Tag: failure

Getting to the Point, Finally

When I started writing about my experiences in the sixties I didn’t plan to go into quite as much depth. The point that I was out to make was that at the beginning of the sixties I was a child and by the end of the sixties I was an adolescent. Adolescence is a strange time in a persons life. We suddenly have the body of an adult with a mind that hasn’t quite caught up. We are feeling emotions and thinking thoughts that we have no experience with.

What’s worse is that in our society there is profound discomfort on the part of many parents when it comes to the task of talking with their children about sensitive topics like sex and career choices and how to choose a life partner. And, to add to the problem, the discomfort is passed down from generation to generation.

I find myself at sixty one, just beginning to appreciate what I want to do with my life, how I should have raised my children, what is important and what is not. This could have happened forty or fifty years ago if my parents had been taught how help me with these issues. What’s worse, my children and grandchildren face similar delayed epiphanies.

I look at the generation that is just getting out of college and I see how so many parents have failed their children. We have taught them that they should get a trophy for just participating. We have taught them that they can live at home as long as they like. It was made clear to me that when I got married, I was on my own.

The world is different. College costs more. College or some other form of post secondary education is expected of anyone who wants to pursue a good job that pays a living wage with benefits like health insurance and a retirement plan. And modern retirement plans aren’t the pensions that were common when we started working. They are typically deals where the employer matches employee contributions to a 401K up to a certain percentage of their salary.

We’re faced with the fear of many more jobs being done by machines in the very near future. This should be good news. We should all be reaping the benefit of a more productive society. After all, in order to make money selling goods and services you have to have customers to buy them. And those customers have to have income available to spend on those goods and services.

Is it any wonder that the world is in such chaos? The fundamental economic model is being invalidated and no one knows what we are going to replace it with. But in spite of all this uncertainty I’m convinced that the only way through this is to face our fears and love one another. I’m not sure of much but I am sure that love is the answer. Pure, unconditional, brotherly love. Namaste.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The Freedom to Fail

Paul Graham is an inspiring essayist. I agree with most of what he says. In August, he wrote an essay entitled Holding a Program in One’s Head. This essay gave me a lot to think about. He captured the essence of much of what upsets me about the corporate environment in which I try to practice my profession. He overlooks one important aspect of an environment that will encourage creativity and innovation. That is the freedom to fail without repercussions.

I sometimes listen to Terry Gross’ radio program Fresh Air on NPR . Recently she interviewed Steve Carell and Terence Blanchard on two separate programs. The thing that struck me is that they both had similar stories to tell about the environment that nurtured their respective careers.

In Steve Carell’s case, he spoke of his experience as a cast member of Second City, the famous sketch comedy troupe where many of Saturday Night Live‘s cast received their training. He said that the great thing about that environment was the opportunity to fail. He went on to explain that they were expected to go out and try new characters and ideas. If they worked, great. If they failed, there was no penalty. They were just expected to go out the next performance and try something different.

In a surprisingly similar fashion, Terence Blanchard described what it was like when he joined Art Blakey’s legendary Jazz Messengers band. Terry Gross asked him if Blakey was a disciplinarian. Terence responded that on the contrary, all the members of the band held Blakey in such high regard that he had to spend a lot of effort putting them at ease. When they asked him to let the band play the classics that made the Jazz Messengers famous, he told them that they should compose their own music and make the band their own. Terence went on to say that it was great to have the freedom to fail. To try new things without worrying about whether they would work or not.

I think that programming is the same kind of creative activity that acting and creating music is. By the very same reasoning, I think that the freedom to try things and fail without repercussions is essential to writing innovative software. Furthermore, I think that most software falls into the category of innovative software. We make the mistake of treating software development like the other engineering disciplines and ignoring the central difference between it and them.

If we are building a building or a circuit board or any other physical product, we have a clear idea of the functionality we are after. We might build a model or a prototype to clarify our thinking but we wouldn’t dream of trying to sell a model or a prototype as the final project. Typically, a lot of effort is expended to rigidly define the product so that we can effectively produce it exactly to plan. The reason we do this is that the process of production is costly to change. We get cost breaks from producing many items exactly the same.

Software is different. In the first place, the per unit cost of producing software is negligible.  Secondly, you rarely know exactly what you want the product to look like until you are well along the road to producing it. Unlike physical production lines, changes to software are easy and inexpensive to make. In all but the most extreme circumstances, software requirements are discovered as you implement the program.

You can define requirements in very broad terms, e.g. “this is a point of sale terminal for a video rental store”, but the details of how that should be implemented should be derived from interactively creating software that automates the repetitive tasks of running a video rental store with someone that understands those tasks intimately. And, who knows what those tasks are better than someone that runs a video rental store.

An analogy that was created to explain the rationale behind eXtreme Programming (XP) captures the essence of this principle. You don’t drive a car on a long trip by carefully aiming it in the direction of the destination and tying the steering wheel in place. You would be in the ditch before you went a mile. Instead, you constantly adjust the course, you drive the car. In much the same way, you must drive toward the creation of an innovative piece of software.

That’s why I love being a programmer. That’s why I hate programming in a corporate environment where management doesn’t understand these basic facts about software development and wants to maintain rigid control over the process. But then again, the money is good.