The Case for Slow Programming

And the issue isn't so much whether or not a programmer can hold the "entire system" in their head so much as, if they don't need to, they can be doing a whole lot more. This is, after all, what computers are good for.

No package manager or dependencies seems strange. What would you call all the projects on this page? https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/PackageManagementTool...

This article reminded me of something I read in the Vanity Fair article about Sergey Aleynikov, the Goldman programmer[0].

>He’d been surprised to find that in at least one way he fit in: more than half the programmers at Goldman were Russians. Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he says. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. . . . The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time.”

Even while he was in prison he managed to code:

> A few months into Serge’s jail term Masha received a thick envelope from him. It contained roughly a hundred pages covered on both sides in Serge’s meticulous eight-point script. It was computer code—a solution to some high-frequency-trading problem. Serge was afraid if the guards found it they would deem it suspicious, and confiscate it.

That kind of discipline and meticulous thought is very hard to build in to someone who has never had these kinds of constraints but it is certainly an admirable goal.

[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...

Before anybody else gets funny ideas: the claims in that article aren't entirely correct.

First of all, I find the claim about 35 hours being the average a bit dubious. It may have been the average some years ago, but today it's probably closer to 38-40 hours, with service jobs (from retail to agencies) often adding unpaid overtime to that. On the other hand our work laws are pretty employee-friendly (e.g. a mandatory uninterrupted resting period of 24 hours per week in case you have to work on sundays) and larger companies are more likely to follow the letter of the law.

The rules regarding Facebook and private e-mail have more to do with German privacy law: if the private use of work computers is explicitly forbidden, there are less legal landmines involved with intercepting or monitoring Internet use. In practice many places have an informal policy that allows these things, just not officially.

The bit about employees not hanging around after work is also inaccurate. For many people a lot of friendships (and relationships) involve co-workers. In fact, this is one of the reasons there was such an outrage when Walmart tried to implement its US work policies in Germany (which forbade romantic relationships between co-workers -- not that that rule would have held up in German courts to begin with).

There are indeed more days of paid vacation and families do receive preferential treatment when it comes to scheduling vacations during the major holidays or summer break.

The difference when it comes to "Handwerk" is also very striking. Mediocre pay (and rampant moonlighting) aside, craftsmen are generally held in high regard and like most professions take a lot of pride in correctness and precision. This probably again goes hand in hand with Germany having a lot of laws, rules and standards for various fields of work (e.g. you can't just set up a shop as a car varnisher, you need a formal qualification for that).

Also, bureaucracy. Although the sibling is right in that you do usually get the expected result if you follow all the rules, the paperwork can be daunting. Most people joke about the tax law in particular, but we have laws, rules and standards for everything. German law generally tends to define even edge cases clearly rather than leave them up to interpretation by the courts, consequently the legal system tends to be less shady than in the US, but trickier cases can still take years (but on the plus side, they are much cheaper than in the US).

Also, universal healthcare.

"...no, you don't, you can't."

Yes I do. And I can.

"Being older doesn't prove anything"

Indeed it doesn't. I know because I pay attention.

I'll put it another way - you can be young and not know. You can also be old and not know. However, you cannot be young and know. But you can be old and know. Old is usually, but not always, measured by time.