Software Development Fiction

Here's one for you: Supposing I combine my preternatural programming skills with my well known talents as a practitioner of Voodoo Economics to come up with a software tool that can take chicken heads and source code trees as input and, as output, tells you exactly how much each line of code contributes to the company's bottom line.
Would you use it?

I got into work at ten after ten AM and settled down to read my email. At 10:30, Bob arrived with a sigh at his cubicle next to mine. As he was unpacking "his" laptop (the laptop that the company gives us to work on at home), Ted-the-manager emerged from his samesize cubicle and said, "Bob, do you have a minute?" Bob had a minute, of course. Ted settled his bulk into the chair adjoining Bob's desk and said, "I need to talk to you about your screen saver, Bob".

I was feeling my humanity in all its frailty, jealous that I couldn't simply reboot and expect immediate performance improvement. I settled for a caffeine rush and sipped (tempted to chug) the hard stuff--a double espresso. I wouldn't be able to sleep tonight, but what difference did it make? My plagued mind was a greater obstacle to sleep than any mere beverage I might consume.

It's possible it was the drugs talking, so please don't hold it against him. He said, 'If code is a commodity, does that make developers programming prostitutes?'" She said the last word in a stage whisper.

It was a wonder I'd made it to the hospital intact. As soon as I got word from Dr. Wirth's sister, I'd abandoned my belongings at the beach house and headed straight back home, thankful I'd driven my own car.

Gazing at the frothy waves, distant sail boats, and dozens of tidal pools formed by the relinquishing tide, I knew this was the definition of off-shore and near-shore outsourcing I could get used to.

If I ever get the notion to write an article on the top 10 worst reasons for choosing Computer Science as a major, I'll have plenty of fodder from the soul-baring confessions shared during the two-day training/team building marathon. Of course it's not like I have a lot to brag about myself, but I just assumed I was the exception...that everyone else had a more noble professional initiation.

You and two coworkers are abducted by force and locked in an empty office building. Fearing for your lives, you immediately begin plotting your escape. The door suddenly swings open, revealing your supervisor dressed in black.

Instead of institutional tables and straight chairs, the room was outfitted with bright orange, red, and yellow overstuffed cushions and bean bag chairs. In the center of the room a round table was situated close to the floor at the right height for the low-profile seating. The usual facility-issue fluorescent lighting was disabled and lamps with colored shades emitted a muted glow, reflecting on the walls.

I felt like I was in class all over again, sitting in an ostensibly safe middle row, hoping to escape just this sort of attention. It's not that I was incapable of answering a question or two, but I'd been involved in the educational process long enough to have my scars. Professors loved to dangle the carrot of an open-ended question, toying with the class like a cat batting its prey, knowing full-well the unsuspected clod he called on would be unable to conjure the precise answer--the right answer--he had in mind.

In an alternative universe (that of William Gibson), Charles Babbage was more successful in getting good machinists and funding. By the 1850s, Analytical Engines were common, and clever German artisans had discovered how to build miniature coal-fired Personal Analytical Engines. Therefore, Emily Dickinson left her home to get a job as a programmer in Boston and one night after debugging code, she wrote:

Truth is, I felt a rush of fear and excitement, like someone living dangerously, on the verge of being exposed as a fraud and prosecuted for an obscure white collar crime, even though I was using my real name and technically had all the necessary credentials to do the job.

I arrived the next day, as directed, at the location shamelessly scrawled on the back of card stock with the words "SALE" and "0% Interest for 12 months" bleeding through. I was initially taken aback by the placard which must have cost a bundle, if priced by the letter. It read, "Foundation for the Analysis of Information Technology and Humanity."

In the year of 2000, when the western world turned its collective gaze to the professional programmer in anticipation of impending technological doom, I took my degree in Computer Science.

It is said that truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction, after all, is the amalgamation of diced, disembodied truths neatly concatenated to form Frankensteinian alternate reality.

Like the curiously segmented children’s flip-book, the writer splices the forehead, nose, and mouth of dramatically different faces to form a startling, but amusing, monster. Fiction liberates and empowers, unfettered by constraints of geography, gender, age, or occupation.

Fiction is the refactored, agile truth, augmented with third-party plug-ins, debugged, and recompiled.

Dredged from the bowels of software development, scraped from the shoes of code-spewing veterans, technology truth searches for a voice like a headless specter swinging a lantern on the railroad of methodologies. With the friendly anonymity of fiction, pearls of perceived software development wisdom can be scattered along with the swine leavings of project failures and analyzed without the unflattering spotlight of accountability.