Many in IT would have you believe that they’re progressive, constantly advancing and learning. They will provide examples such as:
- We’re adopting lean (or agile)
- We’re using Scala
- We’re doing large-scale
Dig a little deeper though and you’ll quickly find:
- The agile or lean they’ve adopted and trumpet is merely a fixed set of ceremonies such as time-boxed cycles, limiting in-flight work, pair programming and automated testing.
- The Scala code they’re writing is largely imperative with no use of any of the obvious functional aspects.
- The supposed large-scale is in fact a couple of thousand customers running on a single database with an operation count per minute of no more than 60.
These individuals and companies are paying lip-service, they haven’t learnt anything other than what the latest buzz is and they’re operating some parody of the real thing.
The fundamental problem is, they don’t do their research. They don’t actually examine what has been done previously and understand its fundamentals, apply it and sharpen it. This is the skill that I gained at university, not some set of buzz technologies or processes. This is the fundamental skill that allows us to progress, to learn, adapt and act.
[ There's a supreme irony in an individual or company claiming to be doing agile or lean and not being able to research, learn and adapt because they follow a fixed set of ceremonies. ]
Unfortunately this skill isn’t generally recognised as valuable in the IT industry, it’s rarely taught and not seen in requests for curriculum changes from business to universities. This sort of feedback is more typical:
…startups need graduates who can hit the ground running, who are proficient in PHP, Python and Ruby (among other modern programming languages), and who, ultimately, understand the practical side of software engineering as opposed to just the theoretical side which they learn at university.
Being proficient in a language does not make you good, it just means you can crank (poor) code fast. Further, understanding the practical side of software engineering means learning from what you do, analysing and adjusting. If we’re all so good at that, why do we repeatedly get burnt by the same classic mistakes?
Far too many within IT act on hype or pay lip-service, they don’t do research, they don’t adopt the basic disciplines of learning. Whilst that continues, progress is nothing but a pretence.
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