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Avoiding Mistakes Can Be a Huge Mistake
theodp writes "No doubt many will nod knowingly as they read Paul Graham's The Other Half of 'Artists Ship', which delves into the downside of procedures developed by Big Companies to protect themselves against mistakes. Because every check you put on your programmers has a cost, Graham warns: 'And just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won't even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work for you.' Sound familiar, anyone?"
Obviously you can't go too much in the other direction either. The checks are there for people who write code seen on http://www.thedailywtf.com/ who actually click the flashing banner that says they've just won lots, and for those who open up the .exe they found in the email that contains 'instructions on how to get a bigger pen15 2day'.
It's like anything else in life. The sins of one hurt everyone.
There will always be people who get shampoo in their eyes, and because of that these checks will always exist.
From the article:
So bureaucracy has a cost in that it places lots of checks on things, and the solution to that is adding more checks?
Sounds like solid bureaucracy to me!
Overclockers
Code reviews teach the reviewers as much as they check on the author. Why would you deny the lesser programmers the joy and experience of looking at good code?
I find the premise of the essay wrong. Go read "Death March" by Ed Yourdon (http://www.yourdonreport.com/). Most of the time problems aren't processes - they're people.
"Programmers, though, like it better when they write more code. Or more precisely, when they release more code. Programmers like to make a difference. Good ones, anyway."
This is a red flag. Coders that just code are part of the problem of a death March. Who has worked with wunderkind that churns out 16 hours of useless bug ridden code? That refuses to write unit tests because they slow him down? And at the end of the project look back, the MetricsReloaded tells you "Yes, that developer wrote the most code, but it is also the most defective and has the least coverage?"
Good processes are adaptive. Good people are agile. You can't build skyscrapers on spec. I am so annoyed by people that push a methodology or ideology that cannot also cite the specific historical evolution of software processes.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
To wit:
Excellence can be determined in various ways, often through documentation, the great allergen of programmers. If you can't explain it, it isn't really done.
The benchmarks can also be defined as well. They need to be met. Make the bars well known, and what must be done to meet them.
There are great references for auditors, too. Feeling a little pain, are you? Had to throw in the grammar nazi reference?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What I don't want is:
- To be reprimanded for every little mistake I make, or worse be put in a position where a little mistake on my part can cause a huge, expensive and/or very visible problem
- To be forced to comply with procedures that do not in fact improve quality but do require 90% of my time leaving me with 10% time to program
- To have no creative input into my code.
There are good ways to achieve similar goals without the above antics. Continuous integration comes to mind. Well qualified specialist testers for User Acceptance is good too. Avoiding mistakes in a way that is programmer friendly will actually improve morale and an employer more desirable. The trouble is that too many employers try to equate software manufacture with mass production factory work in every way and treat their programmers accordingly. If you look at the kind of work a programmer enjoys vs the kind a factory worker is expected to do, no wonder they leave or won't join.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Perhaps programmers that have consistently good code should have some value placed on them. We'll call it "Karma". Programmers with good Karma get audited less often than others. If they fail an audit, they loose some "Karma" and have to write a bunch of excellent code to get it back.
That's awful in so many ways.
For starters look at how poorly Karma works here. It serves to re-enforce awful sheep mentality. Just try putting down Google, Apple or Linux. Or try praising Microsoft.
Next what you're proposing creates a negative feedback loop. A developer codes well and gets through a few audits. Now they're trusted, they can afford to let things slip for some time before anything is caught. There's less incentive to keep producing good code, and there's more of a chance that an error will slip through. No one is perfect and mistakes will happen. The way to protect against them is to ensure there's some redundancy, and taht is exactly what a code review provides.
Also consider retention rates and the average time a developer spends at a company. Does an expert or lead programmer start off having every little thing reviewed? Who's qualified to do that? Or are they trusted based on heresay and a resume? If so how long will it take to find a dud programmer?
Next consider what effect it will have on the morale of a struggling programmer, or one that doesn't cope well with reviews. Especially a junior one whose abilities can be salvaged. A co-operative might work, but constantly giving more and more high pressure code reviews is just about guaranteed to break such an individual.
Finally, you should realize that such "karma" already exists informally and that making it a more formal process achieves very little. In other words developers very quickly get a feel for what the strengths and weaknesses of another developer are.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've worked for both types of companies and I can say that the more 'checks' to prevent mistakes the more ossified the code becomes. Sometimes big mistakes lead to a breakthrough in understanding the problem. It often seems that slow release-to-server cycles inhibit the ability of programmers to learn from their mistakes.
Today is an ephemeron, doomed to the crypt of yesterday.
Benchmarking is exactly were the problem lies....
Having your code reviewed by a peer who can actually comment on it and understand what you are (or are not) doing is not bad. Either they understand it, or you have to defend your work with actual technical arguments. The end result is that you both have an opportunity to learn.
Having your code reviewed by a mindless idiot comparing it to the official procedure is bad.... Even worse when the idiot is replaced by a program. Forcing everybody to follow a single holy procedure simply reduces all code to be mediocre.
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Excellence can be determined in various ways, often through documentation, the great allergen of programmers. If you can't explain it, it isn't really done.
Suppose you have a programmer who's 10x as fast as your benchmark standard guy at producing tested, debugged code that meets requirements, but slower at writing docs. Do you make him write docs, or attach a junior programmer to him for that purpose?
Of course, somewhere up the ladder a software engineer's job becomes mostly writing docs (regardless of whether you go management or architect), but still - tying that anchor around the neck of your best dev is exactly the sort of thing Paul Graham was on about.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me. Given whatever standard of quality you wish, there is at least a 10 to 1 productivity variance in the creation of software between software professionals. Identifying developers who are on the tail end of that bell curve and removing obstacles from their path is the key to both productivity and retaining your super-programmers.
The guys on the 10x end of the spectrum aren't just more productive - they can solve problems that the ordinary coder simply cannot solve at all. If you're part of the millionth re-invention of an inventory database, this doesn't much matter, but if your business sells software that soves new problems, these guys make a huge difference.
Of course, everyone thinks they're a super-coder when they're young, just like everyone thinks they're an above-average driver, but recognizing (and retaining) real talent is supposed to be a development manager's job.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Documentation may be necessary; certainly documenting interfaces is, and some amount of internals documentation is prudent. But no amount of documentation will make poor code anything but poor. Nor will any lack of documentation make excellent code poor; it merely makes it undocumented.
Courageous submission... wasn't that one of the Ingsoc slogans?