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JavaOne and Stalinist Management


By Allen Holub
June 15, 2005 — 
The annual JavaOne conference is coming up; this year, it’s the last week in June. The conference catalog for JavaOne 2005 is actually heartening. My main complaint about all past JavaOne events, except the first couple, has been the lack of “how-to” sessions. Last year was a low point, with massive marketing hype drowning out whatever practical material was present, and there wasn’t all that much practical material. Judging by the conversations I had with other programmers, I am not alone in feeling this way. To make matters worse, the lack of practical emphasis has been an ongoing complaint amongst attendees.

This year, Sun finally seems to have taken this criticism to heart. The current catalog lists 22 hands-on lab sessions that cover everything from client-side UI programming, to security, to enterprise topics like EJB. Of the 18 sessions in the Core Platform track, eight are advanced how-to sessions and three are tutorial sessions. Most of the remaining sessions in the track seem to be the usual too-high-level-architectural and history-of-the-JSR drivel, but I’ll settle for a usefulness rating of 61 percent.

Other tracks seem equally practical in nature. It remains to be seen whether the actual conference can live up to the catalog, but I’m glad to see that Sun finally seems to get it; if you can’t come away from a technical conference of this sort knowing how to do something that you didn’t know how to do coming in, then the conference is a failure.

Changing the topic, a couple columns back (“The Terror of Code in the Wrong Hands,” May 1, page 37), I talked about the software jihadists at the far left of the bell curve. To summarize: The top 5 percent of programmers are 20 times more productive than the “average,” and the bottom 5 percent are actually destructive. When hiring, it’s difficult to distinguish the bottom 5 percent from the bottom 95 percent, though. My main point, which I didn’t make clear enough, was that the industry seems to be actively wiping out the top 5 percent through wrong-headed hiring practices and wrong-headed emphasis on specific technology.

The most disturbing of the e-mails I received concerning the article advocated a sort of Stalinist management that glossed over the problem by carefully feeding employees only that information that management likes. I quote:

I recently read your article “TheTerror of Code in the Wrong Hands” as it was advocated as a must read by one of my co-workers.

I’m sorry if this seems harsh but I have asked him to not distribute your article around the office. I found your “20-to-1 rule” or as it used to be stated around here as “only the top 5% are excellent” theory to be outdated and a poor way to do business. I fortunately have now changed that perception here and people are now realizing the value of stewardship, training, optimism, and peer pressure.

It’s not the fact I dispute necessarily, it’s your outlook. This sort of pessimistic evangelism is exactly what companies fight against. It promotes a superiority complex amongst those who fall prey.

It’s difficult enough to get these “experts” to invest in high potential low experience folks without articles such as this.

This letter was a scary combination of “right thinking” and “kill the messenger.” The fact is that truly elite programmers are not the arrogant experts that the letter fears. Anybody who thinks they’re God’s gift to programming, who refuses to invest in co-workers, is by my definition, one of the jihadists.

I’m sorry if I seem pessimistic, but it’s a hard fact that most companies have either entirely eliminated or severely cut back their training budgets in the past five years. They have replaced a hire-smart-people-and-train-them philosophy with outsourcing and laundry-list-based hiring that weeds out the smartest applicants simply because they don’t know one of 15 technologies.

Frankly, I don’t care how many EJBs you’ve written. What I want to know is: How fast can you learn how to write EJBs, and do you understand the architecture well enough to understand its weaknesses and code around them? I want to hire the programmer who talked his last company out of using EJBs because the technology was inappropriate, not the programmer who mindlessly churned out EJBs for a death-march project.

I, like the letter writer, believe that excellence is an acquired skill that can be achieved by training and mentoring. I see fewer and fewer companies willing to do that, though. If these trends continue, it’s hard to be optimistic about programming as a profession in the United States. I find no value in irrational optimism. Without serious support on the part of upper management, it’s simply not possible to develop an excellent staff from within. An excellent programming shop is created by hiring smart people and letting them work, not through optimistic thinking.

Allen Holub is an architect, consultant and instructor in C/C++, Java and OO Design. Reach him at www.holub.com.


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