With all the startup buzz going around (Y Combinator, Startup School., etc), there's a lot of people giving advice on how to "do" startups. Now, I have little to no experience with startups, so I can't comment on that advice, but another thread that keeps coming up is the business types denigrating programmers. There are numerous requests by business types the "just need a hacker" to turn their brilliant idea into code, and they'll make millions - and the hacker will make a year or two's salary, because s/he "just coded" the brilliant idea.
And then I read this, by a venture capitalist, and I see it in spades - a wholesale dismissal of programmers as slow and behind the times. It's the same attitude I saw in the 90's, when managers expected the Excel macros the receptionist had written for a company directory was deemed "almost done" and the programmer was expected to turn that into robust multi-user distributed application in 1 week, because the "hard part" was done, all that was needed was a little work.
It's really easy to throw together an application with no requirements but your initial ones, without customer UI expectations, training, testing, scalability (and no, it's not just having cloud processing and hosting - you've got to make sure that it does indeed happen when you need it), and documentation. It's even more fun when you can show up a professional with many other responsibilities.
Nice try. Now support the app.
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Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Sleeping With The Fishes
Sometimes someone writes something that just sings to you.
I've seen this so many times in my career, even at small companies, that I feel like one of those
little fish that swim in the dark abyss, sometimes drawn towards the dim light that turns out to be the lure of a horror with big teeth.
How to cope? Emphasize the problems, especially in hallway conversations near the offices of management above your direct manager. Point out your original, longer estimates at every milestone discussion.
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I've seen this so many times in my career, even at small companies, that I feel like one of those
little fish that swim in the dark abyss, sometimes drawn towards the dim light that turns out to be the lure of a horror with big teeth.
How to cope? Emphasize the problems, especially in hallway conversations near the offices of management above your direct manager. Point out your original, longer estimates at every milestone discussion.
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Sunday, June 22, 2008
Insecurity, or self-protection?
I'm as guilty of programming faults as anyone, but there's a vein of blame-the-programmers running through the blogosphere. Here's one example, discussing the tendency for programmers to develop in isolation and drop a finished product into the code line, where it's difficult for colleagues to analyze and understand for review.
What is not discussed is the environment that supports this. In many shops, the number of projects exceeds the number of developers, so everyone is always in the middle of multiple features, and the management rarely considers code reviews a worthwhile expenditure of time. It is hard to get the time for a final review, much less getting time from the 2-5 developers to review code in progress multiple times. The XP practice of Pair-Programming is one way to get at least one pair of eyes on code at all stages is also a hard sell to management - they see it as cutting their staff in half, and they already have too much to do!
Another issue is the type of criticism that we tend to get. Many of us are not well-suited to give constructive ciritcism. A cow-orker of mine is prone to call code not meeting her peculiar standards "bullshit" or "stupid", even if it meets the requirements provided the developer. I'm not partial to having such words applied to my efforts, especially if it's early in the development when my ideas are not fully formed.
But even if the programmers are less harsh, the fact remains that managers do not see reviews as progress, and it's rare to get the time to do them.
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What is not discussed is the environment that supports this. In many shops, the number of projects exceeds the number of developers, so everyone is always in the middle of multiple features, and the management rarely considers code reviews a worthwhile expenditure of time. It is hard to get the time for a final review, much less getting time from the 2-5 developers to review code in progress multiple times. The XP practice of Pair-Programming is one way to get at least one pair of eyes on code at all stages is also a hard sell to management - they see it as cutting their staff in half, and they already have too much to do!
Another issue is the type of criticism that we tend to get. Many of us are not well-suited to give constructive ciritcism. A cow-orker of mine is prone to call code not meeting her peculiar standards "bullshit" or "stupid", even if it meets the requirements provided the developer. I'm not partial to having such words applied to my efforts, especially if it's early in the development when my ideas are not fully formed.
But even if the programmers are less harsh, the fact remains that managers do not see reviews as progress, and it's rare to get the time to do them.
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The Limits of Self-Organization
I ran across this about a month ago, and it struck a nerve.
Now, as my previous entries will show, I'm not a big fan of typical corporate management, with the political games, favoritism, bad decision-making, etc. But I will step up to defend management in a corporation as being the only ones capable of doing a necessary job - keeping focus on the corporate target.
The post I read laments that at a conference, self-organization was a virtue, while it seems lacking in the company he works at. But there is a key difference - the corporation has a goal that is not defined by the participants, and management is the one group that can keep development from mistaking the intent of that goal.
Sometimes the corporate goal is just plain boring - and the developers, as we are wont to do, will want to add something to make things interesting, which will introduce risk.
Now, the Extreme Programming mavens will leap to claim that the developers will not add features that are not covered by a user story. True enough, but a department that is using XP will also have better communications - not a typical corporation.
So it seems a little odd to blame the developers for lacking initiative without blaming the corporate management for making them need more info.
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Now, as my previous entries will show, I'm not a big fan of typical corporate management, with the political games, favoritism, bad decision-making, etc. But I will step up to defend management in a corporation as being the only ones capable of doing a necessary job - keeping focus on the corporate target.
The post I read laments that at a conference, self-organization was a virtue, while it seems lacking in the company he works at. But there is a key difference - the corporation has a goal that is not defined by the participants, and management is the one group that can keep development from mistaking the intent of that goal.
Sometimes the corporate goal is just plain boring - and the developers, as we are wont to do, will want to add something to make things interesting, which will introduce risk.
Now, the Extreme Programming mavens will leap to claim that the developers will not add features that are not covered by a user story. True enough, but a department that is using XP will also have better communications - not a typical corporation.
So it seems a little odd to blame the developers for lacking initiative without blaming the corporate management for making them need more info.
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Friday, June 20, 2008
Speed Coding
One of the more interesting analogies I've seen recently in programming practice is the equating of programming, a mental skill, with a physical skill (karate, painting, etc). This has been expressed as the Code Kata, Code Kumite, and as Software as Performance Art, among other examples.
This idea get the Ninja Seal of Approval(tm). I wish I practiced it more often. Normally, a developer will do this when learning a new language - we take a problem we've done before, and redo it in the new language, honing the program with our experience. We less often work the improvement within a language we already know - improving the performance or the storage, or simplifying it.
For some of us, the projects we are working on have sufficient growth to allow us to improve the speed or memory usage as part of the routine software maintenance. If we don't get this, perhaps we should think about these drills in programming as part of our mental exercises.
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This idea get the Ninja Seal of Approval(tm). I wish I practiced it more often. Normally, a developer will do this when learning a new language - we take a problem we've done before, and redo it in the new language, honing the program with our experience. We less often work the improvement within a language we already know - improving the performance or the storage, or simplifying it.
For some of us, the projects we are working on have sufficient growth to allow us to improve the speed or memory usage as part of the routine software maintenance. If we don't get this, perhaps we should think about these drills in programming as part of our mental exercises.
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Programmer Macho
Programmers are as competitive as anyone else, but since much of our work is mental, and therefor difficult to judge at a glance, we look to what we used to build the system as the criterion for success.
Of course, being the fractious sorts that we are, we all are using different yardsticks. Some judge by the age of the language, or the esoteric-ness of the language, or the purity of expression, popularity, or even the proximity to machine code.
We have our art school types, who champion languages that nobody else uses, and drop them when they become "common", and our Utilitarianists - the best language is the one that more people are using.
We often consider the things we know best as the standard, and other opinions be damned.
Some of it is protection of our investment - of time, of effort, of mental space. Some of it is our almost innate urge to put our own 2 cents in, and some may just be truth.
Of course, telling the difference is the trick. Let me know if you have a trick to tell this.
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Of course, being the fractious sorts that we are, we all are using different yardsticks. Some judge by the age of the language, or the esoteric-ness of the language, or the purity of expression, popularity, or even the proximity to machine code.
We have our art school types, who champion languages that nobody else uses, and drop them when they become "common", and our Utilitarianists - the best language is the one that more people are using.
We often consider the things we know best as the standard, and other opinions be damned.
Some of it is protection of our investment - of time, of effort, of mental space. Some of it is our almost innate urge to put our own 2 cents in, and some may just be truth.
Of course, telling the difference is the trick. Let me know if you have a trick to tell this.
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Sunday, June 15, 2008
Killer (Ninja) Instincts
As quite a few people writing about programming have noted, there is a strong vein of creativity in programming. The feeling when that flash hits your brain is one of the coolest things in the world.
I've always said that programming is weaving with logic - building from thought itself. And so when those insights arrive, its unreal.
After a number of years programming, you start to have a sense of "rightness" about the direction your are taking with code, as this blog post notes. Sometimes it's a vague feeling, and sometimes it's a solid idea. If you get one of these feeling, GO WITH IT!
Every time I've failed to listen to this little voice in my head, I've seen the programming so sour. Typically, at the current stage of my career, it's been architectural issues, but they can be at any portion of the development process.
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I've always said that programming is weaving with logic - building from thought itself. And so when those insights arrive, its unreal.
After a number of years programming, you start to have a sense of "rightness" about the direction your are taking with code, as this blog post notes. Sometimes it's a vague feeling, and sometimes it's a solid idea. If you get one of these feeling, GO WITH IT!
Every time I've failed to listen to this little voice in my head, I've seen the programming so sour. Typically, at the current stage of my career, it's been architectural issues, but they can be at any portion of the development process.
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