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The Terror of Code in the Wrong Hands


By Allen Holub
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May 1, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 3)
The 20-to-1 productivity rule says that 5 percent of programmers are 20 times more productive than the remaining 95 percent, but what about the 5 percent at the other end of the bell curve? Consider the software terrorist: the guy who stays up all night, unwittingly but systematically destroying the entire team’s last month’s work while “improving” the code. He doesn’t tell anybody what he’s done, and he never tests. He’s created a ticking time bomb that won’t be discovered for six months.

When the bomb goes off, you can’t roll back six months of work by the whole team, and it takes three weeks of your best programmer’s effort to undo the damage. Meanwhile, our terrorist gets a raise because he stays late so often, working so hard. The brilliant guy who cleans up the debris gets a bad performance review because his schedule has slipped, so he quits.

Valuable tools in the hands of experts become dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists. The terrorist doesn’t understand how to use generics, templates and casts, and so with a single click on the “refactor” button he destroys the program’s carefully crafted typing system. That single-click refactor is a real time saver for the expert. Scripting languages, which in the right hands save time, become a means for creating write-only code that has to be scrapped after you’ve spent two months trying to figure out why it doesn’t work.

Terrorist scripts can be so central to the app, and so hard to understand, that they sometimes remain in the program, doubling the time required for all maintenance efforts. Terrorist documentation is a font of misinformation. Terrorist tests systematically destroy the database every time they’re run.

Terrorist work isn’t just nonproductive, it’s anti-productive. A terrorist reduces your team’s productivity by at least an order of magnitude. It takes a lot longer to find a bug than to create one. None of the terrorist code ends up in the final program because it all has to be rewritten. You pay the terrorists, and you also pay 10 times more to the people who have to track down and fix their bugs.




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