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Re^6: No, "We" Don't Have to Do Anything

by sfink (Deacon)
on Mar 02, 2006 at 08:38 UTC ( [id://533823]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^5: No, "We" Don't Have to Do Anything
in thread No, "We" Don't Have to Do Anything

You remind me of what happened in my company when my engineering department was placed under the VP of Operations. (He was the only reasonable choice out of our executives, since we didn't have a CTO or VPE at the time.)

Operations people are completely in love with planning and predictability. Which is understandable, given their position. They get mild praise when things go right for long enough, and immediate harsh criticism when something goes wrong once. As a result, they have no interest in research, vision, or any ideas related to anything but making what we already have work more predictably or reliably. Product development is never a good idea in the mind of an operations guy unless the business is facing immediate failure due to the lack of a feature, and that's hard to prove (and admittedly, it is something that is much more often claimed than it is true.) After all, any new release is much more likely to provoke stability problems than fix them, and if the currently deployed version is functioning at all, then it's always safer to spend time honing support processes and knowledge bases than making fixes of questionable correctness or (gasp) adding a new feature.

A company -- or FOSS project -- that adheres too much to this mindset is dead but doesn't know it yet. Stability is death. You have to have a vision for where you're heading towards. And if that vision can be broken down into a neat little schedule, then it's not a vision. Creating anything of true value requires risk. Risk means relying on the outcome of unknowns. You can and should elucidate that vision into a roadmap, and maybe even make up a schedule -- but if you believe either one, you're a fool.

Some projects can be fully planned and scheduled, and some people can only be happy and productive when working on such things. That's why we have operations people, and they do a job as important as the engineers. Projects will usually evolve over time from completely unplanned to completely planned, never quite reaching either extreme, and some people should really just stay away as long as (or until) it's in a state that doesn't mesh with their personalities.

Perl6 is visionary, and cannot yet be forced into the box of predictability. If you're the sort whose brain is compatible with long-term vision, it's not hard to get a pretty good (though necessarily incomplete) idea of what the vision of Perl6 is. Well, what the visions are, maybe. Yes, it's a vague, somewhat incoherent vision, but the sorts of things that Perl6 is attempting to cater to are really not that mysterious.

I'm not attempting to either defend or attack the progress or project management of the Perl6/Parrot projects. (But I am confident that the truth is better than the detractors think, and worse than the supporters think!) I'm just disagreeing with the previous poster on the uselessness of dreams (aka visions). They may be much harder to make real, but they're also the only things worth making real.

That said, progressing from vague visions to preplanned milestones and a worked-out design is always valuable. The tone of your message says to me "the project is useless and doesn't deserve my consideration because it is inadequately planned out." That's known as destructive criticism. There may be a valid point buried within that could help to improve the state of things, but that's not what you're attempting to communicate -- you are only trying to communicate a vague notion "project bad! people working on it bad! and stupid!". If you were to instead look at the specifics and form an opinion of what specifically could be improved based on the actual current situation, then you would most likely have something worth saying. The above is not.

In fact, every one of your points could have been recast in a constructive way, if you were actually interested in helping rather than carping. Here are some general hints:

  • Concrete suggestions: nearly always constructive
  • Vague suggestions: tossup
  • Complaints: nearly always destructive
  • Questions: usually constructive (especially if you record the answer where others can find it!)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^7: No, "We" Don't Have to Do Anything
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Mar 03, 2006 at 16:38 UTC

    I am confident that the truth is better than the detractors think, and worse than the supporters think!

    Someone get this man a medal! :-)

    Makeshifts last the longest.

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