Making Programming Boring

Back to software stuff, a day late again.

My company is working very hard to make programming boring. Maybe boring is too strong of a word, but certainly mundane, simple, and straightforward. But, in the usual double-whammy of bad idea and impossibility, this is a move in the wrong direction.

The problem lies in identifying and defining the task. If the task is so tightly defined that no innovation can take place, then the project is bound to stagnate. While there are circumstances where a tight definition of requirements is both desired and necessary, most situations would dictate that you development staff knows more than you do about the domain of the problem to be solved. Joy's law states that "Most intelligent people work somewhere else", which is really a corollary to "50% of the people are below average." That simple fact can be used to prove that both the designer and programmer are average at best. But it also says that there may be someone in the staff who does "think outside the box," which is only possible if the box is not closed on all sides.

Programming is not brick-laying, or assembly-line work. People may mistake the "Cathedral and Bazaar" analogy as indicating that the work must either be done by skilled craftsmen or by "workers." Software is neither a blank canvas nor a paint-by-number. It is somewhere in between, and each absolute end is used very infrequently. The innovative work done by a company like Google was either designed or created by a few, very smart people and then passed to less-smart (again, invoking Joy's Law) people to implement or use and expand upon.

Innovation is what created the software technology we have today, and to try to over-engineer the design and implementation to the point of stifling innovation will lead to a loss of talent who don't want to work where their ideas aren't recognized and ultimately to a loss of market share to companies that can innovate and create software more quickly, for lower cost, and taking better advantage of the existing technologies. If all you know how to make is widgets, and all your people know about is making widgets, then you would be oblivious to anything that solves your problem better than a widget.