What are some solutions? You can start small. We let ourselves get used to this continual re-deciphering of things and we accept it as ordinary. I would say that most of us are going crazy. There's this Thomas Heller quote that I like, that in every company there's at least one person going crazy. Much of it is not really development in the sense of creating something new, but rather re-discovery. Development time too often is just code archaeology. My counter-argument is that our solutions baffle us when we have to modify them or debug them not very far down the road. One set of barriers is when we say: I'm not good at writing, I don't like to write, I don't understand how the wiki tool works, I don't have any time, Not right now, I'm busy, I have another project to move on to - or (worst of all) Perfection is unattainable so why bother.Īnother set of barriers is when we say: We're here to build solutions, not documents. I think the conversation is mainly about barriers.
I want to acknowledge barriers as well as solutions. Imagine one of the people near you and make their life a little bit easier. The goal is just to save your co-workers a difficult day tomorrow or next week. You can start small - you don't have to write something as long as Moby Dick and it doesn't have to be perfect. Write it down now, in a way that's just good enough for tomorrow. My suggestion to you is to simply write it down. The reason we don't understand how things work is because - last year, last month, or even yesterday - we didn't explain our hard-won lessons to one another. I think that's what life is like for us most of the time. I saw a magazine ad years ago which had a red sports car on a highway with red lights every fifty feet. And the things don't work yet because they're trying to figure out how to put the pieces together. They're still building things because those things don't work yet. And the reason is that they're trying to build things.
The question is, What are they doing? What's really happening? What is it like inside the heads of those developers? What is the stuff that they do all day while quietly typing? I'll tell you (and this has been true everywhere I've worked, the bad and the good): all day, every day, they're stumbling, and they're staggering, and they're swearing. It'll be pretty quiet - there'll be some people talking over an idea here and there but mainly people are facing their terminals with their hands on their keyboards, and they're working really hard. They'll see people working they'll see people typing. Never having been there before, they won't know what's going on. A friend of yours walks into a local software firm at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon.
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