Bulldozer00's Blog

Joel Spolsky is one of my favorite software philosophers. Joel sticks to fundamental principles no matter what the latest flavor of snake oil is being preached at the moment.

In this blog post, Endless Debate, Joel states:

“A terribly common error is having a debate over how something should be designed, and then never resolving the debate“.

He follows that with:

“In too many programming organizations, every time there’s a design debate, nobody ever manages to make a decision, usually for political reasons. So the programmers only work on uncontroversial stuff. As time goes on, all the hard decisions are pushed to the end. These are the most likely projects to fail.”

In addition to political reasons, I’d also like to add fear.  In alpha male dominated corpo cultures, fear drives the non-alpha members of the group. The titled alphas (a.k.a. managers) rule the roost and the non-alphas go silent when an alpha asserts himself – even if the alpha hasn’t got a clue on what the right course of action is.

Yes Master!

I don’t agree with Joel’s assertion that “all decisions are pushed to the end”.  Because of schedule pressure and the fear of reprisal if the alpha’s instructions aren’t followed, the programmer(s) quietly implement the alpha’s horrendous decision in either code, design, or architecture.

The downstream ramifications of implementing the wrong decision get worse depending at which level of abstraction they are manifest. When the customer: gets the software, discovers the problem, and demands that it be fixed, the alphas are quick to blame the programmers since it’s often impossible, or not politically correct, to trace the problem back to it’s root cause – the bozo alpha’s poor technical decision.

Who said that life was fair?