Responding while Forbidden; Gender and Other Issues in OSS and PHP

This post is what would have been a response to a post on Elizabeth Naramore's blog, which she titled Gender in IT, OSS and PHP, and How it Affects Us *All*. Quite a good post, actually, with a long and often thoughtful (but as often thoughtless) comment thread following. I was hoping to respond to a comment on the post, but that apparently is no longer allowed, even though the "Leave a Reply" form at the bottom of the page is functional. There's also a mysterious "Login/Password" pair on the page, but no indication of which ID one uses, or how to go about getting one.

Following is the content of the reply-that-wasn't: I (perhaps unreasonably) think this has some points worth pondering. Please do read the original post first and then come back here - where the "comment" feature definitely does work.

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@A Girl: Great that you're doing AP CompSci next year. As someone who's been in the Craft for 30 years, I have a great sentimental attachment to your idea that "teachers and professors have the chance to shape the mindsets of their students towards women in the industry". If we were a true profession, where essentially all practitioners have a certain common level and content of educational background combined with qualifying experience (e.g., apprenticeship, internship), I'd agree wholeheartedly.

The fact is that many if not most of the people in the industry - both the "coders in the trenches" and the ex-coders who got promoted into management ("because they were such great coders" - thereby removing two qualified people from an organization)... far too many of these people have noformal education in CS (or, often, anything else). And by the time they realize how important that might be, they're old enough that they're facing ageism in the workplace already - they're not confident enough to put the "big hole in the middle of [their] career" and "go back" to school. It doesn't help that schools the world over do such a lousy job of outreach and marketing to those potential students - they're focused on the Executive MBAs and other graduate-level returning students, who can have their pricey programs paid for by their employer. Joe or Jane Schmuck trying to keep head above water in the face of cut-throat competition from planeloads of new arrivals with mimeographed certifications, who've been taught their entire lives to never think out of the box to begin with... things start getting really tough out there. I'm not surprised that enrollment in CS programs is down. I'm amazed beyond words that it's still as high as it is; a less starry-eyed observer might expect the number of CS majors to closely track, say, majors in Phoenician economics.

A lot of the new entrants into CS and IT over the last ten years or so have degrees - they're just not in the "obvious" field. Someone, and I wish I could find the original, wrote an article in one of the industry mags (like C/C++ Users Journal, not IEEE Computer) that, to be good at software in the modern era, one needed to have exposure to "behavioral science, psychology, linguistics, human factors, sociology, philosophy, rhetoric, ethnology, ethnography, information theory, economics, organizational politics, and a dozen other things - and please, please learn to write competently in English!" - I've had that taped above my display for years now. So it's not that we're not educated; the problem - and it is a problem - is that there is no universal common body of knowledge for software "engineering" - which is one of the necessary precursors of any true profession. We're not going to have a CBOK without either a broad consensus within the industry, or imposition of a system from outside (and very narrowly-focused) forces in government or the larger economy. Given the prevailing social and political attitudes of current practitioners ("herding libertarian-poseur cats" is a phrase not infrequently heard), that would seriously disrupt the Craft and, by extension, any industry or field dependent upon software (which by now is pretty much everything).

How to solve the problem - and, in so doing, help redress the pandemic sexism, racism and ageism (in huge parts of the world, recruiting with explicit age limits is perfectly legal, and here in South Asia, you're old for coding at 28)? I've got no idea. When I first started doing this, I thought that within the next thirty years or so (from 1979), we'd be able to turn this informal craftwork that had taken the industry away from the "educated CS types" and turn it into a real profession. Now? I'd say we're 30 to 50 years away from now - unless we have a software equivalent of the New London School explosion and a "solution" gets imposed from outside. We need to grow up, and quickly.

We Interrupt This Program...

We interrupt this tutorial to interject an observation about goals, methods and promises. Goals we have for ourselves as people and as professionals; the method we use to pursue those dreams; perhaps most importantly, the promises we make, both to ourselves and to our customers, about what we're doing and why.

I consider this after reading the Website for some consultants who've done some (relatively nice, relatively low-key) link-dropping on LinkedIn. I'm not naming them here, not because I don't want to draw attention to them (their own site is very clean and well-done), but because the point that I'm going to be making here isn't just limited to them - we, as a craft and an industry of Web development, have some Serious Problems™.

The "problem" is nicely summarized by this group's mission statement:

Our mission is to produce the perfect implementation of your dreams.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

As a goal, implied but left unspoken, absolutely nothing; both as practitioners and as clients, we tend to set ever-higher goals for ourselves. Indeed, that's the only way the "state of the art" - any "art" - can advance. But we who practice the art and craft of software (including Web) development (as opposed to the engineering discipline of hardware development) have a history of slashed-beyond-reality schedules and budgets coupled with a tendency for stakeholders not to hear "if all goes well" as a condition to our latest schedule estimate. We have a history, perceived and actual, of promising more than we can deliver. Far more attention is paid by non-technical people to the "failures" and "broken promises" of software than to things done right. For a craft whose work is accruing increasing public-policy and -safety implications, the effect of unrealistic expectations, brought about by poor communication and technical decisions being made by people who aren't just technically ignorant but proud of the fact, is disturbing. What started as a slow-motion train wreck has now achieved hypersonic speeds, and represents a clear and present danger to the organisational health and safety of all stakeholders.

I don't mean to say that projects always fail, but an alarming number of them do. If, say, dams or aircraft were built with the same overall lack of care and measurable engineering precision that is the norm in commercial software development, we'd have a lot more catastrophic floods, and a lot few survivors fleeing the deluge by air. When I entered this craft thirty years ago (last May), I was soon led to believe that we were thirty to fifty years away from seeing a true profession of "software engineering". As a time frame beginning now, in 2009, I now think that is almost laughably optimistic.

Why have things gotten worse when we as a tool-building and -using society need them to get better? Some people blame "The Microsoft Effect" - shipping software of usually-dubious quality to consumers (as opposed to 'customers') who have bought into the (false) idea that they have no realistic choice.

It's more pervasive than that; commercial software development merely reflects the fashion of the business "community" that supports it, which has bought into one of the mantras of Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of Innovation", namely "don't worry, be crappy." Not that Kawasaki is giving bad advice, but his precondition is being ignored just as those of other software people have been: the key sentence in his "don't worry, be crappy" paragraph is "An innovator doesn't worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it's truly innovative" (emphasis mine). In other words, if you really are going to change the world, nobody will notice if your Deus ex Machina 1.0 has clay feet as long as you follow up quickly with a 1.1 that doesn't...and follow that with a 2.0 that changes the game again. But that space between 1.0 and 1.1 has to be fast, Kawasaki argues (in the next paragraph, titled "Churn, Baby, Churn"), and the version after that has to come along before people (like possible competitors) start saying things like "well, he just brought out 1.1 to fix the clay feet in 1.0." If the customers see that you're bringing out new versions as fast as they can adapt to the previous ones, but that each new version is a vastly superior, revelatory experience compared to the earlier release that they were already delighted by, they'll keep giving you enough money for you to finish scaling the "revolutionary" cliff and take a (brief) rest with "evolutionary" versions. Business has not only forgotten how important that whole process is to their continued survival, but they've removed the capability for their bespoke software (and Web) infrastructure to use and reuse that model. All that remains is "it's ok if we ship crap; so does everybody else." That's the kind of thinking that made General Motors the world-bestriding Goliath it is today - as opposed to the wimpy also-ran it was (emphatically NOT) half a century ago. We really don't need any more businesses going over that sort of cliff.

What we do need, and urgently, are two complementary, mutually dependent things. We need a sea change in the attitude of (most) businesses, even technology businesses, towards software - to realise and acknowledge that the Pointy-Haired Boss is not merely a common occurrence in the way business manages software, but actively threatens the success of any project (and business) so infested. Just as businesses at some point realise that "paying any price to cut costs" is an active threat to their own survival, they need to apply that reality to their view of and dealings with the technical infrastructure that increasingly enables their business to function at all.

Both dependent on that and as an enabler of that change, the software and Web development industry really needs to get its house in order. We need to get away from the haphazard by-guess-and-by-golly estimation and monitoring procedures in use by the majority of projects (whose elaborate Microsoft Project plans and PowerPoint decks bear less and less resemblance to reality as the project progresses) and enforce use of the tools and techniques that have been proven to work, and have an organised, structured quest to research improvements and New Things.. Despite what millions of business cards and thousands of job advertisements the world over proclaim, there is no true discipline of "software engineering", any more than there was "oilfield engineering" in widespread use before the New London School explosion of 1937. Over 295 people died in that blast; we have software-controlled systems that, should they fail, could in fact hurt or kill many more - or cause significant, company- or industry-ruinous physical damages. We should not wait for such an event before "someone" (at that point, almost certainly an outside governmental or trans-governmental entity) says "These are the rules." While I understand and agree with the widespread assertion that certification tests in their present form merely demonstrate an individual's capability to do well on such tests, we do need a practical, experiential system - probably one modelled on the existing systems for engineering, law or medicine. Not that people should work 72-hour shifts; there's enough of that already. But rather that there should be a progression of steps from raw beginner to fully-trusted professional, with a mix of educational and experiential ingredients to ascend that progression, and continuing educational and certificating processes throughout one's entire career. The cost for this is going to have to be accepted as "part of the system" by business; if business wants properly competent engineers, and not just the latest boatload of unknowns with mimeographed vendor certs, then they're going to have to realize that that benefit does not come without cost to all sides. The free ride is over - for all the stakeholders at the table.

It's Time to Grow Up

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet has a very interesting post up, titled "Sticking with XP / Upgrading to Vista / Waiting for Windows 7 / Switching to Mac or Linux — There’s no single right answer". He puts forward the blitheringly-obvious elephant-in-the-room answer to the perennial food-fight question, "Which system is best?" Namely, "use what works for you."

As I read through the post and the comments that had been added to it, I thought about all the man-centuries (if not -millennia) that had been "invested" in the topic. Naturally, I had my own two rupiah worth to say on the topic. Following is the text of the comment I left at approximately 1645 GMT on Friday 27 June. Let me know what you think. (There aren't any links in the post reprinted below; to the best of my knowledge, ZDNet's commenting software hates links, and it definitely hates Macs; every single comment I've posted has given me the error "You must enter the text to post" — on a clean, empty comment form — after I've hit the "Add your opinion" button. Fix it, guys!

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"Use what you like, and like what you use."

That's excellent advice for those of us who've been bouncing around in the funhouse for a while, who know which mirrors make us look weird (or, worse, are broken and likely to cut us if we're not careful)...and, granted, there are blessed few truly "new" users now; statistically, nearly everybody's used a PC with one form or another of Windows, and increasing numbers of us have used Mac and/or Linux, but...

We still do have the FNG syndrome with folks who haven't upgraded for a while, and finally they get tired of their molasses-slow Win98 box when they see this zippy new PC or Mac they've been handed at work. "Gee, we use XP at work, but I heard Microsoft isn't going to sell it anymore... what should I use?" Many of us, professionally or otherwise, are tasked with advising those people. Too often, the advice becomes "this is what I use; try it" without really understanding the (often vast) difference between the adviser and the user in question. And when "advisers" try and hash things out among themselves, it almost universally degenerates into an Animal House food fight scene — which doesn't bring any value to the discussion and actually makes us LESS able to give good advice.

Mental hands up: How many of you reading this have ever spent a month using Leopard? Vista? At least two of Ubuntu, Fedora or SuSE Linux? How many raised your hand all three times? Yeah, I see you, way back in the back.... but blessed few others.

In any other endeavour that dared call itself a craft, let alone aspire to an engineering discipline, this would be malfeasance if not negligence; you just DO NOT give advice on matters in which you are not qualified — and if you don't have experience and/or training with Technology X, you're NOT qualified to present advice as being any more valuable than used toilet paper.

In that light, Adrian has performed a major public service here. Given the reality that most people whose job relies on using and/or developing for one of the major platforms are quite unlikely to be as current and proficient on any of the others, this is the best advice that will just let us get along with our jobs without pissing in each other's lemonade each and every single day (Mike Cox and No_Axe, you know who you are).

But in the increasingly unlikely event that we're ever to make something professional out of this hobby that we are lucky enough to get paid for, the fact that this "solution" is seen as viable to any degree, let alone the MOST viable solution, is absolutely, reprehensibly unacceptable. And since computers and software have become absolutely central to nearly everything in modern life, including not least public policy, if we don't get our house in order under our own power, sooner or later some governmental organization or group thereof is going to step in and exert adult supervision. Is that what we want?

The days when Windows geeks and Mac users and Linux hackers could happily putter away, each in their own walled garden with tactical nuclear landmines guarding against any encroachment by reality, are gone as surely as the clipper ship. In the world of the Internet, where information is what's important and how it's processed/generated/visualized/stored is at best secondary, we're faced with the same choice as every biological or cultural organism at an evolutionary shift: adapt or die. Keep the lemonade clean, or drink the purple Kool-Aid. Our choice. Each and every one of us.

Rant - can people at least engage brains before asking stupid questions? (Or: Paging Andy Rooney)

I read several different development blogs and message boards, such as those associated with phpclasses.org, codeproject.com, IBM DeveloperWorks, and so on. Usually pretty useful both for learning new techniques and keeping an eye on what other people are doing. Several of the boards, particularly on CodeProject, have been getting hot and bothered lately about the declining quality of questions being asked on the public lists; one large category of these is "affectionately" known as "homework questions'. These usually aren't for actual classwork. A more typical scenario seems to go like this: Sanjay is brought into an outsourced project because his agency assures the client that he's a hotshot — fully qualified in J2EE, PHP, XML, RPC and LSMFT (obviously a key qualification, but since the client HR person is neither technical nor over 40, it just appears to be "tech jargon.")

The client manager thinks, "I'll have to let a couple of my other guys go to stay in budget, but if this guy can save our bacon, it's worth it." Sanjay starts one bright Monday morning at 9.00,, gets the usual here's-where-things-are spiel, sits around (billing time) waiting for his computer to be set up and connected to the network (these things almost never happen before the warm body shows up), and by 1 PM is browsing the codebase for the project. By 1.30, he's on the Web, posting questions on sites that make it absolutely, crystal clear that he wouldn't know his ear from a hole in the ground if you gave him a flashlight, a map and six hours' head start.

The most extreme example of this I've personally witnessed was when I was part of a team consulting to a major Southeast Asian telecoms firm, working on integrating the homegrown billing system that one division used into the (telecom-)industry-standard one used by most of the rest of the company. This benefited greatly from knowledge of Java, of both Linux and Windows, and especially of the commercial system which was the target for the migration. The firm which produces this system, in true Java-ecosystem fashion, offers their own training which leads to certification in various aspects of the system. The team had a good mix of knowledge and experience, with the single yellow flag being that the major new-system expert was a member of the client's staff. After being encouraged to bring our own domain expert in (apparently so the client could reassign the existing one if desired), our headquarters (in India) found the "perfect guy". He had Java and J2EE certificates. He had a BSCS from "one of the top universities" in India. He had all the certifications the vendor offered. Oops, they were all for the previous version of the system....but this guy could, on paper, walk on water as far as our project's needs were concerned. So we flew him out from Bangalore. We had, as I recall, six weeks before major schedule slips would hit the fan.

A month later, my team manager and I sat watching this guy type in sample programs from the manual, try to build them, watch them fail, erase everything and start over. The manager said to me, "well, why don't you and (the junior guy on the team) start trying to pick up the pieces? Maybe you can pull something out." Then we noticed something else that was interesting. The client manager kept saying nice things about the "expert", how diligent and hardworking he was. He started taking the expert out for lunch and so on. My manager and I were in shock: this guy had already cut into the project for thousands of dollars and had yet to produce a single project artifact. Worse, in our view, his "experience" and "qualifications" were obviously complete fabrications. Headquarters (back in India), however, wouldn't send out a replacement because they had been told that the client was happy with the guy. We started looking around for brown-projectile-proof mackintoshes, anticipating the storm sure to come. And it did, eventually — shortly after the "expert" failed to follow explicit, idiot-proof instructions on how to extend his visa so he wouldn't have to go back home. Instead of buying a round-trip bus ticket to Singapore, he bought a one-way ticket, later claiming he wasn't sure which bus he'd want to take back up. The Singapore immigration officials blocked him from entering Singapore as they had no reasonable assurance of when he'd leave. The Malaysians wouldn't let him back in because his (tourist) visa had expired that day and he'd need to enter another country before reentering Malaysia. After several frantic midnight telephone calls and (I was later told) negotiation and pleas from our firm and the client, he was unceremoniously dumped on a plane back home, and our firm was billed for a full-fare coach ticket. The client manager became upset because his buddy, the "expert" was nowhere to be found and on no notice, at that.

Why am I blathering about all this now, several years after the event? My ire was raised by one of these "homework questions" I'd mentioned earlier, this time posted on the WeberDev general PHP forum. Entitled "Which is compatible PHP or Java with SQL SERVER 2005", the writer, using the nick "kumarsudu", starts out with...

Hi All, I would like to know which one is have compatible 1. PHP with SQL SERVER 2005 2. Java with SQL SERVER 2005 as i have to develop a project, ...

As another popular forum's members often ask, "how many WTFs are there in this message?" The mind reels. Asking totally nonsensical, absolutely open-ended questions on technical sites and lists is now at a flood stage not seen since the AOL infection of the Internet back in the early 1990s. The writer, besides the sterling specificity of the question as mentioned earlier, shows little knowledge of or interest in proper use of the English language (despite ample materials and information available online as well as off).

It pains me that:

• a person of such deliberate ignorance and lack of brilliance would not only choose to waste my and other readers' time with the request to do his work for him;
• any contracting agency would have such miserably low non-standards that this guy would even get the time of day, let alone a job for which there are an ample supply of other (by definition more qualified) candidates for (granted, they may have to raise their pay to a level higher than a fast-food burger-flipper);
• any client company would not only pay money for such an individual, but continue to do business with the "recruiter" that brought him in;
• there are no project-local, competent individuals whom this writer could ask for help, who would apply appropriate informational and organizational responses to the question; and finally
• that the prevailing business contempt of software development has sunk so low that this type of thing is more unusual for the fact that anyone bothered to notice it than that it happens at all. Would you want to fly with an airline whose pilots were the cheapest available, using forged certificates and qualifications to highlight (non-existent) experience? If your answer to that question is anything less emphatic than "hell no!," please inform me of your flying plans so that I may ensure that I am neither flying nor anywhere on the ground along your route during such a flight.

The "project" mentioned by the initial writer, if performed by individuals of this apparent calibre, is highly likely to fail — wasting the client's time and money, leaving the client wih a problem that still needs to be solved, and continuing to erode the opinions of the client and the client's associates of the business value of software, since, obviously "IT projects always fail."