Re: [tlug] [OT] Good IT Resume

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, Josh Glover wrote:
 > 
 > > I can see now why we are on the opposite side of so many software
 > > engineering issues. I am firmly in the Joel Camp on nearly everything. :)
 > 
 > Which may mean you agree with me in the end, for all I know.

Joel is interesting, fer shure mah homies.

 > > I think in your case, you have a special situation: you are running
 > > your own company, full of like-minded people, and you have the final
 > > say over what happens.
 > 
 > Now, yes. But this was not developed in my company, this was developed
 > through three or four other companies, and worked through with a fair
 > number of programmers. And I've coached this since then in various other
 > companies as well.

Well, when Josh is Boss, he can (maybe, if he's got supersize cojones
or Mauro for *his* boss) create an agile shop-within-his-shop.  However,
doing this requires multiple talents: hacker, mentor, politician.
It's much easier to do if you *own* the shop.  (Or are a consultant
brought in by the sole proprietor, who has shared a cup or two of
Kool-Aid with you.)  That's what we mean by "special" here.  Not
"unusual", but "not the most general/typical case".

 > Possibly not. And I'm not claiming it does scale to large
 > teams. But do we care? You have to admit, even taking into account
 > the best large-team successes (the IBM 360, the 747), most of the
 > Good Stuff comes from small teams.

You mean like the original IBM PC and the X Window System?  The
Macintosh and Google?  Lots of Good Stuff does come from small teams
... but then you need a large team to make it scale.

And of course the Internet is the canonical example.  The Internet
exists *only* as a paper spec, in a certain sense.

Finally, Sourceforge demonstrates what the odds are of being the
Small Team that puts out Good Stuff: purty durn long.

 > And the large team successes are not at all reproducible: in 37
 > years, we have yet to come up with a better overall commercial
 > airliner than the 747.

That's not a useful example.  The 747 is basically optimally adapted
to its environment.  Boeing and rivals keep trying, of course, but
there's really not that much room for improvement.  Not in the same
way there is room for improvement in software systems.

 > If you want a real success, use a small team, not a large one.

Suppose for High Crimes and Treason you were sentenced to be
Amazon.com CTO.[1]  How do you explain to your stockholders that you
want to shrink the company to Fortune 5,000,000 size in order to be
A Real Success?

Again, I think you're defining "real success" in "lifestyle business"
terms.  Which is all to the good.  But most of GDP is produced in
large businesses, and most people work in large businesses.  Cf. Roger
Markus's arguments about why he can't avoid Windows at work.

 > That I'm also going to disagree with. I've worked with a lot of junior
 > developers, and in my experience, they excel when you bring them "in to
 > the fold," as it were, rather than relegate them to "program to this
 > specification."

Definitely.  But this comes back to my "multitalented leader" point.


Footnotes: 
[1]  My wife thinks that an appropriate sentence for Murakami would be
CEO of Shahocho, and for Horiemon to be Mayor of Yubari-shi.  I think
she has a point.  "I am still not kidding."