Engineering Decency

A couple of days ago I was quite unpleasantly touched by a tweet (a Twitter tweet :-) of a so called "expert" (you know, one the people doing only presentations and learning new languages to write their next book...) ridiculing a developer about a failed project. Somehow I didn't like that - come on, the guys just tried to capitalize on a promise Google (yes, that big engineering powerhouse) made! And they were not alone...

What is that, that the programmers find it so hard to show some engineering decency? I've seen it again and again. Is it so much fun* to flame someone to feel better? The experts should know best that doing stuff mean means making mistakes. Or maybe have they forgotten how it is to be working with real stuff instead of powerpoint metadata?

If you are skiing difficult terrain, you know that the question isn't if you will fall, the question is when you will. That's the same in software - you don't want to believe this now (and me neither) but you will make (sometimes stupid) mistakes! So please, show a little decency. The guys you are going to deride probably just tried to create a working system for a given set of requirements which then turned out to be largely false and for a specific platform, which then emerged to be broken. We've all been there.

And because it's difficult and needs to be learnt, I have an example of how to exercise engineering decency (found here). Instead of the usual:

What idiot with even half a handful of moldy cottage cheese for brains would ever create a pile of stinking filth like this and call it an application?! The true feat of engineering here is that this code monster didn't swallow your whole organization in the black hole of its utter lameness. Where did this person learn programming — NBC?”

Try saying that:

“This will take me longer than we had discussed. In my initial examination of the system, I missed some design decisions in the existing code that conflict directly with what we need to accomplish. I didn't anticipate the approach adopted by earlier developers, because I would not have designed it that way myself. I’m sure they had their reasons for choosing that direction, but so far those reasons have eluded me.”

That's decency, that's humility. Maybe there's a reason you just don't see now. But even if that's really a load of crap, frankly, who of us can say he never ever wrote bad code (or a bad powerpoint presentation for that reason)?

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* well, if we'd like to get Freudian, we could say that the unconscious fear of doing some big, stupid mistake reveals itself by attacking others, and that we can maybe reason from that, that the majority of programmers are not well trained for their job. But that would be only a mere speculation to discuss with friends on a lazy evening...