The Good, the Bad and the BS
October 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 3)
The software profession has failed, in both the small and the large, to make visible the quality of our work. Programs are judged by the aesthetics of their interface or the immediate utility of their functions. For end users, these are rightly the first and last concerns (with perhaps a small reserve for some awareness of reliability). The problem is that there are times when we, either as individuals or as businesses, need to convince others that one choice in programming (us) is better than another choice (them). As an industry, we have failed to develop a unified message to help those outside our circle discriminate between good and bad.
Not only is there no objective measure that we can offer, but we don’t even have any traction on subjective measures like safety or “feel.” The end result is that decisions about hiring (individuals or subcontractors) are utterly dominated by only two issues: price and fear of failure. Amongst ourselves, we know that at the request-for-proposal stage, promises about cost and satisfaction are signifiers of incompetence, if not outright fraud, but at some point all of us will lose a job because a CEO heard “risk” from us and “certainty” from another. Saying “good riddance to such a clueless person” may console us once or twice, but the truth is that 40 years after the phrase “software engineering” was coined, we hardly have a clue to give.
I have a client that’s facing a legitimate crisis: Serious shenanigans on the part of an existing software subcontractor have created a true threat to the business. I was engaged as a potential coder (the domain is one that Google steers my way), and I found myself in meetings whose purpose was to interview other potential subcontracting teams. It wasn’t my place to lead the discussions, so I passively observed a smart CEO and MIS director trying to decide between, on the one hand, one of the most impressive initial architectural discussions I’ve ever witnessed and, on the other hand, bozos with sales skills. As with many companies, my clients didn’t view themselves as a software development company, and the MIS director, while sharp and more than competent at handling infrastructure and integration, just wasn’t experienced in developing strategic software. While his BS detector had the right trend, what appeared to me to be a black-and-white decision was, to him, still gray. Thankfully, they both asked for and took my advice. Life is too short to program with bozos, and while there are no guarantees, I feel pretty good about the odds.
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