Smart and productive people are happiest when they are free to do whatever they feel is worthy of their time and attention. One of the key to their productivity is that they don’t need to be told what to do every step of the way. Retire at 30 does not mean being unproductive, it means working on what you want, when you want. I have even met execs in large orgs that were essentially doing the job because they liked it. They did not need the salary anymore.
The behaviour described in the article makes me think of a goal-oriented AI. It does not require a lot of complexity and can exhibit very advanced and quite surprising behaviour.
Dude. TI-81 was my high school calculator. I got pretty famous at some point for managing to squeeze into it a decent RPG with monsters, health points and some story line. Other geeks were jealous and jocks patted me on the back for providing distraction. The challenge was the available BASIC program memory. We spent the next few months figuring out how to reduce the footprint to the bare minimum to add more gameplay. No internet at the time. Just our brains and the manuals. I chuckle at the idea of what we could have done if we had been hinted access to assembly and pixel flicker tricks to have 4 colours.
The point seems missed to me. Like any serious collaborative undertaking (movies, buildings, complex systems development, scientific collaborations, etc), successful software needs a unique person to carry the vision of what is the expected result and do what needs to be done to achieve this result, including organizing the works. Call him or her a director, an architect, a chief scientist, a hero… He/she will always be needed.
It’s interesting to note that these people can also become the doom of the project. This is why there is no single easy recipe for picking the right person.
Reminds me of the Surgical Team from The Mythical Man-Month, and of an interview of I think one of the authors of the agile manifesto, talking about IBM internal experiments concluding that it was the most effective organisation.
I've been working in such teams, the surgeon was typically one of the early developpers, that did (and knew) most of the code, but as the system grew sub-surgeons started to emerge for new or reworked parts.
This is the precise point of the famous article by Leslie Lamport on time, clocks and the ordering of events in a distributed system. I was surprised that it was not mentioned in this article, as it formalizes the link between this fact and the relativity of time.
Crossrail is legendary in the field as the example of what not to do when managing mega projects.
What I was told by greybeards: systems engineering was non-existent and rushed to the « let’s start to concrete » phase. When the project started to install the various systems, all hell broke loose. For example, systems had to be taken in, then out, because they just didn’t work in the field.
Side note: which makes this article really a good laugh. Who cares if your virtual model works if it does not in the real world?
OK so, that would not have been too bad if the management of the mega project would just have recognized the fuck up and declared delays. Instead, it scrambled to find ways to recuperate the accumulating delays, while reporting green to the politicians. As usual, a cretin came into the room to suggest that signalling tests could be compressed down and commissioning tests could proceed while construction completed the remaining work.
Problem: crossrail decided to experiment with a new hybrid signalling system that uses two different types of train control in order to maximize throughput in central london area. That turned an already rotten idea into an impossible one. Situation in the fields became insane. Signalling contractor shot a letter to cover ass. Politicians finally noticed, and sent clueless consultants to investigate, therefore opening the gates of hell.
Aaaaah. I like the scent of Napalm in the tunnels.
I've worked on some mega projects as well, and the key to being on time and on budget is to manage the PR so that no-one knows when it's supposed to be completed and how much it's going to cost. The only difference between Crossrail and private sector projects is that there is no press scoutiny over how much over budget they have gone and how late they are.
It was summer 99. I was finishing my CompSci MS degree in US. I was driving back from visiting DC with my future wife in my Oldsmobile ‘84 Cutlass Supreme (a.k.a. wreck on wheels). The day was so hot the radiator exploded, so we waited in a diner until the night fell and we could ride in cooler air. A guy and his family parked next to us. His car was also bust. It was a Yahoo guy. 15 minutes later I had a friggin’ job offer in my back pocket, as we rode toward the setting sun.
But neither does a logical clock. The implication only goes one way: if A happens before B, then the logical clock of A has to be smaller than that of B. The other way does not have to hold.
