I’ll once again very politely dissent ... and yeah, I won’t bother to keep doing so.   The perception that is obviously encouraged by many folks, among many other folks who ought to know better, is that ... if scrap code is not “free,” at least it is “cheap.”   It is neither.

Just let the record show that I only want to hire the programmer who damm well knows what kind of join to use, and who does not have to “try them out first.”   She is the one who I want to be working on a production dataset that I am right now looking at, which has 338,207,496 rows in it.   I am not running a school here.   I am here to try to figure out why another client’s project is crashing and burning, and, once again, I think I know.

I almost never find incompetence.   I usually find neatly indented code and I usually find comments!   What I always find is a process problem.   The team knows how to do it.   But, the team does not know what to do.   How can you “cross that bridge when we get there,” if there is no assurance that the bridge will exist, much less be capable of supporting the load (which is also “to be determined”)...   Fifteen years ago, I thought what I was seeing was an anomaly.   But I see it to this day.

If there is any central theme to what I am saying, it is that our industry has a reputation for “trial and error,” “fly by the seat of our pants (and we’re proud of it ’cuz what we’re doing is so magical and wunnerful that it has to be this way)” practices.   The sooner we can get rid of these notions and start doing what every other engineer or homebuilder has been doing for generations, the better off we’ll all be.   “Flyin’ away on a wing and a prayer” belongs as the theme-song of Greatest American Hero, but nowhere else.   This thing that we are all doing is not so gosh-darned remarkable; at least, not anymore.

(“Okay, I’m done,” he says. Quietly steps off the podium, picks it up, puts it away.)