Richard Feynman illustrated a point about involvement and productivity in the book “Surely you are joking My Feynman”. There was a big team of physicists working with every possible resource available to create the atomic bomb. As part of the project they were supposed to do tons of calculations and hence hired the best mathematicians in the country and placed them along with expensive computers to churn the necessary calculations out. Since the project was top secret, the mathematicians just received the problems; in spite of their level of expertise, the performance was found to be too mediocre.
Feynman took the tough decision of disclosing the project secret to enhance their productivity and convinced his superiors to help him to do so. He got a buy in and went ahead in explaining about the nature of the project and why it is necessary for them to come up with the bomb before any other country comes up with their own. As expected by him he found the productivity to increase many folds when they knew the end goal and its importance. His idea of treating them not just as a facility for mathematics but involve them to be as part of the project has paid rich dividends. He has observed that the mathematicians became very inventive to make use of the limited availability of the computers and took extreme care to iron out inefficiencies.
This is a real life incident and I have also heard many times about “difference between laying the bricks and building the cathedral”. In the software building world, the bigger picture never gets painted to the entire team and often the talent is overrated than how the job can be taken to the finish line. Unless every one in the team has a strong sense of ownership towards the goal, the peak performance never occurs. Getting the whole picture can also give an illusion of a time consuming activity, but benefits out weigh the time spent on that activity.
What would happen if the captain of the football team need to yell to every one the field on what to do next, wont it be a terrible team to play with?
Is it not cool to look like James Bond and attack every problem coming to us at runtime ? My answer is, it does not take us too far if we are not using the manuals for the tools we use unless it is extremely simple like a hammer and has only two steps to use it.
I some times wonder that if search engines had made people lazy to learn something from the grass roots up. This is not just an one off observation, I have known developers who thrive on search engines for everything from silly to complex ones. Of course, the search engines made a huge repository easily accessible to us; but not everything can be solved using them. If any one argues that they can get lots done just by intuition, analysis and net search then; why not we have technological marvels built by almost everyone.
We should not shy away from understanding the details or referring the manuals (It is not cool to act like James Bond). Only with a strong understanding of foundations we could go very far or tackle difficult situations with ease.
Richard P Gabriel introduces the term “habitability” in the context of software development. It is about how good is the code to navigate easily and understand what changes to make. He relates this one directly to a person living in a building. If the building is simple, well lighted and ventilated then it is very habitable one but if a building has been designed to win a awards then it might not be an easy to live in place. Some thing like how many people will choose their place of work to be Taj Mahal.
This topic evoked a mixed response in me as I was very much inclined to aesthetics and reduced number of lines. This was definitely food for thought as I had never thought about me being a builder and want to build dwellings such a way that it would be a habitable one. The next few days went by pondering over the thoughts again and also discussing that analogy with some peers. We all felt that if we programmers consider ourselves to be builders (coders) then our aim should be long term life and habitability of what we build.
How to know if the code is habitable or keep it habitable? My inference so far has been that not to treat any software as a finished product. Developers should consider that the system will always be under repair and should keep it in a constant repairable state. The idea might not get along very well with everyone, but so far any thing which I have coded and considered complete has been changed within a short period of time. That means there is nothing called a finished product, which can be related to leaving a semi-finished building to both engineers and dwellers to start using and making changes at the same time.
The more habitable a codebase is, more is the sense of ownership and responsibility. I will finish with a snippet from the book
When people lose the sense of responsibility for the environment they live in, and realize they are mere cogs in someone else’s machine, how can they feel any sense of identification with the community, or any sense of purpose there?
Novi's 