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My thoughts are with him also

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 22:18:31 -0800

We love you Jerry Weinberg!

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Rob MacGrogan — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:01:02 -0700

I too am a big fan of code reviews. I've found them especially useful in guiding young or mediocre developers toward better practices. Or even toward guiding intermediate or advanced developers toward even better practices. I myself have recently learned a lot by having some of my own code reviewed by a developer who works in the IT shop at our client.

That said, I typically look at code review as a once in a while thing--something that's it's good to do from time to time, but not something that needs to be done on every piece of code written. Am I alone in this?

Our client actually has a policy that every single code change that a developer makes must always be code reviewed by another developer. I believe that this process is a waste of time, personally. The occasional code review will reveal a bug or a design flaw. Constant code reviews lead to brain death or will be cursory at best. They are certainly very time consuming and would eat up a huge chunk of our schedule if we actually did them diligently (which now they are putting pressure on us to do, even as the already overbooked schedule really starts heating up).

Great story

Edward G Nilges — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 20:38:37 -0700

BillG wasn't a great programmer, but had a complete understanding of the way in which you need to account for everything, including the fact that 1900 had (and 2100 will have, assuming we make it) no Sadie Hawkins day.

But how many bond maturity programs for bonds bought in the 19th century (which still exist) know this?

People have a sense of their lack of worth which was beaten out of them in the early Microsoft culture by diminishing the old sense to a negative value and then building it back up to a larger positive value.

Poor parents in America tell their kids to downsize their expectations, and the father of one rich girl I knew in Seattle regularly called her "dummy". Dave Cutler, the developer of Windows NT, had had a hard childhood and had struggled out of it.

These predamaged souls came to Microsoft for one brief shining moment in the 1980s in which they were called upon to be like Leonard Cohen foresaken almost human.

I'm serious. Microsoft in the 1980s was a subtext of the 1960s in which people said for one brief shining moment that we deserve to do something cool and useful. My observation was that the Microserfs were not as academically qualified as people going to Apple at the same time: state schools as opposed to MIT, in somewhat the same way as, earlier, Tom Watson of IBM recruited salesmen and engineers, who were upon being recruited headed for the American night, ordered them to shape up, and rewarded them for shaping up.

Yet somehow...Douglas Coupland documents their road BACK to the default condition of enserfdom while nobunny writes of the outward bound journey, because it wasn't as sexy as Apple.

BillG was positioned to do this man to man but already, time has moved on.

Today, if even a MANAGER walked into a conference room with a fully marked up document and started firing questions, he'd be met by vacant stares if high enough in the hierarchy or another manager...who takes the position that his concerns are somehow kiss-of-death "academic", that we just need to "get it out the door", ya, de ha ha...would mock the markup guy as a dweeb.

Even if the manager is like Bill a majority owner, he would STILL be subject to exogenous pressures in such a way that resistance would be able to contact board members or venture people and undercut the manager/owner.

The irony is that when BillG was creating something ex nihilo, I allowed some bimbo of a consulting firm executive, in 1979, to tell me that all useful software had been written, for mainframes, and that the software powering embedded devices would use IBM mainframes and their compilers to create binary files for download, period.

I should have told said bimbo to fart in a bottle and paint it, and, a year later, I did. Not only that, on my last day with the firm, knowing she hated smoking, I bought several "nize beeg fat Habana ceegars" and distributed them to the mailroom crew.

"...men will still say, THIS was their finest hour".

[Donna she really was a bimbo she really was, and I am a real feminist guy. Well sort of.]

Unlike Bill Moor I had no habit of surrealist pranks (some of his pranks in Chicago and Berwyn were classic). I had two small children and was deathly afraid of unemployability from 1981 on. Still, man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

Managers love it when programmers have lousy tools and struggle with buggy compilers. If management in some embedded or similar context makes you use a lousy language or compiler, write a new one.

Support from the Top

Daniel Read — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:59:24 -0700

Thanks for adding your thoughts, Chris. I agree, in particular, that sustaining reviews and other quality-oriented processes for which it is difficult to perceive the benefit requires a committment from the top. A quality culture, as you put it, probably cannot happen without support from top either. Along these lines, I'm fond of this essay by Joel Spolsky called "My First BillG Review." After telling a great story about Bill Gates reviewing Joel's spec for an early version of what later became VBA, he concludes with some thoughts about the benefits of having a programmer, someone who understands the technical issues and the software culture, running the show.

Thanks again,
Dan

Hard to maintain

chrishmorris — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 00:18:28 -0700

No, it's not just you, Dan. I'm at an earlier stage in the process, trying to establish review. It's hard to do, for several reasons.

One thing I think we have to register is that there are cultural preconditions before reviews are useful. I once worked with someone who used to work at ICL, a large and now defunct UK computer company. I called a review for some of my code. He said he would come on one condition: that I promise reviews would not become mandatory. At ICL they were compulsory, and were, he said, a waste of time. This is all too easy to imagine.

When people resist reviews, it's because they don't feel they will be useful. This may be because they don't know the benefits. But they may also be right. I agree with everything you said about the potential benefits, but I think it needs a very high level of maturity.

I plain don't think that this level can be acheived bottom-up. So I don't think any coder or team leader should feel bad that they cannot sustain code review. It needs support from the top, and a thoroughgoing quality culture.

More about code reviews

Donna L Davis — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 17:10:51 -0800

Dan...I read this post of yours some time ago, but saw it on the recently viewed list and now feel led to comment. Code reviews *will* happen...it's just a matter of when. It can be before production (as it should be, during development when there is still time to do something about the crappy code), or post production when you're sifting through the convoluted haystack to find the source of a problem.

You already mentioned one big reason code reviews are tossed: everyone is busy and the schedules are tight. Here's another: The reviewer learns after a while that his/her very good suggestions are ignored! In fact, I was helping someone find the source of a problem yesterday and saw exactly that: huge blocks of commented code, variable and recordset declarations that were never used, code clearly borrowed from an unrelated system for example purposes and not used...with variable names that had nothing to do with the current system: all stuff I had pointed out months prior. Should I have to tell someone to wipe and then check for trails later to see if they did?

Of course this isn't always the case. I've seen plenty of staff (the good ones who are really equipped to be developers) use code reviews as a mechanism for picking up new techniques and tricks they can use in their next system. In this case, a code review isn't an exercise in finding all the things wrong that the person ought to have been able to find themselves if they knew what they were doing. The code review is a mechanism for making the system more supportable by providing others with some foundation. It also encourages consistency.

Another plug for code reviews: As developers, we often get tunnel vision when we're embroiled in a project and can really benefit from a second opinion...a sounding board.

Debate is moot?

Mohan — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 06:42:22 -0700

That the debate over offshoring, offshore outsourcing is getting to be a mere rhetoric is obvious from the fact that even the media is spending lesser newsprint on the topic as we head towards the 4th quarter of 2005. Analyst reports suggest that about 80 to 90% of fortune 500 companies already have their offshoring strategies in placeâ€¦.
- Mohan, Author: http://www.offshoringmanagement.com

Re: Computers of the Future

Bill Marriott — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 10:41:46 -0700

Hi Dan,

Wish I had seen this a while back. I could have confirmed for you that this is certainly not a futurist's prediction of what a home computer might look like. I see that you linked to a truth or fiction type site, and I can confirm that it is the set of control panels for a nuclear submarine. Having spent several years of my life staring at those meters and gauges, it was surprising to stumble across them on your site.

Bill

Ready to Believe

Daniel Read — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 17:51:52 -0800

This silly thing got me thinking today. I added some musings to my blog:

A Little Skepticism is a Good Thing

Dan

The thing that really makes i

Rob MacGrogan — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 13:50:24 -0800

The thing that really makes it look real to me is the odd, unreadable, poorly-memiographed-looking type in the caption.

I like it even better

Daniel Read — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 12:10:34 -0800

Oh, well. :-) I think I like it even better now that I know it's a hoax. I'm still going to use it as my wallpaper for awhile. The attention to detail is great. That guy standing there so proudly, looking so stodgy and confident in his creation. The gigantic speaker attached to the bottom of the TV. The grainy look. Brilliant.

These internet hoax busters are no fun. :-) Lesson learned...

Dan

Uh... turns out... that's a submarine console

berrydoo — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 12:05:21 -0800

I just found out that this picture is a hoax. This is actually a picture of a submarine console that somebody downloaded and edited. Check out this link:
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

It's still pretty funny though.

What a photo!

Daniel Read — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 11:09:09 -0800

I love this photo. I might just make it my desktop wallpaper. There are so many things to love about this. What is that big wheel?!? It's like something off a boat. And I'd love to know what all those dials are for. I'm so glad that now that the future is here it turned out that we do not all have to use Fortran to operate our personal computers.

Love it. Thanks for posting, berrydoo.

Dan

Macro vs. Micro in the Outsourcing Issue

Daniel Read — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:56:05 -0800

Rob, I very much appreciate your comments. They add something valuable to the discussion. You bring in another side to this story, and one that I did not consider as an implication of Yourdon's imperative for developers to "stop whining." I find myself in the interesting position of agreeing both you and Yourdon (and I'm not sure Yourdon would disagree with you either re: organizing). When you say this:

The attitude that software developers (read workers) should buck up and lift themselves by their own bootstraps and see themselves only as individuals within the system is very helpful to the corporations offshoring jobs. If we simply "stop whining" and refuse to band together to protect our common interests, well, we'll continue to see declining salaries and more jobs being shipped overseas.

I find myself in total agreement with you, even though, as I've said in writing on more than one occassion, I am a big believer in the idea the programmers (in the U.S., at least) need to take responsibility for their own destinies. Your employers are not your parents, and they are not going to "take care of you." But I also fully support the idea of programmers and other software professionals getting organized. I am glad that organizations like the International Game Developers Association, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Programmer's Guild, and others are out there fighting for all of us. I'm a believer in unions, despite their flaws and limitations, and I'm a member of the National Writers Union. I fully agree that we are living in very anti-worker-organization times here in the U.S. Free Trade is like a religion to a lot of people.

But I also find myself in agreement with Yourdon when he says this in his editorial:

But most of those whose jobs are at risk are understandably nervous, and many strongly oppose the whole concept. More than that, they argue that "somebody ought to do something about outsourcing." Meanwhile, theyâ€™re mad at their elected leaders for not doing something, and somehow being responsible for the evil plot of outsourcing. Theyâ€™re mad at their employers for making cold-blooded, greedy decisions about outsourcing. And theyâ€™re mad at the whole world for not sympathizing with their plight.

While much of this anger is understandable, and some of it is justifiable, itâ€™s time for us to stand up and tell these angry people: Stop whining. Stop waiting for someone else to solve the problem. Take charge of your own jobs, your own career and your own future. No one else is going to do it for you.

I think what we have here is perhaps a difference between a macro view and a micro view. I think what Yourdon is saying is that if you as an individual fixate on the macro-level problems and don't pay attention to your own career management, then you do yourself a disservice. That is where my message comes in: take hold of your own destiny, don't wait for external forces to change in your favor. The danger in this message, though, is that it leaves out the imperative to also be part of the macro-level solution.

I also think Yourdon may be reacting to a lot of bile and ranting that has gone on in various message boards and blogs. I just received a review copy of a new book called Dude, did I steal your job?: Debugging Indian Computer Programmers by N. Sivakumar. The book includes several quotes like this one by anonymous programmers posting on the net:

Greedy American companies are falling all over themselves to hire pathetically stupid and incompetent workers from India. Why? Because they are as cheap as the dirt which covers everything in India.

With the discourse sinking to this level, I can see where Yourdon gets the word "whining."

Dan

Whine

Rob MacGrogan — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 14:37:33 -0800

While whining is not a particularly useful activity, it is a simplistic rhetorical trick to dismiss the other side of an argument as "whining." Drawing attention to and calling for action on a pressing problem is not necessarily whining. We would be unlikely to hear any mainstream commentators asking people to "stop whining" about terrorism or health care costs.

Obviously, offshoring (though we might as well give up and start calling it "outsourcing" like everyone else does now) is not in the same league with those two issues. But it is a vital and important issue in the US software development industry right now. Jobs are certainly being sent overseas in an effort to save money. Personally I have a theory that software projects that do this end up paying more in the long run, but that's another issue.

Software developers have every right to band together and protect their interests--just as every interest group in this country does. Lawyers, doctors, old people, and even corporations band together to form groups to advocate unapologetically for their own interests--regardless of how their interests affect the interests of others. This process is called politics.

The fact that software developers have not effectively banded together to lobby to protect their own industry and their own jobs is a crying shame, and we are all suffering the consequences in salaries that are lower than they could be and jobs that are more difficult to find and keep than they should be.

Doctors unapologetically fight political battles to, for example, limit the rights of individuals to sue for malpractice. Lawyers fight unapologetically to protect and enhance the right to sue. Software companies lobby hard to increase the number of H1-B visas available and to protect their own tax breaks when they send jobs overseas. There would be absolutely nothing wrong with software developers fighting to protect American software developer jobs. Why should we, and we alone, disarm in this fight?

The attitude that software developers (read workers) should buck up and lift themselves by their own bootstraps and see themselves only as individuals within the system is very helpful to the corporations offshoring jobs. If we simply "stop whining" and refuse to band together to protect our common interests, well, we'll continue to see declining salaries and more jobs being shipped overseas.

It all comes down to a pervasive anti-union attitude. Whenever a group of workers get together to do something, it smacks of unionism. Everyone knows that unions are bad and are only out to protect the lazy and incompetent, and that libertarian software developers would never want to be involved in anything like that.

I see nothing wrong with software developers fighting to protect themselves just as doctors, lawyers, airline pilots, professional athletes, and corporations do.