As for the argument that programming languages are too cryptic, this is just a misunderstanding of what people really want. What people really want, is magic.
An issue well explained by Frederick Brooks in his famous Mythical Man Month book: difficulty of software development comes from analyzing and modeling the problem. Translating it into a programming language is an easy part.
The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are.
While the data quoted in the article comes from electric engineering, I expect that in programming the reality is even harsher.
One of the first slides that deeply troubled me claimed the following:
- Tests are (executable) specs.
- If it’s not testable, it’s useless.
What I see as a problem here, are the extremists. In my experience dealing with too devoted zealots of even perfectly reasonable methodology have been sometimes more difficult than actual problems we were trying to solve.
Entropic failure of conceptual integrity is probably the most common reason for software project failure. (The second most common reason is delivering something other than what the customer wanted.) Software rot slows down progress exponentially, so many projects face exploding timelines and budgets before they are killed.
I wish it was just a folklore. Unfortunately it's not.
I’ll never forget my second day on the job when Chris Cox, our V.P. of Product, assigned me the task to fix a pretty complex bug in News Feed. I'd never written php in my life, but a few hours later when I got my code working and ready for review, he said "Cool, ship it!" with a big smile on his face. At first I didn't think he was serious, but once it shipped, I realized that I had just pushed out a change on my second day that 25 million people would experience instantly.
Facebook that clearly embraces hacker culture. That reminds me recent essay by Paul Graham:
Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
And then it’s happening. Despite years of constant reminders that every feature a client asks for will always be more complex to write than it is to explain, you go for it. You really believe that this time, it really can be done in two weeks. Yes. Yes! We can do this! This time it’s different! It’s just a few graphics and a service call to get a store location. XML! No sweat. We can do this…I’m pumped! Let’s go!!!
It takes just a day for you and reality to once again make acquaintance.
A story of an “urgent, high-priority project”, that many of us know all too well. Great read.
Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.
So, even Apple was affected by the mania of ridiculous productivity metrics.
Two decades making games. I've seen a computer fly through a window, I've seen an ex employee trying to sledgehammer through from one companies adjoining wall to ours so he can get to his office and get his "stuff" back, I've seen one of my friends, a long time game vet kill himself on his birthday because nobody would listen to his brilliance
Disturbing comment to a good article on computer game industry. Great material for a book indeed.
The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to the "official" repository. There are many maintainers looking after various subsystems, but every patch they merge must eventually be accepted by Linus Torvalds if it is to get into the mainline.
It's surprising to read that the flagship of Open Source has so centralized development process. And scary bus factor.
Only the best are able to make significant contributions.A good developer will be orders of magnitude more productive than an average developer.
Random collection of things that make software development such a wild profession. Some are valid, but if the last one was true (“Requirements gathering is bulls**t!”), the whole consulting and outsourcing business should just disappear. For some reason that hasn't happen.
