You can't be "competent" at poorly defined tasks
The ever-reflective Chris Morris writes "being very competent at a defined task is not enough in a situation of flux".
The problem is that managers are forever asking programmers to be "competent" at undefined tasks, where you can only be "competent" at a defined task.
Large MIS systems have no authors per se and as a result programming becomes the appearance only of agency.
The "situation of flux" is the naturalized economy over which we're not supposed to have any power.
Programmers typically and to the extent they love the artisan activities of programming seem to not be at all the type of man who prefers to in Tolstoy's words ride the tiger, appear that is like Napoleon or Donald Trump to manage organizations effectively where in reality Napoleon took credit for victories not his, and Trump, according to real commercial real estate people, is a failure as a commercial real estate developer.
But managers know, if programmers do not, that programmers will refract the needs of a wider class of real users because programmers act in their own interests and in the interest of their social class.
In this heartbreaking situation the only opportunity to be human (are we not men) is to find a sweet problem and solve it.
But then, in MIS programming, you open yourself to the accusation, the common accusation, that you are in a jejune fashion defining a problem "in flux" in such a way that you can apply a favorite sweet solution.
This is analogous to the way in which posters on the primitive and barbaric usenet facility accuse any poster, with few exceptions, who has actually done his homework on the topic of the ng, with having anything from a hair up his ass to a "conspiracy theory" (now redefined to mean almost any clear political explanation of political phenomena). For example, I recently and temporarily forgot my commitment to stay out of usenet, an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, and posted an essay examination on a Shakespeare play I teach.
Posters compared me to a past poster, Phil Innes, whose major thoughcrime was that he'd read a major recent critical work on Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, by British poet, critic, and former husband of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes.
They did so because I knew and they didn't how many dukes of Gloucester exist in the History plays.
They said that Innes was obsessive about his book but I realized that in the contemporary corporate world (where mid and low level employees cannot, for reasons of corporate flexibility, form a theory about the overall direction of their company: where Enron employees were instructed to hold their stock while the upper level managers were selling), "knowledge" itself is if treated as one's own an obsessive form of conspiracy theory.
From this knowledge, right-thinking people are expected to shrink.
Innes had possibly found Hughes' theory, that Shakespeare was engaged in a proto-feminist search for a solution to the problem that he was writing too many tragedies, explanatory of many puzzles including the dead end of Timon of Athens and the diffuse structure of The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and Pericles.
But, like a programmer who recommends a compiler for a large problem where the rules are in flux, or one who renarrates "the problem of storing files" into the management of virtual memory, Innes was insulted by becoming instantly "the guy with a hair up his ass about Ted Hughes" in a world of vicious children.
In fact, it is probable in the case of large MIS problems that more than one solution may exist, and the BEST solution would be the one that the actual programmers are most familiar with: but this runs counter to the management ideal of the "virtual" company, staffed by "virtual" employees defined not as actual people, but circularly, as the people who give you the best financial results (where this can't be determined outside of very broad, and negative criteria, when you hire them!)
For the same reason that the coder for the other company in Chris' post had to blame Chris group for an ill-defined "lack of support", and in the same fashion as the Apprentice, success is retroactively used to prove that the successful are geniuses, while failure is thrown at the persons assigned to the unmet need, and their job, it is tacitly agreed, is to Bend It Like Beckham and kick the responsibility anywhere but here.
Managers in other words talk as if there was indeed a magic bullet, and "programming" becomes a search for the bullet while covering your ass.
Since my experience includes, in a situation of flux, that a program for telecom billing could simulate the telecom, and since the project was so late that nobody else wanted to touch it, I have had opportunities to exercise old-fashioned agency.
My nostalgia for these "old days" when there was this space for being an agent without people thinking you some sort of nut was such that I am glad no longer to be a corporate programmer.
Most opportunites are poorly defined, to start with
I'm not comfortable with this view. I think it sets a ceiling on your career.
To begin with, there is a business problem or opportunity. Like everything else in the real world, it is poorly defined. If the appropriate response includes software development, someone must come up with a vision and then a spec. If not us, then who?
If you want some theory on this, Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" is worth looking at.
His "Tractatus" was perhaps the highest expression of the tradition of sharp definition and precise logic, which began with Aristotle and ran through Leibniz, and which is so attractive to programmers.
His second thoughts have much to teach us. Life is messy, and our language is flexible to cope. This is not irrational, it is in fact the only form of rationalism that can cope with the everyday world. His most original contribution is not any particular point but an attitude: this is how it is, get used to it.
I've got a particular reason to face these issues, one that may sound paradoxical: my customers are scientists. They work with data that is pre-scientific, in the sense that the theory to account for it is still under development. Once clear definitions are available, they will move on and research something else, something that is as yet not understood. So competing views of the same real-world events are fundamental to what they do.
Very interesting reply, Chris. Thanks.
We studied Tractatus and went on to Investigations. My department chair, about whom I have written elsewhere (E. D. Klemke) invited Gustav Bergmann to speak on "The Glory and Misery of Ludwig Wittgenstein".
Bergmann felt that the Tractatus was the glory, and the Investigations, the misery.
It would be great if programmers could stay in the world of the Investigations, in which we tolerantly play nice with others, engaging in language games.
The problem is that programmers, unlike end users, have at the end of the day (at build time, to be precise) shuttle between this world and the cruel and Tractatus like world of the computer.
Nobody wishes to acknowledge that the cruel and Tractatus like world of the computer as experienced phenomenologically by the competent programmer (who remains the only programmer worthy of respect or even mention) is as Dijkstra said, a radical novelty...which instantiates, which incarnates, and which makes flesh the "glory" (or is it the misery? could Bergmann make such a neat division?) of having to
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
That is: in my direct experience and for coming on forty years, end users and spokesmen for management as such (which is merely an interface between capital and labor and thus in a sense irresponsible and hortatory by definition) have exhorted programmers to "focus on the needs of the poor user" and to FORGET their own needs for simple intellectual integrity and self-respect.
As you know, prior to writing the Investigations, Wittgenstein took a sabbatical teaching spelling. On a sabbatical teaching in China, I can certainly see how this made the former prisoner of war more aware that the way we use language is not easily mapped onto symbolic logic.
But what Wittgenstein failed to see, as a man who remained independently wealthy all his life through a combination of frugality and the Wittgenstein family fortune, was the social dimension.
This is that "language games" aren't benign and friendly all the time.
Sometimes they consist of a bunch of people being less dazzled by brilliance than baffled by bullshit.
Furthermore, the journey into the precise world itself generates useful questions.
Why is the minimum withdrawal amount 100.00? Why does the user want this?
Why is it that public contact sessions for our minimum wage help desk people are scheduled without breaks?
All too often, entering the language game of the user means the sloppy inheritance of a midlevel manager's picture of what his company is all about, and his contempt for other workgroups.
This collides on the network with competing language games and guess who the fall guy might be.
To truly incorporate a given user's language game into a program, what you have to do, in my opinion, is force the user to choose by making them select parameters consciously, if necessary using a language-based interface.
Otherwise you are to blame for not, in a miserable late-Wittgenstein way, grokking the End User's real goal which when the End User is middle management is sometimes pimping the company for personal gain, using language games of a deliberate and planned imprecision.
You are almost never talking, one and one and for this reason more precisely, with the Big Man, because in our globalized society, the Big Man is always more than one guy.
And the fundamental paradox happens to be that if in a company you do indeed get to talk to one Big Man (the disappearing bourgeois subject) the only way to transmit his desires accurately is to take his place, or give him a way to take your place with an executive dashboard.
Now, I understand that your end users are "scientists". But my experience at Princeton was that insofar as "scientists" are engaged in Big Science, they are corporatized, and end up communicating with mere programmers sloppily, and the result is Big Fortran in some cases.
In 1998, two such scientists "disproved" global warming using Excel bar charts by displaying temperatures since 1981, which happened to show a cooling trend, which changed to a warming trend when I added 1980, because the data set was too small to show what are geological trends.
Consider the plight of the programmer who works for such "scientists", characterised by Adorno in the 1940s as the sort of "scientists" who are full time, in his words, "candidates for posts": alternately desparate in the overcompetitive culture of American science for recognition, anxious about grants, or anxious about the funding of their jobs.
They've hypothesized that there is no such thing as global warming and that, as bigod scientists, they can prove it.
Along comes some community college dropout who asks them what to do with the charts that include 1981.
Boom, the dropout is out of a job.
In this, variants of late Wittgenstein are used drained of social critique to tell the programmer to chillout.
It's just a game, kid.
A language game.
Don't take yourself so seriously. What're you, kid? Community college, Army, state school? Your boss went to Yale.
This was the misery of the late Wittgenstein. He created the cultural meme that we can bullshit all the people all the time.
3000+ men and women dead in Iraq is one consequence of this *schlamperei*.
In other words...
Reminds me of Chris Date's Incoherence Principle...
"It’s not possible to treat coherently that which is incoherent...""