I know it's just a story, but if I had managers like this, I'd be headed for the door so fast, I'd trip over them.
The Programmer's Dilemma
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: The Programmer's Dilemma
#22In the original prisoners dilemna, there was real consequences involved: 10-20 years in jail. Getting fired from waterfallcorp doesnt sound like the end of the world. (Some might even consider it a good thing). Entertaining read though.
Re: The Programmer's Dilemma
#23A colleague of mine - his wife was a 3rd grade teacher. One day, he mentioned to her the process that we were doing. And she laughed. She showed him the daily progress report. "What I did today? What I want to do tomorrow?" That her 3rd graders had to fill out everyday. Are programmers adults that need to be self-managed + micro-managed like 3rd graders?
> She showed him the daily progress report. "What I did today? What I want to do tomorrow?" That her 3rd graders had to fill out everyday. To be honest, it sounds just as insane—possibly more—that children have to do this kind of thing. There were fewer assessment exercises of this sort when I was in school, albeit appreciably more than my parents had to contend with. The main lesson I took away from them was to avoi…
"To be honest, it sounds just as insane—possibly more—that children have to do this kind of thing."
That particular exercise is a way of practicing the connections between verbalization, logical reasoning about the future, and emotional desires. It sounds like an excellent way to help the top half of the IQ bell curve to work on projects bigger than will fit in their head overnight.
As to wasted time, it should not take more than a few minutes a day, a bargain compared to the time spent on the party indoctrination in history and social studies.
Re: The Programmer's Dilemma
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check your definition again. In Game Theory, that's a different game, where cooperating outweighs suckering the other guy. That's called a "Stag Hunt:" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma/#StaHunPD It could be that in some organizations, the rewards are such that a Stag Hunt is a better model.
No, I mean best outcome for all parties -- ie win-win -- and the story sounds to me like there is no actual good outcome for this tale. I am well aware that in prisoner's dilemma if one person betrays/blames and the other does not, that's when one party gets over. Sorry for being unclear.
No, you're still missing it. In Prisoner's Dilemma, if they both cooperate they still get a bad outcome. It is globally the least bad, but individually worse for each of them than defecting if the other cooperates. Look at the payoff matrix: [1]
If mutual cooperation was the best outcome, there would be no dilemma.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Strategy_f...
Re: The Programmer's Dilemma
#25This feels like an argument on the wrong level of abstraction. Even if the methodology is at fault, it seems silly to say "Waterfall is the problem." That's simply too large of a point to make. You could say that you fell behind during development and couldn't tell that you were falling behind, so the problem snowballed. That's specific enough for people to discuss without resorting to politics. Otherwise you're taking the organization's dysfunctions head-on, which is a losing battle.
Re: The Programmer's Dilemma
#26A colleague of mine - his wife was a 3rd grade teacher. One day, he mentioned to her the process that we were doing. And she laughed. She showed him the daily progress report. "What I did today? What I want to do tomorrow?" That her 3rd graders had to fill out everyday. Are programmers adults that need to be self-managed + micro-managed like 3rd graders?
Not everyone understands that scrum and agile have this heritage of coming from getting horribly managed projects worked on by extremely mediocre devs in the enterprise trenches on track.
Re: The Programmer's Dilemma
#27Sounds a little bit like the prisoner's dilemma...
Thanks for the insight Captain Obvious. Did you forget to eat your Wheaties this morning?
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation." [1] There are many places for insulting others, HN is not one of those places.
Re: The Programmer's Dilemma
#28Somewhat off topic, but I am reminded of a paper I had to critique a uni: "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It" [1]
The paper reasons that following a strict process is unrealistic, but that it is still worth it to "fake" a process, by presenting your system to others as though you had followed it (for example through documentation and reports that mimic the waterfall process, presented to players such as the VP and Director of Marketing in the OP).
[1] http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/presentatio...
The most interesting thing is that this paper was published before I was born in 1986. Even so, everyone in my class (this was about 18 months ago) was in agreement that the paper was still valid. (Though there would be the reasonable argument that we weren't able to give informed opinions having yet to experience software engineering in the real world at that point)
Re: The Programmer's Dilemma
#29The problem here is that managers think that writing good software is like baking a cake, if you have the right ingredients, the right process, the right environment and the right people, then you are 99% likely to end up with a satisfactory cake. This is absolutely not the case with building software. It could very well be the red tape in the office, the politics, maneuvering, posturing, noisy programmer area, the t…
I disagree. The different between building software and baking a cake is that we've had thousands of years to perfect a few dozen types of cake. The recipes are well-known and easy to follow.
Building software is very much in its infancy and many magnitudes harder than baking a cake.
And any manager who thinks just having the right ingredients, people and recipe will guarantee a good cake has never baked a cake, anyhow.
Re: The Programmer's Dilemma
#30If you are playing poker and you don't know who the sucker is, you're it!