become more organised — I brought Getting Things Done. Then I lost it. I feel I might be more organised if I stop loosing my organisational aids. Read more →
Homework Follies
“How did you multiply this times 2.5 and get this?” I ask. He looks at the problem for a while. “I multiplied it a different way,” he says. ME: Shouldn’t this answer be 41 instead of 71? HIM: No, Alex. ME: Why are you calling me Alex? HIM: What is “no”? He’s reading a word problem aloud: “Maggie was traveling with her family on the Oregon Trail. The first day, they traveled 11 miles, the second day they traveled 9 miles, and the third day they traveled 14 miles.” Pause. “Now that was a good story!” Read more →
Disorganization
We’re trying to figure out a directory structure that lets us organize project documents in a way that’s less confusing than the current directory structure. We’ve got a lot of documents and nobody can find anything when they need it. Thinking outside the box for a minute, maybe a better question would be: Do we really need to produce this many documents? Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Soul-Crushing Email of the Day
I swear to God this is a real email from a once-promising manager with degrees from Brown and Princeton, who recently accepted a new position as Chief of Staff to the CEO, and now uses her Ivy League education to put out emails like this: Effective immediately please ensure that all written communications at [insert company name here] have a minimum font size of 12. In particular, [insert CEO’s name here] has asked me to convey that he will be ‘throwing away’ any communication he receives (over email or on paper) that does not meet this criteria [sic]. Please call me with any questions or comments, and hope everyone has a great weekend! I always say if you’re going to misuse the word “criteria,” at least do it in a highly readable 12-point Verdana font . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Completion Percentages
It ain’t over till it’s over. — Yogi Berra A project manager reports that her project is “48 percent complete.” In terms of what, I wonder? Calendar time? Cost? Effort? I know it’s not 48 percent complete in terms of functionality because there hasn’t been any working code delivered, just a bunch of documents. One approach that makes sense to me is to express completion percentages in terms of implemented requirements. For example, if you have 100 functional requirements, and 48 of them have been successfully implemented, then you’re 48 percent complete! Actually, I oversimplified that a little . . . All requirements are not created equal: Because some requirements cost more to implement than others, and some requirements have a greater business value than others, you could assign relative cost and relative value numbers to each requirement, and calculate completion percentages accordingly. This is good both for measuring the… Read more →
Negative Milestones
I buy my first pair of reading glasses. My wife almost weeps when she sees them. “You’re getting old,” she says. Read more →
The Ephemeral Beauty of the World
Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world? — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse Read more →
Profiles in Management: The Baffled Bigwig
Our Sr. EVP dropped by today for a meet and greet . . . he was 45 minutes late, and when he arrived, it was obvious he had no idea who he was talking to. “Is this the IT group?” he asked. It was explained to him that some of the people were from IT, but some were from the call center and tech support. “And do they all report to you?” he asked the senior manager in the room. Here’s a little trick I’ve picked up over the years: When you’re addressing a group of people, take a few minutes beforehand to learn who they are. It will make them feel less insignificant. After this fiasco, he went off to a catered meeting with other highly compensated executives, and I went out to buy my own lunch. Prediction: This meet and greet will be mentioned in at least two… Read more →
My Next Career
Somehow at dinner the subject of moving to Texas comes up . . . not a discussion so much as a stream of consciousness monologue by my wife, who has relatives in Texas, and it’s much cheaper to live there than it is here, and so on. “But what would you do for a job?” she asks me. Read more →