“…and that’s really scary.” Watch all the way to the end, the argument is made there. And there’s a lot to back this up:

A very rare technology/software-engineering post. Article here deals with the three types of programmers:

We have three primary personas across the developer division: Mort, Elvis and Einstein. Mort, the opportunistic developer, likes to create quick-working solutions for immediate problems. He focuses on productivity and learns as needed. Elvis, the pragmatic programmer, likes to create long-lasting solutions addressing the problem domain, and learning while working on the solution. Einstein, the paranoid programmer, likes to create the most efficient solution to a given problem, and typically learn in advance before working on the solution.

This interests me, but I’m even more interested in the response from the programming community. One theme that seems to re-emerge over and over again is that people do not like to stereotype or pigeonhole; they seem to be operating from a premise that any lessons learned by indulging in such contraband thinking, must automatically be wrong.

I’m not impressed by that argument at all. There was, however, another one (somewhere) who pointed out it’s credible, in fact likely to be a common occurrence, for a single engineer to display one of these behaviors on one project and a different behavior on some different project. This is something I find to be quite reasonable. Perhaps instead of labeling these things “personas” it would be more appropriate to call them roles.

I notice as I think back over the years, there is a very strong predilection among management, and also among recruiters and contracting agencies as their own role has become more pertinent to the industry, to see all software developers as “Morts” and the software itself as some kind of stuff to be measured in magnitude only. Like asphalt, wallpaper paste or roofing shingles. How many pounds does this Mort spread per hour? Oh, he became a project manager or a principal architect? That must be because he was the quickest. This is an assumption that leads to much trouble for many stakeholders.

Speaking for myself, thinking back on my experiences, and the ones that made me feel most fulfilled and like I had contributed the most to the success of a project, where someone else lacking my experience could not, my roles there could be more realistically likened to the guy hammering the frames and studs together. Or maybe pouring the foundation. It’s the little secrets that lead to success. Pay extra to get the big honkin’ long nails, measure-twice-cut-once, verify everything, and proceed with an attitude of “Whatever I build is gonna stay built for a long time.”

I recognize the hazards and harms of stereotyping. But I do have to say, there certainly is a perceptible difference between the Elvis/Einsteins and the Morts. And I have been very fortunate career-wise, overall. There were a lot of times when it didn’t seem like it, but looking back over the long term I’ve spent a lot less time on the bench than some other people have, many of whom possess talents in great abundance that I’m lacking.

But I must say, I probably could have improved on things for my own benefit, had I been more proactive in taking on the issues raised by this “Mort complex.” Probably, others could have done so as well. Our vocation is grossly misunderstood by the public. I suppose all vocations are, in some way or another. But ours is misunderstood by insiders, who truly believe and act on the assumption that we just slap things together that can be slapped together any ol’ way, and progress-against-time is the only variable that has any lasting impact on anything. Remember making jokes about this? “You guys get started on writing that code, I’ll go upstairs and get some requirements.”

This is our blogger friend Sonic Charmer, CEO, Chief Cook and Bottle Washing of Rhymes With Girls and Cars talking. We subscribe to his RSS feed, and you should too. Not because he’s the guy who came up with a realistic theory about why it’s so hard to burst drinking straws out of their wrappers with one hand lately…although he did do exactly that, and nobody else has. But because he looks at movies in a very intelligent and useful way — which is to say, he looks at them the way I look at them. As a menagerie of over-used, underly-creative tropes.

Like for example: You know that trope where a kinda-sorta-bad-guy, but not completely evil bad guy, a bad guy who shows lots of promise for being redeemed into a good guy, is coerced into holding up a bank or cracking into a safe because a really super-duper-rotten-to-the-core-bad-guy has kidnapped his daughter and is holding her hostage? Well…Sonic has not written too much about that lately, to the best I understand. But he does have something to say about the plot device where a sexpot female has just the bees’ knees excuse for cheating on her husband or boyfriend.

What he’s writing about, specifically, is…

A guy, due to some strange circumstances, is thought to be dead.
His wife starts sleeping with his best friend.
Then he comes back.
At first, he doesn’t know, as she hides it from him.

He came up with:

1. The Walking Dead
2. Homeland

And then I threw in:

3. A Very Brady Sequel
4. The Dead Zone
5. Face/Off
6. Darkman
7. Rob Roy

After which, I thought of

8. Multiplicity

Now, what SC is looking for falls within a tight scope of decent women of healthy conscience who thought their husband or paramour was dead, dead freakin’ dead. Some of these skirt this perimeter and some fall well outside of it. In Rob Roy, Mary has no way of knowing whether her husband Rob is alive or dead, and has no reason at all to suspect he’s on the far side of the sod, in fact she is taken, in a memorably graphic scene, against her will. Andie MacDowell in Multiplicity, likewise, has no reason at all to think her husband is dead; she’s unwittingly seduced by his clones. But they do fall within the definition of what Sonic Charmer is describing, in that these are women who enjoy the benefit of some flimsy excuse, interwoven with the movie’s main plot, for engaging in The Act outside of monogamy.

The trend is perceptible, if not outright-objectionable, because if for no other reason it isn’t reciprocated across gender lines. It is awkward and distracting to cobble together a story about a man being taken against his will…although it’s been done, like here and here.

But Sonic’s query concerns a tighter class as well as a looser one. He is thought to be dead; she is despondent, bereft of solace, finally finding it in the arms of another man, most likely his best friend. Meanwhile, he emerges from oblivion, not dead after all. Has that happened in a gender reversal? I cannot think of a single example. Well..maybe just one, which was a made-for-TV sequel of something that came before.

Commenter Severian came up with some decent observations, I thought.

[O]ne could go so far as to say “woman receives the complete devotion of two hunky men but never really has to choose between them” is the plot driver behind umpteen movies these days, and behind chick lit in general. It’s certainly the case in those awful Twilight movies any male in any kind of relationship in the past five years has had to endure….

I guess it boils down to: a wom[a]n with two or more men on a string is somehow a heroine (and a victim, because they keep trying to force her to choose), whereas a man with multiple women on a string is a player and a jerk. And since women control the bucks, that’s what we see.

Now, here we have a paradox: Women like attention. They crave it. Not all women; but the kind of women being discussed here, the kind who nurture all these unstable emotional demands, who command all the purchasing dollars that mold and shape the movies the rest of us see — they want to be valued. If they must go missing for any length of time, they want to be missed. They want attention, lots and lots of attention.

You could be forgiven for thinking that if they do have a fantasy about someone disappearing, being thought dead, and miraculously reappearing again — it would be about them. But that is not the case. The fantasy has to do with the husband or boyfriend disappearing…the waifish despondent widow finds comfort and solace in the bed of his best friend, and then the dead guy comes back again and now we have a love triangle, oh dear. What to do. But — in real life, if that were ever to happen, the two-timing slut-widow wouldn’t be getting a whole lot of attention. Weeks, months, maybe years after the reappearance, the whole community would be focused on Lazarus. Wow, how awesome that he isn’t dead after all. Too bad his wife is such a tart.

It’s clear to me the entire exercise is all about sympathy. Women in movies can be indecisive about their partners in the mattress-dance, because they can do that and still remain sympathetic. Dudes can’t do anything like that. The cold, hard truth is that nobody’s going to feel sorry for a guy if he loses his woman…his wife, girlfriend, sister, mother, daughter. He’s certainly not going to be given any kind of license to fuck around. That would be violating the memory of whoever. But things work out differently for the honeys; they need someone to keep them warm at night, and they need their bills to be paid. Plus, they’re all sad what with their hubbies being drowned or blown up or whatever. Need a strong shoulder to cry on.

But then again — nearly all of these examples come from the 1990’s.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Roger Gitlin writes in Canada Free Press:

What we are witnessing today as 2011 turns the page, is a slow, agonizing death of the once proud party of the people. In decades past, the Democratic Party was the party of the working man. It was the party that fought to even the playing field with unscrupulous and an all-too greedy American industry. Over time, real progress was made and working folks were paid a decent wage and afforded a lifestyle that many today would envy. I was fortunate enough to grow up in the America of the 1950s and 1960s that molded me into what I am today. In 1968, I was proud to cast my first ballot for Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Things have changed a bit these past 45 years.

Today the Party of the working man has become the Party of the non-working class. The Democrats have devolved to become the Party of moochers, leeches, and victims. And this Party of hope and change has morphed into a Frankenstein that would turn FDR in his grave. The Democratic Party is an abomination that is slowly strangling the greatest country in the world: The United States of America.

He gives lots of reasons not to vote for them…none of which I need. Question is, are they really on a downslide into oblivion? Isn’t that looking through rose-colored glasses?

I’ll permit myself this much optimism: They are not going away, since we have a need for two major parties. One of those parties, or the other, can diminish itself to standing for absolutely nothing, and certainly the democrat party is close to this extreme. But that party will continue to endure, if for no other reason than to accumulate and thereby represent the votes of opposition to the other party, votes which are always going to be there, and will always need a place to go.

But I think in the next couple of decades the Donkey Party will have to reform. Standing for absolutely nothing is a bad plan. History suggests that when it comes to planning battle strategy, democrat strategists are smarter than I am — as I would certainly hope they would be, since this isn’t my day job. But they’re pig-iron stupid when it comes to things they haven’t seen coming. They have a poor track record of “waking up,” becoming aware of things which had previously escaped their awareness. I don’t think they were aware of what follows…

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging page:

It’s interesting. We’ve got all these people who say the two major parties are the same, in some ways…and let’s face it, they have a point.

But it seems when the GOP surges to victory, it’s over some specific issues. Like hey, quit letting these felons out of jail to rape our wives and slaughter our children. Or get rid of that boondoggle ObamaCare. Nuke those terrorists, welfare is temporary assistance not a permanent way of life, build the dang fence.

When the democrat party has a good year, it’s over a bunch of fluff and nonsense. Hooray for us! Help us destroy our opposition. More power and money to our friends in the unions, businesses shouldn’t be profitable, work shouldn’t be rewarding.

These two parties are not the same.

The democrats don’t have a platform. In order to create the perception that they do have one, they have to peddle cliches that don’t really mean anything.

Well, they don’t have much of one. If I were to speak in tones of realism about the platform they really do have, it would be three planks:

One, there are people with racist/sexist/prejudicial thoughts running around, and (somehow) we’ve got to fix this.

Two, there needs to be more power and money going through the federal government. Since it’s we good people who are going to be running it forever and ever and ever, y’know. No bad people are ever on top, from this moment forward, so we have to make it omni-powerful and put it in charge of everything.

Three: Like I said, above, hard work should not pay. People who create products and provide services useful to other people, need to be under the command and management of other people who’ve never done any such thing in their entire lives.

This isn’t a complete list. There’s a line somewhere that separates “what’s wrong with them?” from “what exactly is it they’re trying to do?” The line gets blurry and it gets blurry rather fast…so the ones that look more like criticism than statement of purpose, I’ve left off. Skipped over the ones that would make them look really bad.

No further comment.

…and this is starting to annoy me quite a lot. It’s like getting poked in the ear, with a stick, repeatedly, by an irascible little kid whose parents won’t do anything about it. It goes from “this is weird” to “what the fuck” to “time to lay the smack down,” at warp speed…and the flip-flopper thing has been going on since Kerry was running, some seven years ago.

The act seems to arrive in three parts, kind of an unholy trinity thing:

1. My position has been completely consistent since Day One^TM;
2. You’re an idiot for not seeing it that way;
3. I’m getting really irritated so don’t ever ask that question again.

Perceived front-runner Mittens demonstrates at 4:43…the question is asked at 4:05…through the sixth & seventh minutes things start to get testy. By 7:25 starts walking through the three items listed above and, frankly, acts like a bit of a snot.

He had further words for Bret Baier afterward. I’m not the first to say this and I won’t be the last, but if Romney really hopes to be the nominee he’d better get ready for a lot more grilling than what we saw in the clip. Baier discusses this further with Bill O’Reilly here.

Although Romney did a good job clarifying the immigration question and I find his quibbling somewhat reasonable, I call bullshit for two reasons. They have to do with the phenomenon overall, not quite so much with Romney, although they both apply here:

One. Logically, the argument of “There are subtle differences here that are going over your head because you’re not looking closely enough” — works when you’re arguing two things are different, against an opposition who insists they are the same. It doesn’t work when you go the other way.

Two. If you are indeed unfairly maligned as a flip-flopper because your comments on this earlier occasion, or on this later one, were taken out of context and some false meaning was read into one of them — the rational thing for you to do would have very little to do with dissuading people from looking further. If you’re sincere, you would pick up on where the mistaken perception set in, and then you’d go after it like a pit bull. Which, to be fair, Mitt did. But why then is it on others to bring it up and give you the opportunity to do this clarifying? Mitt should want to do that, and instead, here he is snapping at people.

Let’s walk through the meaning of this very carefully. It’s high time someone did.

People who are CompletelyConsistentAllTheWayBackToDayOne, are going to be somewhat passionate about that position. Indeed, if they’re picking up flak about being a flip-flopper, whether it’s deserved or not, it might very well be because the voters who care about the issue have gotten the gist that their concern isn’t being shared by the candidate. In other words, perceived inconsistency might not have anything to do with it at all. Now if I can figure that much out, rest assured the candidates can and Mitt Romney can. So this tactic of “Let’s move on, and you’re an even bigger idiot if you ever bring it up again” just exacerbates the problem. If the candidate isn’t concerned about that, then he must not be concerned about the issue. He looks guilty. And generally, he probably is. There’s no reason for you to move on unless you just don’t give a damn.

The flip-floppers are proven…or at least, strongly suggested to be…guilty as all holy hell every time they do this, and they’ve been doing it a lot lately. They’ve been doing it because Kerry got away with it. Didn’t win, but you could see this was working well for him and it looks like someone out there took good notes. Now they’re trying to get away with the same shenanigans as the encyclopedia salesmen:

There’s a much broader problem going on here though. I think Romney’s irritation is genuine, as was Kerry’s, and the same goes for the current President when these luminaries are confronted by audiences who aren’t radiating the emotional vibe being sought by the luminary. So this part of the problem doesn’t concern the candidates for the office, or even the current holders of the office, it has to do with the office itself. It is becoming an imperial position. People going after it don’t want to be asked whatever questions, or be confronted by whatever concerns. They want to tell the peasants want to think about things, how to prioritize things, and what emotional reactions they should be having. The candidates are being unfairly inconvenienced by the fact that such matters are under the control of other people.

Thing I Know #112. Strong leadership is a dialog: That which is led, states the problem, the leader provides the solution. It’s a weak brand of leadership that addresses a problem by directing people to ignore the problem.