You can finally get number of how much that “technical debt” really is. How much an average bug cost? How long does it on average take until a bug is discovered? Until it is fixed? How much did that quick and dirty patch a year ago really cost? Add to that all the technical value you could get out of such an analysis. What modules/classes have had the most bugs, historically? What classes are unstable and has to be changed all the time?

Think of it as a Freakonomics of version control.

Multitasking doesn’t work,
but it would be so nice if it did
that we try anyway.

That’s about the best summary of (human) multitasking I’ve heard.

This picture is pretty good too, though.

My lunch mates felt that the decision to go with this vendor was not necessarily in the best interest of their company and the technical platform they were developing. Instead, they felt that there were other ways forward which would be better. Some of these ideas included common-sense things such as choosing quality over quantity, working on getting the current code into decent shape, and so on. They also felt that they had been trying to get this message across to management.

Why then did these suggestions not catch on with management, and why did the vendor’s salesmen manage to convince company management to choose them? I don’t have the answers, but I will not let that stop me from sharing my thoughts. I also don’t have all the details on this specific case, so I’ll be a bit more general.

I think that developers and architects have many good ideas on how to build systems, but that we don’t always do a great job of describing these ideas to business people. I think we also sometimes adopt ideas on the basis of liking them, rather than because the idea has been proven over and over again.

Failing that, we need to get a very well-paid management consultant to tell them the same thing. Because in the world of business, the greatness of an idea is proportional to the hourly rate of the person presenting it.

I originally intended to just comment that piece, but the sheer amount of comments made me realize that no-one would actually read it anyway. So I might as well write a response in my own blog which about as many will read but which makes me feel better.

I believe the answer is “yes”. I think that a competent programmer needs to be “mathematically inclined”. Not because the average programmer’s typical work includes much math such as applications in 3D, compression, and image manipulation. In those cases it is fairly obvious that a firm grasp of math is required. I believe the answer is “yes” because in my mind “mathematically inclined” also means “good at seeing patterns”, “good at identifying duplication”, “understands basic complexity theory”, or simply “good at groking thinks”. And while a good understanding of math in general is valuable, I think a solid understanding of discrete math and logic is invaluable.

Finally, I liked what the unnamed author mentioned in Jeff’s post wrote enough to reprint it here.

I run a small (4 people) web dev shop and I’m finding that younger coders haven’t had the pleasure of writing assembler or managing without library functions. I’ve always found strong math skills to be one of the most useful skills for coding, and when one has Google and a massive library of functions, one doesn’t have to be good at math to get things working, until it either breaks, has edge cases, or brings out OS or library bugs.

Some quick examples: simplifying tricky equations to determine array indicies or memory offsets; trigonometry to help with physical calculations; mental hex/bin/dec conversion; logic equalities such as DeMorgan’s theorem.

A few days ago, I a girl caught my attention on the tram. Now, a lot of girls catch my attention, but this time it wasn’t actually the girl herself but her shoulder bag which caught my attention. It happened to have a print which I thought was pretty funny.

Join a proud minority — read books.

First I thought that was rather witty, but then it actually made me sad. Are people who read books (by free will) actually a minority? If I restrict myself to the software development world, then apparently they are. According to DeMarco and Lister in Peopleware:

The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one. That fact is horrifying for anyone concerned about the quality of work in the field.

Consider if this would have been some other field, say medicine. Would you have liked to hear your surgeon say, “nah, I don’t really read books, I base most of what I do on reading blogs”. I sure wouldn’t!

Why you should read books

Alright, why should you read books? Why not just read blogs? Good question! And here’s why:

Books are better than blogs!

Now, that’s a pretty tough argument. Of course, I’m not saying that blogs are bad, but what I am saying is that so much more work has been put into the really great books than into any blog out there. Don’t waste all that work! By reading books, you will learn stuff you otherwise wouldn’t have and you’ll get a deeper understanding of it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Blogs are truly essential and a great part of the internet. All programmers should consider themselves very lucky for having access to all that material. However, their content is typically only good after a couple of loops in the echo chamber (aka blogosphere). When you buy a (good) book, the material you get is already refined, it has already gone through all that necessary editing.

When not to buy books

You might ask yourself, why should I buy books which will be outdated in a year anyway? Also, there are no hyperlinks in books. Books suck! Well, in this regard, I completely agree. The answer is:

Don’t buy reference books.

Here I’m going to quote Jeff Atwood, because he explained it very nicely.

The best programming books are timeless. They transcend choice of language, IDE, or platform. They do not explain how, but why. If you feel compelled to clean house on your bookshelf every five years, trust me on this, you’re buying the wrong programming books.

How about you?

So, that’s my thoughts on the subject. What do you think? Do you read books? What is the best book you’ve read? The worst? Why? Answer with a comment!

I often get inspiration to write posts from reading books or blogs by really smart people. Thus, I often refer to people who are smarter than me. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to get comments from these people on my posts. While I’m typically rather convinced by my own reasoning when I write the post in question, every time I get such a comment I am struck by how much smarter they are than me.

Recent cases where this has happened:

• Mike Cohns comment on Not Converging on an Estimate: I discussed an adaption of some advice he gave in a book. However, my adaption forced me to ignore other parts of the same advice. He pointed out that there was no problem in actually doing both parts.
• Full Statement Coverage: I wondered why Ron Jeffries was writing such sloppy unit tests in some of his articles. He didn’t seem to test even half of the code he wrote. A short email conversation later I had realized that he of course wasn’t sloppy, but rather just much more clever than I was.

So, I simply hadn’t understood what they meant the first time? I don’t believe it’s as simple as that. I think I did understand. Most of the time anyway. But my level of understanding just wasn’t as deep as theirs.

The upside is that every such moment makes me a little bit smarter! Have you experienced a similar situation? What was your latest “revelation”?