Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

There is one thing that never stops striking me when I come across it: the vast gap between the value that good software developers/architects provide for their clients and employers, and the appreciation of that value shown by clients and employers.

It seems that most of the time, organizations are prepared to bite the bullet of paying quite handsomely for good software professionals, but if they can think of any way not to, they’d rather not: there seems to be some ingrained notion in many peoples heads that software development is somehow a menial and lowly task requiring little to no skill, that can be taught to anyone given a weeks “handover”.

I’ve seen this being expressed many times over: By having the highly paid, highly skilled people being divorced from hands-on development, instead being expected to provide “architecture” and “designs” for an army of lower paid, considerably lower skilled developers.
I’ve even seen cases where companies have given notice to their skilled developers, to then have them “teach” everything they know in a week to some offshore team that are actually web designers/html-jockeys!

As if knowing how to crank out a static web page with some text on it was the same thing as writing scalable software for integrating diverse information systems!

What seems utterly lost on people with this mindset is that skilled software professionals are highly paid for good reason: they have a scarce skillset that takes years and years to pick up and hone. Even the difference between an experienced, highly skilled developer, and that of a junior unskilled developer can be that the experienced developer can do things in no-time, that the junior developer would not be able to pull off given infinite time!

A good metaphor for this situation is that of trying to make a woman give birth in a month by impregnating 9 women - adding women to the equation won’t hasten the delivery, because the quantity of women is not the cause of the problem in the first place.
In raw economic terms, it makes more sense to pay a highly skilled person £600 a day to perform a task that takes him a week to finish, instead of paying 4 lowly skilled people £100 a day to perform a task that they will never be able to finish.

How this appreciation gap has come about, is beyond me, but I think it has to do with people thinking of software development as if it where conbeyor belt industrial production, whereas in reality, it is actually new product development - it is actually designing both the product, the conveyor belt, and the tools and processes around reproducing the product.

The Register: “Rubbish UK management crushing creativity” (quoting a scientific study).

Nothing new there. For a country that culturally puts such a premium and emphasis on “management”, the average level of UK managers is really poor compared to my experience of other countries. If it wasn’t for immigrant managers and software developers, the UK IT industry would pretty much grind to a halt from general mediocrity and incompetence (the sad state of british software engineering is a completely different chapter altogether).

When I first moved to the UK, I was taken aback by how politicised the work place was: a general culture of “divert the blame, grab the glory” prevailed over true teamwork. After closer to 4 years in the country, I’ve gotten used to it, but unfortunately it has been confirmed to me that politics often takes the front seat to actual progress in many organizations.

Personally, I think the country’s obsession with stardom and football (soccer for you yankies) are partly to blame: the stature of managers attracts a lot of people into management who really shouldn’t be managers, and many of those in turn are either spineless pushovers that are just secretaries with fancy titles, or go one step too far by modelling their management style after macho authoritarian football managers.
The only problem with the latter is, there is a marked difference to managing a group of overpaid, pampered, uneducated and half-witted ball-kickers, and managing moderately paid intelligent professionals..

My previously mentioned difficulties in getting credit led me to request my own credit profile. It turned out that my credit score was a respectable 884 out of 1000 (with a perfect repayment history), however a deeper look into the files led me to find what I suspect is the reason for my difficulties in gaining credit:

Someone who was up to no good (read: acted in a fraudulent manner) lives/has previously lived in the same apartment building as me. And in true british logic, a lot of credit givers will basically turn you down if someone else on the same street address has a bad or fraudulent credit record. To add insult to injury, it doesn’t even need to be the same flat, the same street address will do, as most organizations won’t distinguish addresses down to the flat number.
So in other words, I’m being punished because someone with a seemingly greek last name who commited fraud once upon a time lived in the same apartment building as me.
Brilliant..

So, I’ve been rejected for credit for the second time this year, this time for an American Express Business gold card, that I thought would be useful for separating company expenses from personal expenses.

I’m beginning to suspect that either someone has stolen my identity, or the credit raters actually punish people for being affluent and debt free. It is funny how I was approved for a £400K mortgage earlier this year (which I eventually never took out), but I can’t even get the simplest of credit/charge cards.
Reason seems to have nothing to do with it: I make a comfortable upper middle class income, I have a semi-considerable amount of assets in investments, and I have absolutely no debt, zero, nada, zip. The only thing that could be perceived as “debt” is possibly my monthly credit card bill, which runs at around £1000 a month, but which I pay in full each month on time.
Furthermore I have never-ever paid a single bill late since I moved to the UK three years ago, in fact, I am kind of anal about bills and probably act a bit stupid by always paying bills the second I receive them.
From a creditors point of view, I should be a dream: I always pay, and I always pay on time with time to spare.

I can only conclude that I am either subject to identity theft, or I am being punished by not having any debt. Being punished for being debt-free is actually a possibility: I have heard that a lot of creditors and credit agencies feel more comfortable lending to people who are already in debt.
The herd logic of lending tells them “if others where comfortable enough to lend someone money, it must be a vote of confidence in them”. In other words: it makes more sense to mindless pencil-pushers to lend money to someone who is already halfway to bankrupcy, than someone who has an abundance of assets and cash but no debt. Brain dead..

For anyone who isn’t Scandinavian, a bit of background: Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) is the old government monopoly airline jointly owned by the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish governments. In the last few years the company has struggled financially, and with unions making more and more outrageous demands. To add insult to injury, they’ve also lost touch pretty badly and forgotten that they are no longer a monopoly.

So, today I saw an ad for SAS’ “Eurobonus Gold” membership card, and I have to say it amused me in all its stupidity:

“Get a Eurobonus Gold card, and you’ll be first in line for any overbooked flights!”

Hmm.. So let me get this straight, if I pay extra for a “benefit card”, I might actually get the benefit of getting the service that I originally thought I had paid for? I wonder if I could get away with a similar scheme for my consultancy work? “Pay a little extra, and I might just turn up and do some actual work”?

The fact that SAS even tries to run such a stupid ad just shows how woefully out of touch they are.
But unfortunately, it is just a natural progression to how they tackled the competition from low cost carriers with a new “service concept”, with the service concept being same old high prices, worse service and charge an arm and a leg for a cup of coffee.

I usually keep politics somewhat off this blog, but whenever I think of something supremely bizarre, I just can’t help myself.
Apparently, in the “War on Terrorism”(tm) we should accept having our liberties encroached in the name of security.
So here are a few questions/thoughts:

Airports are pretty much the flagships of security thinking, you cannot find an environment that is better controlled. Yet the security is counterintuitive and outright stupid: Apparently, liquids can be dangerous if an individual carries more than 3dl of it, split into three 1dl containers. So what if a couple of friends, God forbid, decide to cooperate and bring 3dl each, that they then pour into a 6dl container they buy in the tax free shops on the other side of the security?
And if mineral water can be lethal when carried through security, why can I buy copious amounts of flammable and explosive chemicals in the airport pharmacy at the otherside of the security checks?

Inconsistent and porous security anyone? And do keep in mind, airports are very much the “flagships” of post 9/11-security thinking. You won’t be any “safer” anywhere else.

But hey, I’m repeating myself, my main point is that security is very much reactive, based on politicians wanting to be perceived as “doing something”. They only stop one avenue of potential attack after it has already been attempted. But for each avenue of attack they close down, there remains an infinite number of other potential avenues of attack for terrorists.

I think the gist of my argument can be boiled down to the following:
Why would anyone in their right mind think that the same politicians and bureaucrats that cannot even catch obvious cases of benefit fraud made by semi-retarded rednecks, would somehow turn into James Bond-like superheroes just because you give them a gun and some wiretap equipment?

..when both of their websites are filled with corporate marketing speech, but the actual downloads are buried and hidden away so that it is nigh on impossible to find them..

Looking for your next role is always a frustrating experience: It takes time, you get approached about roles that are entirely inappropriate or uninteresting to you, you get turned down for roles that look perfect for you, and you have to deal with agents that range from friendly and competent to frustratingly stupid and arrogant. Not only that, you have to compete for attention with a bunch of people who lie blatantly about their skills and experience on their CV’s, put them together with the types of agents mentioned last, and you have a frustrating mix.

Today, I had one of those experiences: I called up an agent I had spoken to about a role a few days ago, on paper I looked as perfect for it as is possible, ticked every box, and there where a lot of boxes to tick. Yet I was baffled to hear the agent say: “oh, we didn’t forward you, we decided to forward another person with more J2EE-experience”.

It baffled me not so much because I have some overinflated view of my own skills, but because whomever they forwarded must have been a clueless liar. Why?
Because I’ve been working with J2EE in one form or another since 1999. And if memory serves me correctly, the 1.0 spec of J2EE was released at the end of 1999. In other words, I’ve been working with J2EE pretty much since its inception, and with some of the technologies in J2EE since before they where bundled up under the J2EE umbrella.

First of all, years of experience is usually not a good indicator of skill anyway (beyond a certain degree), but someone who claims they have “10 years of experience” in a technology that is 8 years old probably doesn’t have much of a clue about said technology..
The painful part is, some agents actually fall for that crap, thus rewarding liars and penalizing honest people.

According to credible sources the magazine Business2.0 may soon be axed by Time inc. And apparently more due to management incompetence at Time, rather than any lack of success for the magazine. According to the article I link to, some people at Time don’t like that fact that Business2.0 is eating away at the company’s “crown jewel” publication, Fortune.

If Business2.0 was really to go away, it would be a truly sad day. Business2.0 is focused at keeping an eye on the tech business in particular, and does so in very entertaining fashion. I read a lot of business magazines, but Business2.0 is by far the best one. It is the only magazine I will travel through half of London to get my hands on, and it is the only magazine that I not only read every single page of, but that I quite frequently actually read more than once.

I sincerely hope that Business2.0 is kept alive, if you believe some sources it is breaking even. And to add to that, it has a very devoted and specific following, if Time can get their act together when it comes to ad sales, Business2.0 should really be one of the easiest sells around with such a targeted readership.
This news is kind of ironic, considering that just today I was looking at subscribing to the magazine so I wouldn’t have to do my mad dash to the specialty magazine store in Knightsbridge once a month to get my hands on a copy..

People in the software industry often like to think of themselves as bastions of cool logic. After all, at the core of it we are concerned with basically supplying computers with instructions based on logic and maths, there is little room for emotion or irrationality at the core of a microprocessor.

Yet despite this, our industry seems more prone than most others to buying into whatever is proclaimed as the latest silver bullet: we are essentially divided into two camps, we either flog the snake oil, or we buy it. CORBA, EJB, Web Services, SOA, ESB, RUP, CMMI, XP, Agile, MDA etc etc, they have all at some time or another been proclaimed as the second best thing to the second coming of Jesus Christ. Some of the acronyms have been rather useful in some contexts, others have been mostly a distraction and hindrance, but none of them have been a silver bullet.

For all the “irrational exuberance” over one acronym after the next, one has to question: what is the cause of the software industries proneness to believing in silver bullets? And will we ever learn?
After 8 years in the industry, I am starting to almost feel slightly ashamed of myself if I ever use one of the “hot” acronyms, especially if it happens to be the acronym of the season. It has gone so far that if I do find one of the “acronyms” useful in a given context, I will go to great lengths to try to find some other word or description to describe it. I simply do not want to come off as a buzzword spouting moron (hence the sarcastic name of this blog), because most of the time the people who find it necessary to fill any gap in their sentences with a buzzword are just that: clueless.

But the question remains, when will our industry mature and learn, and get past the silver bullet and snake oil era? I’m pretty sure the industry will get there one day, after all every industry matures, it is just that software is in the dark ages, just as medicine was prior to the 20th century.
I’m just not too convinced the industry as a whole will mature within my period of actively working, these things never happen overnight. It took medicine several hundred years, you know..