That's not the construction phase, sitting down and writing code into methods that were created at design time is the construction phase. There is nothing comparable to compile time in the readily available analogies.
So one more time, in order for software to not suck, it needs to be specialized into trades. And the trade members should *never* do the jobs of the other trades. That will permit them to focus on their trade and become more efficient than anyone who generalizes in all trades. *That* is when software will become far superior than to date.
The problem is once a trade is identified (jdbc specialist, text to speech specialist, parser specialist) there is a tendency to automate. However, there is still integration time spent which validates the trade. You cannot automate *everything*.
I see what you're saying, but you are misunderstanding me as well. The ultimate goal is that the partitions in education I described are focused on the role as oppose to how they are today. You *have* to be a master to be an architect because that's the level an architect must operate on. You have to be a bachelor to design properly. You learn how to program small tasks at a high school or vo-tech level. This is not how it is today, I agree; however, if your roles are properly enforced, the programmer *must* kick a bad design back to the designer. Your example of the programmer reworking a design is exactly whey these things fail all the time. They are breaking from their role when this occurs, in the same way a seamstress breaks their role by changing the design of a garment at the sewing machine.
Again, You are talking about education as it exists today, not as industrialized levels - there *is* a correlation between the skills of an electrical engineer, an electrician, and a blueprint specialist and their education. *that*, my friend, is where software needs to be.
Unless you are saying it's easier to design & build an aircraft than it is to write software?
You know, I can almost imagine a construction foreman telling an inspector the same thing you just told me. And yet buildings don't collapse on themselves regularly. That is unless there aren't inspections or tradecrafts.
And if you think I don't know what I'm talking about, please explain why most software projects still fail after over a decade of practice. You're observations are characteristic of people who do not understand industrialization. NOBODY in an automobile line's engineering team welds like the welder on the assembly line. And they don't send the engineer down to weld the most difficult parts. Instead, if something's difficult, they send it back to engineering to fix the design. An architect who feels the need to do some things themselves because it takes less time is unskilled at conveying a plan adequate enough to offload the work to the appropriate member of the team.
And I wholeheartedly disagree that software is harder than anything industrialized. The proof is simple. Boeing builds aircraft. The aircraft are made of hardware and software. Your assertion is software is more complex than the hardware and software, which is impossible. Therefore, I assert that architecting, designing and building an aircraft is more complex than writing a piece of software. And yet it's news when one falls from the sky and a crashing computer isn't.
You have too much bad experience for you own good, and your response resembles the initial responses that men had to women learning to type (used to be a male only profession). Yet once they learned, typing became a "lesser" skill. It's possible for software to be easier too.
No architect would be able to write a persistence layer better that the rote programmer who specializes in writing nothing but jdbc & dao code. Or design it better than a design who specializes in designing the persistence layer. Period.
It seems so foreign because it's not an industrialized profession.
Industrialize software development. It's still a science right now and not an engineering practice.
We're the only industry where the person who designs the product also works on creating it. This is a collosal mistake for the exact reason this article points out - there are not enough skilled hands to squander on the unskilled aspects of development.
The architect should never create class diagrams. The developer should never change the architecture. The Programmer should *never* change a method signature or add a new method or class.
Then the architects can be masters, the developers bachelors, and the programmers high school graduates.
*That*, my friends will cause an explosion in the quality of software development. If the developer has to design to the method level and get it right, reuse will become the way of life, not just a novelty. Typing can be learned in high school, as can method level programming.
If programmers are simply tackling a string of homework assignments from their point of view of simplicity (here's a problem method, fill it in) they can be more like carpenters and less like jacks of all trades.
Won't fly when you're talking about development teams. Limiting your developers hardware is a recipe for bogging down an IT department. "I need eclipse installed" "I need a new.net stack" "I need a case too, stat!"
contractor. And I make my client look like a rock star. She'd rather throw herself under a bus than have someone tell her I have to go. US businesses today are full of poor performers. Pull your share and IT can eat crow trying to attack you for pointing out their crappy obstructive policies.
sure, just set up a proxy on another machine you have access to within the company, route all your internal tomfoolery through it, then wipe the proxy logs.
network crossover cable and my own laptop - problem solved. Better yet, pop the case and plug a new usb port into the mother board in place of the epoxy job.
Not to mention the problem with modding lease'd equipment w/epoxy.
Oh, and lock down the USB ports doesn't work when I can boot from a CD and get linux with NTFS support to push my files. And a crossover cable to scp them from my own box.
When the sticks first became popular, ports weren't locked down.
No they can't. IT doesn't have firing authority over me. Politics does. All IT can do is complain about my behavior. When I explain that I *needed* to transfer files by pluging an "unauthorized" laptop into the network to finish a deliverable that makes my boss happy, their complaint never even makes it to my door.
And, when IT cannot install a copy of Visio within 4 days of a request, I install CASE tools *after* being explicitly told by an IT cronie in an email that *any* software not in the sanctioned list is prohibited. Why? Becuase companies don't exist to breed IT departments, IT departments are supposed to support companies. And inevitably, there will be a process too slow for business. Whether it's creating a user support mailing list for an internal application, installing software on a notebook, or setting up development hardware at the data center.
Hell, I once bought an e420 on ebay and brought it to the office on a hand-truck after using a sharpie to write my consulting company's name on it. Why? Because up until then, my client had been waiting SIX MONTHS for the data center to finish setting up hardware already purchased for a hot project. I had the dev environment up and running within 2 days of the weekend I bought the box.
Pushing the limits *never* got me fired or kicked off a contract.
What, you mean like when I brought my own google search appliance to work at my last job because the corporate intranet search capability blew chunks?
IT lost this fight when the USB memory stick became popular. Besides, no matter what they do, they can't stop me from creating a knoppix cluster from my coworkers pc's after they all leave for the day.
But I did always wonder why more departmental firewalls were present in all the places I've worked. I mean, does the CTO's pet project development team really need access to the production CRM cluster?
I don't see why it's taking all of these states so freaking long. I wrote a law banning the use of incandescent light-bulbs in my house 1 week ago and now have 100% compliance. And Australia has how many more people than just me?
Tonight I'm passing a law banning the existence of green LED's on appliances to tell you they are on. There's an amendment to make this effective only at night, but noone wants to fund my efforts to drill holes in everything to put a CdS cell in so the lights turn off at night. But first I'll have to temporarily repeal the law against taking wire cutters to functional appliances.
Can you imagine if individual households had to operate the way legislators expect a country to? *Shudder*
Here's a stupid question? If 99% of email is spam now, why don't we all just switch to a protocol and servers that authenticate and force identities based on a distributed trusted service? Sounds like there is so much to gain by jumping off the SMTP ship.
Let's face it, serialized broadcasting where you are told when to watch was always an artificial constraint of media. If all media was turn on the tube and ask for what you are looking for at any point in time, "protecting the children" would not be an issue since they wouldn't randomly stumble upon it.
The real issue is, broadcasters cannot guarantee that a kid isn't around when they schedule a show, but you need to be in order to watch it. Get rid of this and this problem will draw back somewhat. Not entirely, but somewhat.
I chucked the tv 5 years ago. I won't let it back in until I have an apple-tv, a myth-tv and no other way of letting "programming" in. Radio station bandwidth ought to be used to push files out for prestaging on your radio, but what you listen to at what time is best left up to you.
Lastly, and it pains me to say it to some extent, I'm happy that US influence in the world is on the decline. I'm thankful that the dollar isn't as strong or universal as it was and hopeful this will continue. I don't want the jerks that pick a fight with me on Marta in Atlanta to EVER have the opportunity to go to another country and further demonstrate micro-level-war-mongering to reflect this overall influence of violence in the states.
Wouldn't it be great if the router hijacked the few http requests passing through it and gave the user a dynamically created password with instructions to print it and tape it to the router? There could be a snazzy checkbox letting them skip future redirects after they have the password.
Then hitting the reset on the router just caused this to happen again with a newly created password.
When my clients do this to me, whether by email or phone call, they *do* pay for an extra hour of work. No email or discussion goes without followup work, so if they actually succeed in getting ahold of me they get a full hours attention between the call and what I do afterwards. And surprise! I'm not on site as long the next day since I'm taking care of personal stuff during the usual work day in retaliation^H^H...^H^H to maintain my work-life balance.
Complacency and fitness may decline with lower population densities, but conflicts increase with density. There may be arguments focused on making better use of space and the effects on our well being, but after my last trip on the Atlanta transit system where some stupid teenage girl tried to pick a fight with me to impress her friends while my pregnant wife was sitting next to me and I outweighed her by a good 60 pounds of muscle, I'd argue that my efforts to keep people like that away from people like me allows both groups to survive.
There is more than one type of person - some of us, when stuck in large groups where high percentages are stupid and antagonistic turn violent on a dime to protect that which we hold dear. Can anyone really argue that excluding myself from urban "civilization" is "unhealthy"?
Software is still a Science and not an Engineering practice.
As long as the design can also be the implementor and estimates based on actual analysis are optional, Software will NEVER be an engineering study.
These aren't changing quickly for what I believe are a few reasons:
IEEE has not created a Professional Engineer - Software and noone really wants them to. Companies don't like to be told they have to hire something that sounds expensive to build something they cannot see. Companies will NEVER open their software to outside inspection the way construction companies must open their buildings because of the concept (flawed, I think) of Intellectual Property.
If a company had to have their software inspected by a Software P.E. before using it in production or selling it to end users - If Software P.E.'s had to adhere to standards which included concrete estimates and testing - If companies were not allowed to use anyone they could find that has seen a computer to write their software... commercial software development would be much further ahead.
Do I believe any of this should happen? No. Why? Because I want it to continue to fail. I do not believe software development should be put on a pedestal or only performed by "experts". I believe shoot from the hip software projects allow open source software projects to exist and to succeed in the market.
Open source works without accurate estimates because the contributors can flock to good projects and don't have to adhere to a labour budget. Company employees can't get wind of the cool software project and leave the crappy one's - corporate structure and budget's won't let them.
I don't believe companies with more than 120-150 people are stable - once they breach this range empire building occurs and massive uncontrollable monsters result. If a company truly needs more than 150 people it should split into two and partner on the project at hand. I believe this is a human condition - humans work best in tribes where they can personally know all of the members.
All of this might be completely and utterly wrong. But it's my hypothesis.
It was nice knowing you in the early years. But now, good riddance.
Way to take the things that worked and allowed me to use muscle memory and familiarity to get stuff done and throw them out. This just happened to IE7 and it sucks now. This happened to Money and it sucks to an extreme level now.
The applications don't even match each other any more.
The company is going into the ground like a lawn dart. I'm glad I moved my office manager to OpenOffice last year.
I particularly love this response from the expert:
"There is no definitive evidence that controlled food additives cause cancer. "We do know that half of cancers are caused by lifestyle factors such as being overweight."
To paraphrase, "not only are you wrong, you're fat."
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the construction phase, sitting down and writing code into methods that were created at design time is the construction phase. There is nothing comparable to compile time in the readily available analogies.
So one more time, in order for software to not suck, it needs to be specialized into trades. And the trade members should *never* do the jobs of the other trades. That will permit them to focus on their trade and become more efficient than anyone who generalizes in all trades. *That* is when software will become far superior than to date.
The problem is once a trade is identified (jdbc specialist, text to speech specialist, parser specialist) there is a tendency to automate. However, there is still integration time spent which validates the trade. You cannot automate *everything*.
I see what you're saying, but you are misunderstanding me as well. The ultimate goal is that the partitions in education I described are focused on the role as oppose to how they are today. You *have* to be a master to be an architect because that's the level an architect must operate on. You have to be a bachelor to design properly. You learn how to program small tasks at a high school or vo-tech level. This is not how it is today, I agree; however, if your roles are properly enforced, the programmer *must* kick a bad design back to the designer. Your example of the programmer reworking a design is exactly whey these things fail all the time. They are breaking from their role when this occurs, in the same way a seamstress breaks their role by changing the design of a garment at the sewing machine.
Again, You are talking about education as it exists today, not as industrialized levels - there *is* a correlation between the skills of an electrical engineer, an electrician, and a blueprint specialist and their education. *that*, my friend, is where software needs to be.
Unless you are saying it's easier to design & build an aircraft than it is to write software?
You know, I can almost imagine a construction foreman telling an inspector the same thing you just told me. And yet buildings don't collapse on themselves regularly. That is unless there aren't inspections or tradecrafts.
And if you think I don't know what I'm talking about, please explain why most software projects still fail after over a decade of practice. You're observations are characteristic of people who do not understand industrialization. NOBODY in an automobile line's engineering team welds like the welder on the assembly line. And they don't send the engineer down to weld the most difficult parts. Instead, if something's difficult, they send it back to engineering to fix the design. An architect who feels the need to do some things themselves because it takes less time is unskilled at conveying a plan adequate enough to offload the work to the appropriate member of the team.
And I wholeheartedly disagree that software is harder than anything industrialized. The proof is simple. Boeing builds aircraft. The aircraft are made of hardware and software. Your assertion is software is more complex than the hardware and software, which is impossible. Therefore, I assert that architecting, designing and building an aircraft is more complex than writing a piece of software. And yet it's news when one falls from the sky and a crashing computer isn't.
You have too much bad experience for you own good, and your response resembles the initial responses that men had to women learning to type (used to be a male only profession). Yet once they learned, typing became a "lesser" skill. It's possible for software to be easier too.
No architect would be able to write a persistence layer better that the rote programmer who specializes in writing nothing but jdbc & dao code. Or design it better than a design who specializes in designing the persistence layer. Period.
It seems so foreign because it's not an industrialized profession.
Industrialize software development. It's still a science right now and not an engineering practice.
We're the only industry where the person who designs the product also works on creating it. This is a collosal mistake for the exact reason this article points out - there are not enough skilled hands to squander on the unskilled aspects of development.
The architect should never create class diagrams. The developer should never change the architecture. The Programmer should *never* change a method signature or add a new method or class.
Then the architects can be masters, the developers bachelors, and the programmers high school graduates.
*That*, my friends will cause an explosion in the quality of software development. If the developer has to design to the method level and get it right, reuse will become the way of life, not just a novelty. Typing can be learned in high school, as can method level programming.
If programmers are simply tackling a string of homework assignments from their point of view of simplicity (here's a problem method, fill it in) they can be more like carpenters and less like jacks of all trades.
Won't fly when you're talking about development teams. Limiting your developers hardware is a recipe for bogging down an IT department. "I need eclipse installed" "I need a new
Some roles require easing restrictions.
contractor. And I make my client look like a rock star. She'd rather throw herself under a bus than have someone tell her I have to go. US businesses today are full of poor performers. Pull your share and IT can eat crow trying to attack you for pointing out their crappy obstructive policies.
I think it's coming back so it can go away again. What do you think minicomputers and dumb terminals, and unix servers and X windows terminals were?
Thin clients don't work for development.
sure, just set up a proxy on another machine you have access to within the company, route all your internal tomfoolery through it, then wipe the proxy logs.
network crossover cable and my own laptop - problem solved.
Better yet, pop the case and plug a new usb port into the mother board in place of the epoxy job.
Not to mention the problem with modding lease'd equipment w/epoxy.
Oh, and lock down the USB ports doesn't work when I can boot from a CD and get linux with NTFS support to push my files. And a crossover cable to scp them from my own box.
When the sticks first became popular, ports weren't locked down.
No they can't. IT doesn't have firing authority over me. Politics does. All IT can do is complain about my behavior. When I explain that I *needed* to transfer files by pluging an "unauthorized" laptop into the network to finish a deliverable that makes my boss happy, their complaint never even makes it to my door.
And, when IT cannot install a copy of Visio within 4 days of a request, I install CASE tools *after* being explicitly told by an IT cronie in an email that *any* software not in the sanctioned list is prohibited. Why? Becuase companies don't exist to breed IT departments, IT departments are supposed to support companies. And inevitably, there will be a process too slow for business. Whether it's creating a user support mailing list for an internal application, installing software on a notebook, or setting up development hardware at the data center.
Hell, I once bought an e420 on ebay and brought it to the office on a hand-truck after using a sharpie to write my consulting company's name on it. Why? Because up until then, my client had been waiting SIX MONTHS for the data center to finish setting up hardware already purchased for a hot project. I had the dev environment up and running within 2 days of the weekend I bought the box.
Pushing the limits *never* got me fired or kicked off a contract.
What, you mean like when I brought my own google search appliance to work at my last job because the corporate intranet search capability blew chunks?
IT lost this fight when the USB memory stick became popular. Besides, no matter what they do, they can't stop me from creating a knoppix cluster from my coworkers pc's after they all leave for the day.
But I did always wonder why more departmental firewalls were present in all the places I've worked. I mean, does the CTO's pet project development team really need access to the production CRM cluster?
I don't see why it's taking all of these states so freaking long. I wrote a law banning the use of incandescent light-bulbs in my house 1 week ago and now have 100% compliance. And Australia has how many more people than just me?
Tonight I'm passing a law banning the existence of green LED's on appliances to tell you they are on. There's an amendment to make this effective only at night, but noone wants to fund my efforts to drill holes in everything to put a CdS cell in so the lights turn off at night. But first I'll have to temporarily repeal the law against taking wire cutters to functional appliances.
Can you imagine if individual households had to operate the way legislators expect a country to? *Shudder*
Here's a stupid question? If 99% of email is spam now, why don't we all just switch to a protocol and servers that authenticate and force identities based on a distributed trusted service? Sounds like there is so much to gain by jumping off the SMTP ship.
Let's face it, serialized broadcasting where you are told when to watch was always an artificial constraint of media. If all media was turn on the tube and ask for what you are looking for at any point in time, "protecting the children" would not be an issue since they wouldn't randomly stumble upon it.
The real issue is, broadcasters cannot guarantee that a kid isn't around when they schedule a show, but you need to be in order to watch it. Get rid of this and this problem will draw back somewhat. Not entirely, but somewhat.
I chucked the tv 5 years ago. I won't let it back in until I have an apple-tv, a myth-tv and no other way of letting "programming" in. Radio station bandwidth ought to be used to push files out for prestaging on your radio, but what you listen to at what time is best left up to you.
Lastly, and it pains me to say it to some extent, I'm happy that US influence in the world is on the decline. I'm thankful that the dollar isn't as strong or universal as it was and hopeful this will continue. I don't want the jerks that pick a fight with me on Marta in Atlanta to EVER have the opportunity to go to another country and further demonstrate micro-level-war-mongering to reflect this overall influence of violence in the states.
Your write, I'm so embraced :)
Wouldn't it be great if the router hijacked the few http requests passing through it and gave the user a dynamically created password with instructions to print it and tape it to the router? There could be a snazzy checkbox letting them skip future redirects after they have the password.
Then hitting the reset on the router just caused this to happen again with a newly created password.
Viola, no more default passwords.
When my clients do this to me, whether by email or phone call, they *do* pay for an extra hour of work. No email or discussion goes without followup work, so if they actually succeed in getting ahold of me they get a full hours attention between the call and what I do afterwards. And surprise! I'm not on site as long the next day since I'm taking care of personal stuff during the usual work day in retaliation^H^H...^H^H to maintain my work-life balance.
Everything was hard before it was industrialized.
Complacency and fitness may decline with lower population densities, but conflicts increase with density. There may be arguments focused on making better use of space and the effects on our well being, but after my last trip on the Atlanta transit system where some stupid teenage girl tried to pick a fight with me to impress her friends while my pregnant wife was sitting next to me and I outweighed her by a good 60 pounds of muscle, I'd argue that my efforts to keep people like that away from people like me allows both groups to survive.
There is more than one type of person - some of us, when stuck in large groups where high percentages are stupid and antagonistic turn violent on a dime to protect that which we hold dear. Can anyone really argue that excluding myself from urban "civilization" is "unhealthy"?
That would certainly make it more suited for our senses and spacial recognition as humans.
:)
Now, if only we could get the 3D rendering software done on time
Hey, that looks painfully like the notes I've taken on my marriage.
Software is still a Science and not an Engineering practice.
As long as the design can also be the implementor and estimates based on actual analysis are optional, Software will NEVER be an engineering study.
These aren't changing quickly for what I believe are a few reasons:
IEEE has not created a Professional Engineer - Software and noone really wants them to.
Companies don't like to be told they have to hire something that sounds expensive to build something they cannot see.
Companies will NEVER open their software to outside inspection the way construction companies must open their buildings because of the concept (flawed, I think) of Intellectual Property.
If a company had to have their software inspected by a Software P.E. before using it in production or selling it to end users - If Software P.E.'s had to adhere to standards which included concrete estimates and testing - If companies were not allowed to use anyone they could find that has seen a computer to write their software... commercial software development would be much further ahead.
Do I believe any of this should happen? No. Why? Because I want it to continue to fail. I do not believe software development should be put on a pedestal or only performed by "experts". I believe shoot from the hip software projects allow open source software projects to exist and to succeed in the market.
Open source works without accurate estimates because the contributors can flock to good projects and don't have to adhere to a labour budget. Company employees can't get wind of the cool software project and leave the crappy one's - corporate structure and budget's won't let them.
I don't believe companies with more than 120-150 people are stable - once they breach this range empire building occurs and massive uncontrollable monsters result. If a company truly needs more than 150 people it should split into two and partner on the project at hand. I believe this is a human condition - humans work best in tribes where they can personally know all of the members.
All of this might be completely and utterly wrong. But it's my hypothesis.
It was nice knowing you in the early years. But now, good riddance.
Way to take the things that worked and allowed me to use muscle memory and familiarity to get stuff done and throw them out. This just happened to IE7 and it sucks now. This happened to Money and it sucks to an extreme level now.
The applications don't even match each other any more.
The company is going into the ground like a lawn dart. I'm glad I moved my office manager to OpenOffice last year.
I particularly love this response from the expert:
"There is no definitive evidence that controlled food additives cause cancer.
"We do know that half of cancers are caused by lifestyle factors such as being overweight."
To paraphrase, "not only are you wrong, you're fat."