Sysadmin Field Notes

July 29, 2004

On safari, I'm reading Planning Smarter: Creating blueprint quality software specifications". It's pretty good, and eerily talks about almost exactly what we are starting to work towards accomplishing at work. I like the analogy of specifications to blueprints. I think this is exactly covering the terrority that I always thought was missing: "Okay, we've got our requirements, now what's the next step to turning them into software?" I love that he mostly dismisses as metadata most of the things that people hold near and dear to their hearts as the canonical planning documents.

Also interesting was a deconstructing of the notion of software development as science or engineering. There are some good, solid reasons why it does not map directly to either of those, and is much closer to creative writing (something I've been thinking about anyway).

There's a thought in chapter 5 (section: "Hire the Cream") that was interesting to see as well. The author used a piano player analogy, but I thought of it in sports terms. Yes, you can train people and make gains their quality and productivity, but when it comes to finding people at the top of their game, there is a very limited pool available. There are only a small number of people who can play professional baseball or basketball, despite what amounts to a worldwide talent search and training program (school sports). There are also incredible rewards to be had (fame and money) for those with the ability, so everyone has a pretty good incentive to try and make it to the pros, but still only a few can. Basically the talent pool size is fixed pretty closely to the population size, rather than any other training or industry factors, which means it's going to be incredbly difficult to attract and retain any sizable number of heavily talented people, probably forever. Food for thought there.