What Developers Can Learn From Anonymous

snydeq writes "Regardless of where you stand on Anonymous' tactics, politics, or whatever, I think the group has something to teach developers and development organizations,' writes Andrew Oliver. 'As leader of an open source project, I can revoke committer access for anyone who misbehaves, but membership in Anonymous is a free-for-all. Sure, doing something in Anonymous' name that even a minority of "members" dislike would probably be a tactical mistake, but Anonymous has no trademark protection under the law; the organization simply has an overall vision and flavor. Its members carry out acts based on that mission. And it has enjoyed a great deal of success — in part due to the lack of central control. Compare this to the level of control in many corporate development organizations. Some of that control is necessary, but often it's taken to gratuitous lengths. If you hire great developers, set general goals for the various parts of the project, and collect metrics, you probably don't need to exercise a lot of control to meet your requirements."

Comments

What the group has to teach

[Anonymous Coward]

What the group has to teach is simple: If all you want is to disturb the normal process, and highlight certain aspects, then you don't need much organization.

Wake me up when anonymous actually produced something non-trivial.

Re:What the group has to teach

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything I need to know about Anonymous I learned in Junior High School.

Re:What the group has to teach

[jones_supa]

Exactly. Destroying anarchistically random stuff all over the Internet and putting the label "Anonymous" on it, not much sophistication required.

Re:What the group has to teach

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually this is incredibly hard, no matter how you put it. Humans, and I mean every one in the species, are by nature social creatures. We all, not crave, but need attention, approval to some degree. Pulling off stuff like that but resisting the urge to stamp your name on it, or even a nickname is quite incredible.

My only issue with them, is that they make it easier for politicians to push people into using real credentials on the net. I enjoy my anonymity, we might lose that sooner or later, but I would have prefered it was later.

As for what they do ... well, banks are supposed to be secure, isn't that the reason people trust banks, why they deposit money there? If they start losing customers, it's not because the customers saw their data online, but because their false advertisment for security.

Politicians ... well, they're representatives of the people, there's this thing called transparency, if the guy I voted for, the I NEED to know about it, even if it reveales personal aspects of his personal life. Isn't this what democracy is about? Needs of the many over the needs of the few?

In the summary it says "the organization simply has an overall vision and flavor." for religion or politicals this is called doctrine. As long as they don't make the mistake those two do, of focusing on a few individuals or something more than the basic idea, the movement will keep on going virtually unhindered for years.

What they're doing is wrong, but there's no other alternative, police, and other law enforcement bodies are useless in these situations, and the press ... well, the term yellow journalism appeared two seconds after the term journalism was created.

Re:What the group has to teach

[johnlcallaway]

Banks are supposed to be secure .. and a responsible person would notify the bank if they found the door unlocked instead of giving out private information to strangers on the street.

Politicians are representatives of the people. Their personal lives are not important, only what they do when on the job. Other people have jobs, should their employers have access to their private lives???

Anonymous gets all the attention they need within their own group and by the publicity they generate. Kind of like serial killers who thrive off the publicity and kill more so they get more attention. 'They' know who they are, and they know people are talking about them. It's not necessary for them for people to know their name. In fact, it's the secrecy that is so attractive, doing something wrong, and talking with your buddies about it but knowing your buddies aren't in on the secret.

Anonymous is a terrible model. For one, it requires fanatical devotion. How many programmers out there are going to get that fanatical about rewriting 20 year old COBOL code??? I'm sure it works great for open source products where people can get excited about what they are doing. But for the other 90% of tasks out there, I seriously doubt it will work.

I seem to have a different idea of the fun stuff I want to work on than what my boss wants me to work on. Without his telling me what to work on, it's doubtful the stuff he finds important would ever get done. Oh wait .. I work on the stuff he finds important because if I didn't he would fire me.

Seems to me like Anonymous is more like the establishment than they are willing to admit.

Re:What the group has to teach

[Dodgy G33za]

When a politician stands on the podium with their wives and children, it is them that have brought them into the discussion. When they preach conservative "family" values that effect the whole of the electorate, but are happy to sleep with hookers, then no, they do not have a right to privacy. Same with those that preach morals from the pulpit or the vatican balcony and then don't report the kiddie fiddlers to the police.

The thing is, those is public office often get additional protections (killing a cop is worse than killing a non-cop for example). With privilege comes responsibility, and the other side of the coin is that a cop who abuses their position, or a politician who is a hypocrite, should be called to account.

Depends on your requirements

[melonman]

I was reading "The mythical man-month" only this weekend, which starts with the observation that "everyone knows" that two kids in a garage can do more than a corporate development team, and then points out that, if this was actually true without caveats, corporations would hire two kids in a garage every time. There's a difference between producing a standalone program and developing/maintaining a product system.

Re:Depends on your requirements

[Missing.Matter]

What you've just said is something many entrepreneurs find out too late: that ideas are dime a dozen, and execution is what really differentiates successes from failures. Strong organizations differ significantly from "two kids in a garage," in that they have people who are experienced in execution and all it entails including: capital management, marketing, legal, supply chain, distribution, manufacturing, personnel, security, infrastructure etc. These things all need to coordinate with R&D and work on specific timelines to sync with departments, and this is all happening in parallel. Two guys in a garage operate serially, so management isn't really needed.

I know most people here are developers, so most of us see the world in developer-colored glasses, so saying things like "Just hire good developers and let them loose and they'll churn out good work and you'll be a success." is just plain wrong. They'll do what good developers do: develop. And that might be enough to make a good product (or in some cases a good prototype or preproduction product), but it's not enough to make a successful product. This is also why the "two guys in a garage" stories are few and far between; their efforts were met with a good deal of luck and happenstance which drove their success. Right place, right time sort of stuff. Everyone else with the next big idea in their garage met with failure because they lacked execution.

Do we need Anonymous to learn this?

[luis_a_espinal]

the organization simply has an overall vision and flavor. Its members carry out acts based on that mission. And it has enjoyed a great deal of success — in part due to the lack of central control. Compare this to the level of control in many corporate development organizations. Some of that control is necessary, but often it's taken to gratuitous lengths. If you hire great developers, set general goals for the various parts of the project, and collect metrics, you probably don't need to exercise a lot of control to meet your requirements

This is standard common sense, and the negative effects of over/micro-managing and red tape are recognized (and felt) not just in software but in all endeavours (even within families.) We know what to do about that in all forms of organizations and projects.

That people and project still fall far from the well-known solutions, that has more to do with human behavior, team dynamics and the economics of the incentives/rewards, disinsentives/penalties, (whether tangible or psychological, subjective or objective) than anything else.

Anonymous, with its faceless nature (that precludes the realities of disinsentives and penalties), and incoherent goals, has nothing to teach us or anyone engaged in a real-life project or mission subject to incentives and disinsentives, and the realities of identifiable human relations.

The article might be good to drive traffic (ZOMG, Anonymous in teh titl3!), I'll give the author that </journalistic-attention-whoring>

What Black can learn from White

[tverbeek]

The only lesson here is that creating chaos doesn't require any kind of organizational structure (which is almost tautological). Producing something orderly is a whole different question, and unless you happen to have an infinite number of monkeys at your disposal, the chance of that happening in a finite period of time is pretty damn improbable.

Yeah, if your goal is anarchy

[Dachannien]

And it has enjoyed a great deal of success - in part due to the lack of central control.

But Anonymous hasn't really done anything that requires the true contributive efforts of more than a few people at a time. LOIC doesn't count, because "here, run this" isn't in the same ballpark as actually contributing code to a project. The person/people who wrote LOIC still exercised control over the actual software and made decisions about what features went in and what didn't.

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