Enterprise Software Considered Harmful

I've read Ravi Mohan's interesting comments.

First of all, enterprise software can be precisely as interesting, in an ideal world, as plumbing. If the "enterprise" is space exploration, then "enterprise" software is MORE interesting than Yet Another Compiler.

Working with an Ocean Engineer, I developed a hydrostatic stability program for oceangoing research vessels, one of which explored the ruins of the Titanic and another of which discovered changes in the ocean owing to global warming. Part of my job was building the graphical "plumbing" but all of it was Fun because the work had Meaning.

The problem, which is unstatable in the American business world, and in worlds, such as India's software development industry, with a postcolonial dependence on the health of the American industry, is that if the enterprise is something like life insurance or peddling real estate, programmers are saddened and disheartened by the triviality and in some cases the nastiness of the business they support.

Moreover, chapter nine of my book (Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler) deconstructs the boundary between "enterprise" software and "plumbing", because it shows how a compiler for a special-purpose language can implement business rules.

Note after all that "MIS grunt" and "plumbing stud" are ROLES. These ROLES evolved as the software industry "matured". The earliest programmers, including even myself in 1973, wore multiple hats, and a spiritual mentor, who worked for IBM on "business" applications in the 1950s as a Man in a Grey Flannel Suit, had to develop compilers to get business applications done.

I developed a request compiler merely to consolidate 50+ mailing list selectivity problems. The plumbing was the enterprise code.

The problem, however, is stark.

We learn in school that on the one side is the conquest of nature in the form of science (a "conquest" which owing to global warming may be in reverse) and on the other the "people" side of things, coded as soft and cuddly.

This is an example of a binary opposition which structures and distorts thought. Just as the very idea that we control nature through science and mathematics is questioned by environmental theory and unpleasant environmental effects, the managerial "story", that people in corporations are warm and cuddly and humanistic, is undercut by the simple brutality of corporate life, in which the warm and cuddly Human Resources types are straightforward enforcers of the law of economic scarcity and inequality.

But more important, the binary opposition ignores something that was pointed out by Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (midcentury German social theorists who unlike "sociologists" in American universities actually THOUGHT about society).

This was the fact that man is part of nature, and any totalistic programme to control "nature" has to tame MAN.

[It's important to your boss that you use the shrinkwrap tool, in many cases, because this prevents you from at some point asserting ownership in the final system. You in other words are part of the problem as well as the solution, because an earlier generation of programmers, without ethics to be sure, wounded perhaps by what they saw happen to their hard working fathers in the Depression, walked out the door with proprietary code.]

Fashioning things like compilers and plumbing software in general, is indeed attractive, because it removes the programmer from what appears to be a controlled space, in which he is less than a Subject, coding the Law, and more a "programming resource", expected to conform at all times to a management "vision"...an Object.

In an ideal world, we would not need the software artifacts on which most of the effort in the MIS industry is focused.

Consider for example, monstrous medical billing systems which use arcane and ill-understood rules to allocate the total cost of a hospital stay (a number itself arrived at by methods that do not bear close investigation because of the inability of the free market to simply admit a simple human need-for-care) to the various insurance providers that the hapless employee/patient has cobbled together before his stay.

You CAN develop elegant algorithms to make the allocation correctly and efficiently but what undercuts job satisfaction is the underlying Buddhist problem of "right livelihood". You're developing the elegant system to assuage and not eliminate an injustice being done to the patient who in a developed society has the human right to single-payer health insurance.

[And...let me assure you...if you like Robin Williams' Peter Pan "gots kids"...you do this. For years.]

This is because American society has "evolved", or devolved, to the point in which control of nature includes as a major subproblem the control of people, who remain part of nature even in theology ("remember man, from dust thou cam'st and unto dust thou shalt return" being the applicable Christian text: "clots of blood", the Islamic).

The system, the mechanism is in a fully developed society with America's committment to a free market so afraid of the games wounded, dispossessed, and outraged people will pay to evade paying the hospital that it spends more and more energy on forestalling chicanery.

Whereas even in Hong Kong, a free market system, you simply pay 100.00 and the taxes of the tai-tais make up the balance. They pay these taxes because they are quite low, but spread amongst many tai-tais.

Americans tell the tai-tais they are being foolishly altruistic.

Given that many MIS systems don't serve human needs, this is the reason why programmers retreat into "plumbing", but here, you're still supporting a system which has through its internal logic to turn upon real people, and send them bills they don't understand and cannot pay.

Let me address some of Ravi's thoughtful points in my next post.