developer.* Blogs - Open Discussion Thread: "Integrity Testing for Software Professionals" by Donna L. Davis - Comments

Integrity, Drones, and Mad Managers

Donna L Davis — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 06:30:38 -0700

I agree that one should never equate integrity with being a good team player if that means following orders mindlessly. We all know the sort of people who will suddenly become mute in front of the boss, after having vented mercilessly in the hall. Granted, there comes a point where you have to be willing to accept your boss's decision after you've expressed your concerns...or be willing to walk away. I also realize (and have expressed before) sometimes we don't walk away when we probably should, for family and other reasons. That's compromise...and possibly reduced integrity for the perceived better good on a personal level.

I have lived through mergers and hostile takeovers and have tasted a bit of the managerial manipulation of which you speak. I know the problem isn't only that of the developer's. Yet, all management isn't evil either. Most managers are just promoted developers trying to do the best they can and then they retire and let one of the developers get promoted and discover: it ain't easy on either side of the fence.

Also...I'll be the first to say that the reason this topic is dear to my heart is that I struggle on a daily basis myself. It is easy, sitting fairly peacefully behind a computer at a desk, to get distracted by writing articles and other quasi-work-related ventures, justifying each task when a less appealing but necessary slice of work absorbs the vinegar of my procrastination.

E.N., your expansion on the topic makes for a much livelier treatment.

Is this problem solvable within IT?

Edward G Nilges — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 04:43:21 -0700

Donna, my view is that within IT many social problems surface and because of the nature of our work take on an intensified form.

Professional integrity may be one of these problems. If the economy treats employees, including IT employees, as replaceable parts, then IT employees won't develop personal integrity.

For example, if headhunters persist in ignoring both signs of personal integrity, such as the willingness to leave a job without another job lined up, and signs of professional maturity including knowledge of and interest in computer science *per se*, then employees will continue to arrive at the jobsite figuring that it's screw, or be screwed.

Old-fashioned evidence of integrity included job gaps when the employee, dissatisfied let us say with the integrity of one of the only major employees in his town, left voluntarily. They also include political and social views at variance with conservative management.

But these are for the most part negatives in the job market. The employee is advised, with a good reason, never to say that his employer was unfair, or cheated stockholders, or was a polluter. One reason is epistemological; while some programmers may have access to data that shows unfairness, malfeasance or payoffs to environmental monitors, most programmers don't have the big picture.

And, of course, in the job market in the USA, the employee is well-advised to either be silent or to mouth probusiness views exclusively. Except in a job market that is booming from the viewpoint of the job-seeker, the job-seeker's role is that of humble supplicant.

This in my view creates integrity issues on the job, from using the Internet to play games or conduct a business, to writing code that one knows sucks. Management plays the game at BOTH ENDS as dog-eat-dog: it conceals its malfeasance and misfeasance from the stockholders and the board, and looks to the stockholders and the board for fat pay raises on schedule: it withholds medical insurance, a living wage, and medical insurance from as many employees as possible...even, in some cases, programmers, who are often retained as "consultants" to lower their rate and avoid paying health insurance.

In this context, many employees justify malfeasance, using a half-understood 1960s "power to da people" ideology.

I worked in 1998 for a start-up in Illinois whose lead was a foul-mouthed, brutal Yuppie...who was scared to death, because he'd invested his life savings and that of his wife in a shaky venture. Just how shaky it was I found out: his previous "guru" had created fifty Access "macros" for fifty slightly varying formats of shipping labels, and every time the client changed requirements, fifty of these overly complex macros had to be changed and tested.

Meanwhile, more macros had to be created every day to meet new requirements.

My boss threw a fit when I advised him to scrap the macros and allow me to create a VBA system for Access to determine the format and create the label for the company was in cash burn mode where ANY time estimate was too long.

He had some Russian emigres on the staff. They had a REMARKABLE lack of care for anything like professional ethics and I also advised him to fire them en masse. I don't think this was a Russian trait, for most Russian developers are honest and capable. No, he hired bad guys. At the time I wasn't a bad guy, but I was acting up in such a way that may have made my boss think I was a bad guy.

This was the first job I ever left without another job lined up, and it was most satisfactory for me to tell the boss to "take this job and shove it". And, it was after I told him exactly what I thought of him that he gave me a performance bonus, rewarding my honesty. It would have been better, possibly, if he had allowed me to rewrite the macros, but he would have been on my case day after day, with him asking me whether it was done, telling me to jettison everything but the essentials, and me saying life is short but art is long.

I despair of changing those aspects of IT with have to do with society in the large. The problem isn't "Indian *babus* taking our jobs", it's that we're overcharged for apartments and medical care in the USA. The problem isn't integrity, it's that American management has never prioritized things like integrity nor the strong communities and families that build integrity.

For every IBM (prior to the 1990s, when Lou Gerstner destroyed the old IBM culture), for every company which owing to a dominant position in a market can foster pushback and professional integrity, there are countless smaller firms scratching and biting to be first, telling their employees to cut corners, and destroying families and communities by closing plants.

DP people have long cultivated a sense of professional integrity in their own DP communities. The problem is that they have done such a poor job in selling the need for this moral community to the outside world, or even in letting the outside world know it exists.

Many lawyers in America, for example, are genuinely surprised to learn that programming has intellectual content and involves judgement at all. They assume that it is mere clerical dog work.

A clerk, to a lawyer, is an agent of the firm who CANNOT commit what the lawyer calls a tortious act or a criminal act insofar as he follows orders, except in certain well-defined situations. Outside these situations the law doesn't even see anything like the professional responsibility of which we speak and which we seek.

To the business manager, such talk is a detour and frolic because the business assumes the responsibility of being ethical and conducting business in a legal fashion.

I conclude that talk of professional integrity is company unionism in the worst sense, a sham, if it starts by assuming that the company's expectations are an unchanging measure against which integrity can be measured.

I mean: the discussion can't end with "write good code for your employer, who knows best".

Any discussion of integrity in programming has to include what to do when the developer is counseled to not form, or jettison, professional standards. This discussion has to take into account the fact that a good professional will do just that in certain circumstances.

The discussion also has to take into account that any programming goal and its accomplishment can be mathematically modified into the question of meeting that goal by a certain time, and that given a one-way relationship of communication and power, management is free to always reduce the time allowed for a project, to below the time needed.

Any discussion of integrity has to take into account the fact that we lack integrity, strictly speaking, when we "pad" estimates, even if we do so because management will reduce them.

Note what happens when a developer honestly asks for a nonzero amount of time to create a program.

The discussion, in my experience, IMMEDIATELY becomes "how can we discredit that estimate and reduce it?"

Credited with scientific knowledge during the employment courtship, the developer is then deflowered in the first meeting as one who, while he knows ever so much, is not on board, is not yet a member of the hunt, who is not clubbable, until he makes his chops, usually by deliberate dishonesty, reassuring management that tall buildings can be leaped at a single bound.

This masquerades, in a necessarily post-Enlightenment society, as Knowledge. The developer's Knowledge is subordinate to a higher Knowledge that oh yes, we can make or buy a silver bullet. Of course, what it is is Power, in the postwar arrangement narrated by Galbraith, wherein management is a priesthood whose Power it is to renarrate reality.

The discussion needs to account for the fact that as a technology, from German applied organic chemistry of the 19th century to programming, "matures", it becomes more important for management to "rationalize" the process. It did so in German chemistry by ensuring that ace lab rats wrote down their procedures and then by employing less well qualified people to execute these procedures, and this mechanism occured in programming.

"Integrity" in this context can be a form of sabotage from the viewpoint of management and we need to face this fact squarely.

In fact, the situation becomes, in my view, like that on an airline where you are advised at the beginning of every flight to put your own oxygen mask, should the masks drop down, BEFORE you put it on Junior. The airlines do this because in a depressurization, you have seconds before oxygen deprivation destroys brain cells (the recent crash in Italy of a Tunisian airliner may have illustrated this).

The discussion of integrity for the same reason has to refer back to a vision of justice, and whether the employee is getting a square deal. Is your work situation a "just" work situation? To determine whether it is, should you measure it against some out of date midcentury American IBM job, or against the global reality...which is that 99% of the people in the world would kill a small animal, at least, to be in your situation?

The question is one of Buddha's Right Livelihood, and it is not a simple one. Buddha, by Right Livelihood, did not, in my opinion, mean any one aspect of the elephant of RL. You should be getting your physical needs met, but should not be writing special-purpose ADA compilers to enable A-10 Warthog pilots to set wedding parties on fire. And, it's silly to define "needs" at some minimalistic level because in my experience, the next thing you know, you are sneaking down to the 7-11 to buy a monster bag of M & Ms on the sly, because you've made Buddha's initial ascetic mistake.

The job market generates, in a random fashion, hundreds of partial answers to Right Livelihood. You're working at a wonderful job...for a military contractor. You are working for the UNHCR and helping refugees...but ha ha, it's in Geneva, where a Toblerone costs ten dollars, and the UN wants to pay you 10K a year.

Integrity is taking this bull by the horns in all its glory, not just being a good team player. I think if I was on Donna's team, the situation would be close to ideal. But suppose I was on Oppenheimer's team AFTER the decision to move from the fission to the fusion bomb.

Is this question answerable within IT, or do I have to rip world philosophy a new asshole to solve it?

The Collective Effort

Donna L Davis — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 14:18:25 -0700

Certainly IT projects depend on the collective effort of the team, but here is what I meant about the impact of individual players: There are some team members who will almost singlehandedly assure the success of a project by their sheer willpower/determination. If others do not pull their load, they will worker harder and take up the slack. Such effort rarely goes without notice or impact, though. A team member will only be willing to do this so long before he starts to resent the slack coworkers. So fire the slack one, right? In real life, the slack one does just enough to get by...and make it difficult to justify letting him go.

I think it goes back to your point about integrity being personal and ingrained. The person of integrity would be horrified if they could not contribute effectively to a team effort. This extends to all areas of life. Invite him to a potluck supper and he's not going to pick up a bag of potato chips or a stale, store-bought cake.

Integrity...work ethic. I suppose I am blending the two. However, I'll say this: If you take any hypothetical IT work group, the supervisor (and possibly coworkers, if they are closely involved with each other's work) could tell you instantly who is the "weakest link", who is the #1 contributor, and everyone in-between. While the team may be able to pull off successful projects, even with some individual players who don't give it their all, is that really success? I believe a successful team includes individuals who have internalized a distinct sense of purpose for themselves and who can sleep at night knowing they have invested themselves whole-heartedly in everything they set out to do (whether work or personal). It's one thing to have different levels of ability...that's normal in a team. The scenario that grates on my nerves is the very capable individual who spends the day sitting behind a monitor all day with Visual Studio on the screen, but is really converting music from one format to another, listening to audiobooks, and occasionally hitting a showy bit of work (and making sure everyone sees it). Not only does the supervisor know it, so do all of his coworkers.

Integrity Testing for Software Professionals

lonebyte — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 22:03:24 -0700

Integrity is generally a reflection of an individualâ€™s ethical and moral framework. Itâ€™s shaped by their upbringing, and how they view themselves in relation to the world around them. Having said this, on a professional level, because of the nature of our tasking, we should hold ourselves to very high standards of integrity that extends beyond something one only talks about.

Information and the technologies enabling it are the lifeblood of any organization, and we are the professionals within the professions at the forefront of its synergy. In many respects, it holds us to ethical and moral standards comparable to those within the medical professions. Right now, itâ€™s a personal consideration, but I feel in time we will be held to a higher degree of accountability.

â€œâ€¦game is won or lost by individual players..â€ No! as IT Professionals, itâ€™s by our collective efforts.

Open Discussion Thread: "Integrity Testing for Software Professionals" by Donna L. Davis

Daniel Read — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 20:20:25 -0700

This is an open discussion and comments thread for the article published in developer.* Magazine, "Integrity Testing for Software Professionals" by Donna L. Davis. If you haven't already, you can read it here, then add your comments below.