House of Eratosthenes

Imagine joining an engineering team. You’re excited and full of ideas, probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful designs, awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and strength. You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a major metropolitan area. Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again. Fred only works with wood, so you ask why he’s involved because this bridge is supposed to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a 200-foot drop over rapids. Don’t worry, says Mary, Fred’s going to handle the walkways. What walkways? Well Fred made a good case for walkways and they’re going to add to the bridge’s appeal. Of course, they’ll have to be built without railings, because there’s a strict no railings rule enforced by Phil, who’s not an engineer. Nobody’s sure what Phil does, but it’s definitely full of synergy and has to do with upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they just let Phil do what he wants. Sara, meanwhile, has found several hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge design, so you’ll have to build around each one as the bridge progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety concerns. Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it’s become a case of “whoever got to that part of the design first.” This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things together, they’ve given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their way through the day with whatever parts were handy. Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re important parts. After the introductions are made, you are invited to come up with some new ideas, but you don’t have any because you’re a propulsion engineer and don’t know anything about bridges.

Would you drive across this bridge?

The premise is the conclusion and the conclusion is the premise. I’m not too sure about it, because the problems mentioned are all introduced by the people. And it isn’t even rooted in the people, it’s in their associations; more beauty and order and functionality made into ugly detritus by group-think. “Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it’s become a case of ‘whoever got to that part of the design first.'” That resonates with me, and my sad dark war-stories, more than anything else in that paragraph, but heck — Tom, working by himself, might end up doing just a dandy job, and the same is true of Harry.

People just aren’t good at looking at the designs and handiwork of other people, and saying to themselves “Right, so that’s it then; we’ll do it that way, going forward.” Teamwork, for all its blessings, is based on an axiom that people will be doing that every hour of the day, for months or years at a time. And that just isn’t how we’re wired. The problem is with the people, and the flawed assumptions about how they’ll work together, not with the programming.

This one hurt, like a shiv in the ribs:

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

MY GOD, IT’S TRUE. Red label, I keep it in a gravy jar in the chest freezer. But not German electronica, I watch Fargo or Club Dread. And yeah, you bet your ass it’s Good Code. The very best.

Okay, maybe not, but a damn sight better than anything that’s been tainted by the ravages of office politics. And if it was a bridge, yeah, you could drive across it.

Do you want to live in a world like this? No. This is a world of where you can smoke a pack a day and nobody even questions it. “Of course he smokes a pack a day, who wouldn’t?” Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they’re fully conscious they see their whole world and every relationship in it as chunks of code, and they trade stories about it as if sleepiness triggering acid trips is a normal thing that happens to people. This is a world where people eschew sex to write a programming language for orangutans. All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.

Yeah…I’m reminded of my late Uncle, who once said “Morgan, there are two kinds of people in the world…the ones like you who go around dividing everyone into two groups of people, and everyone else.” But there are two groups of people, and because of that, there are two groups of programmers: Some have passion about all the things you can do by translating an idea into a language, and some have passion about all the different languages into which one thing can be translated. Isn’t that the trouble with Common Core? It’s that second group that’s making the problem. The same is true of programming. No greater capability; no reduced maintenance; no easier comprehension of what is encoded, for the humans reviewing it; but, it is yet-another-way-to-do-the-same-thing, and that second group goes apeshit. The rest of us get more work to do, and we’d better act excited about it or we’ll be showing what slope-forehead troglodytes we are.

If a new language comes along to motivate the first group, it is one that makes something possible that had previously been written off as not-possible. There is a conflict, I think, that needs to be had-out sooner or later. Is that such a radical idea? We’re still in the first century of this new craft. It has to happen, because we’re the ones doing the brain surgery or trying to defuse the time bomb, and they’re the ones jumping on the bed.

[…] System “Imagine Joining an Engineering Team…” The Development Triangle Doing Away With the Electoral College Bloggiversary #4 for Professor Mondo […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/01/2014 @ 06:54

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“Imagine Joining an Engineering Team…”Thursday, May 1st, 2014

“Imagine Joining an Engineering Team…”
Thursday, May 1st, 2014