Sysadmin Field Notes

June 16, 2007

So there's weird dust-up in the .NET community regarding some fictional persona named Mort. Like Oren Eini, I can't seem to figure out what in the world the argument is. Mort is good? Mort is bad? Mort is "Agile"?

The descriptions of Mort I've seen don't indicate to me that "Mort" has ever heard of, let alone used TDD, domain specific languages, continuous integration, etc. He/she just isn't interested. There's a million things Mort could do today to improve his/her code, but doesn't, either because he/she is not inclined or able to.

Here's what I think the real issue is. Tools can't fix that. Assuming I'm understanding the persona properly (which is highly likely that I'm not, since Sam and Nick work for the same company and don't agree on the definition), Mort will write bad code no matter what tools he/she has. The only thing that can help Mort is targeted instruction by a talented teacher.

If you add in a unit tester to the default package, Mort will write bad, hard to maintain unit tests that are more trouble than they are worth. If you add continuous integration, Mort will only check-in once every two weeks because he/she doesn't want to break the build. Mort needs peer pressure and mentorship to get better, not more tools in the toolbox.

Update: On a re-read, this sounds elitist, but that's not what I was getting at. Mort's do a lot work for corporate America and elevating their level (and identifying/driving out the really terrible ones) is important, maybe even critical to our industry improving. I just think the best way to do that is by attracting talented mentors and leads to the platform that can then bring up their teams, rather than trying to suddenly and spontaneously get Morts to change their behavior for the better just because a new tool popped up in Visual Studio.