I have long noticed a split in computer magazines between hortatory pieces which urge the manager to flog the troops to implement best practices, while failing to describe what on earth they might be, and pieces that actually describe those practices.

The contradiction in software management has always been that the best user of a software tool can in principle make the tool, but the problem here is that this reduces a necessary alienation.

The enthusiastic, in-depth geeky tone is ultimately disruptive in the software factory, but at the same time, without enthusiastic geeks, there is no software, INCLUDING the soft implementation of packages, such as Installshield, which expose a Turing-complete interface for generality.

Take a look at what Andy Tegethoff [1] has to do to stay current on his own time, and ask yourself, if any software manager works this hard?

You don't become a geek by choice. The fact in my experience is that you cathect to hardware and software for the SAME reason the child of an abusive mother visits her in prison. We're wired to get a quantum of satisfaction from our lives, and if the only way to get satisfaction while studying to pass examinations rigged to sell Microsoft software is to geek out, this is what we'll do.

Girlfriends and wives of male geeks don't understand this. They think that, boo hoo, their geeked-out sweetie pie "loves" computers. But we need a neologism for the love of technology as a mechanism for SURVIVAL in a world in which economic justice is a nonstarter.

In Chicago a long time ago, I expressed some enthusiasm for the Cobol compiler. I was rebuked, and the manager said, we don't need your enthusiasm. I read after that of a Soviet employee who was rebuked for her enthusiasm for Communism in the same words.

What this fails to acknowledge is that people use their "id" as well as ego in technology, and that without instinctual drives there is no technology. Homo erectus, for millennia, proved that we don't need technology but homo sapiens basically thought it was cool to make rather than steal fire. He also sought the satisfaction of renown.

But industrial civilization has to tell the lower middle class that their only hope in a world predefined as one of scarcity by economists and physiocrats, that they are shop-soiled goods who have, year after year, to stay current, anhedonically, with a naturalized technology. Paradoxically, they have to make it (as in the fundamental paradox that you have to "install" Installshield, and the lie of "turnkey") while disavowing ownership or even job satisfaction.

The articles in SDM were downsized to 8th grade level but even here, there seems to be no real market for pabulum. At the same time, as computer science enrollments decline and jobs migrate to Asia, the US geek market may be imploding back to a hobbyist hard core.

US managers hope that Asian geeks will work as automatons but my experience is instead that their expectations for satisfaction increase just as rapidly.

Meantime, I have picked up some recent Apress titles to find the dedication to be "to my Savior, Jesus Christ". Now, as the Off Topic Monster from the Planet Gazumbo, far be it from me to say that a hard-working Apress author doesn't have the right to a religious dedication, as long as Gary Cornell is willing to let another author dedicate his book to Allah or Mazda, lord of light.

But, as the Off Topic Monster from the Planet Gazumbo by way of China, I will say that I would not buy a computer book by a Fundamentalist as my personal choice, because Fundamentalism is a PRODUCT of alienation from the tools of production, and, in my experience, a direct response to the fact that the manager tells you to use best practice while nuking said praxis when it appears.

Fundamentalism creates mental pre-conditions for pious hopes in software, and as we know, where there is a pious hope in software, the software WILL be late and WILL have bugs.

Dan, I think this demise creates an opportunity as long as your content consistently takes the programmer point of view, and treats the programmer as a whole man or woman who has political interests divergent from management.

I see, in other words, a discussion of how to use Installshield followed by a discussion on informal workplace solidarity, followed by a discussion of how to code public-domain algorithms.