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Hackers As Factory Workers?
DevDude writes "A strangely interesting article is running on MSDN, entitled: The Case for Software Factories. It suggests creating 'development environments configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application.' As a developer thrust into many an unsavory situation, I am constantly stepping in the remnants of some development methodology or other. Will super-specialization of software development teams help the industry to push out better software faster? Or are we hassled enough without being treated as an assembly line?"
This will never work. Not because it's impossible or inefficient, but because programmers will never submit to it. For some reason, people who type instructions into machines have gotten into their heads that they are underappreciated artists or that there is something uniquely heroic about what they do. The vast bulk of programming is just repetition. It's skilled repetition, but no more so than drafting or car repair.
It suggests creating 'development environments configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application.'
That's all well and good, but after a developer codes 5 apps which work pretty much the same way, won't he just develop libraries so that any subsequent app will take less than an hour to code?
Back in the early to mid nineties I became aware of how the software industry was changing and saw that programming would become like being a factory machine operator.
When I started, computing was more like being a scientist, the journeys one would undertake would lead to wild, mysterious and interesting places. Now you need 30 years experience in SOAP and XML and JSP and Java and etc. etc. and all you do all day is read documentation telling you how to use some crappy proprietary set of classes that some daft bugger threw together one Sunday night because the boss needed a color wheel widget that allowed him to choose colors based on the phases of the moon.
Sorry, but programming these days is so unbelievably boring and if you want to be a factory worker then knock yourself out and get an IT qualification.
Other evidence can be seen merely by walking into a software shop. You'll either be faced by rows of cubicles (which I'm actually quite envious of as at least you get some privacy) or, more likely, a huge open plan shop floor which is noisy as hell, totally unconducive to doing any sort of work beyond drone coding and ugly as fat in a liposuction canister.
There is no "will it be", IT already is a factory style production environment. It's just the "managers" that keep telling you how "valuable" you are that make it seem anything different.
The effect of this is to make your skills non-portable. You won't want to leave your job because your experience is so highly specialized that you'd basically be an entry-level programmer wherever you end up. Not only will you be entry-level, but your MS will be only marginally more useful than the guy who took a couple community college courses in the cube next to you.
This whole idea is centered around getting more code written, cheaper. While it may in the short term improve quality due to specialization, in the long term it serves to replace software engineers with codemonkeys.
Ideas like this make Stallman look like an optimist.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
It disturbs me that the general public and MBA types don't seem to understand how difficult software actually is.
There is this curve where when you learn how to program and write a few small projects you extrapolate from that experience and believe that large projects must be the same.
Part of the misconception lies in the belief that the difficult part is knowing a programming language. Being able to competently write code is only being conversant. It is really the higher levels of organization that are difficult.
You don't need to hire a genius to slap together a porn site for you...it is a solved problem and much like hiring a factory worker, you don't have to look hard to find someone who can assemble the pieces. But as you start going out into uncharted waters doing things that are more technically interesting, you will find that you cannot just hire anyone who knows how to type out correct code.
The good news is that believing that all programmers are the equal doesn't make it so. Any company who wants to try this experiment does so at its own peril.