Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Political

Being intellectually divorced

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I spent the day today talking about the war in Iraq and possible solutions, about protests and voices. But behind all of this has been the disappointment of hearing people chastise the peace movement — dismissive statements about self-indulgent moralizing.

Once, not long ago, before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote that it was important to respect those people who choose not to protest:

 

I think one thing we’ve learned since the last major global anti-war demonstration is that these demonstrations aren’t for everyone; neither is some or even all aspects of the anti-war movement. We must remember to respect each other’s beliefs and choices, if what we say in these demonstrations means anything at all.

We’re heading into tense, difficult times. Regardless of what each of us believes, we have to keep in mind our respect for each other. Our service people in the Middle East deserve our respect. So do the people of Iraq. It just breaks my heart to see two groups who deserve respect having to kill each other because a few men, deserving of no respect, have demanded it in their arrogance.

It’s difficult, then, to see people deny me, and others who have been part of the movement, that same respect.

Kottke came out with a posting on the war, the first and only time he’s made a statement about it. He wrote:

It’s all much more complicated than this. All the arguments out there for and against are necessarily shallow. We’re getting very small pieces of the whole story from TV reports, newspaper articles, weblog postings, and magazine pieces. No one has the time to read or write a complete analysis of the situation (which would be a social, political, religious, scientific and economic history of the world from 5000 B.C. up until 2 minutes ago…basically all human knowledge).

Summing up, Bush bad, war bad, this war not so bad even though bad Bush reasons also bad.

Rather than provide a solution, or an alternative, he basically calls all sides the joker and dusts his hands off from any further discussion. Back to blogging as usual, he’s made his stand and his statement. He’s done his part. And oh, the praise that came in when this posting was published.

Yet, what did Kottke say — that the pro-war and the anti-war sides are all idiots, but he’s neither so he’s intellectually superior to both?

Demands have been made of the peace movement: what are our solutions? What is our strategy? Good questions, and ones we should look at answering. I’ve tried to start this discussion, though I realize that the Kottkes of the world will consider it to be trite and ineffectual and it most likely would be laughed out of any number of erudite gatherings in New York and San Francisco.

What those who would disdain what I say miss, though, is that for all of its simplicity and idealism, it comes from the heart and I am at least doing something. It comes because I genuinely want to make a difference. Because I’m doing the best I can.

Kottke says:

Just as unconvincing as Bush’s flimsy arguments for war have been the arguments from the other side for peace. Talk about preaching to the choir. Your “blood for oil” and “give peace a chance” signs are as ridiculous and unconvincing as Bush’s “well, they’re evil” argument. War is bad. Duh. Any ideas as to alternatives? Praying, marching, and hoping for peace isn’t going to get it done alone. Bush and the peaceniks are both equally at fault for not working hard enough at having a meaningful dialogue on Iraq, each side settling for lobbing rhetoric over the wall. Bush looks like a chimp. Great…now tell me what the fuck that has to do with anything. Blech.

 

By demeaning both sides of the equation, Kottke is indulging in an intellectual divorce from the issue. But can a person do this? This conflict isn’t happening on someone else’s world.

You see, the war is happening. People are dying. Chaos is increasing, and there will be deeper and heavier prices to pay on this issue before this is over. To condemn both sides with a pithy chi-chi clever dismissal doesn’t absolve Kottke, or anyone else, of responsibility. Doesn’t make them superior to we who made our simple statements either for or against this war.

Dave Rogers would have us shut down the protests and fund organizations and people such as Blair and develop thinktanks and have conferences as a solution to Iraq. He wrote:

 

What would it take? There are already probably some organizations who have some thoughts on these things, maybe sponsor some kind of international conference of these various groups. Outline an agenda for what the immediate needs are likely to be for post-war Iraq. What will be the security arrangements? How will the oil be sold and what will be done with the revenues? What is the state of the health and education infrastructures within the nation? What are the real problems with ethnic animosities among the various groups? What kind of reconciliation efforts will there people? Does South Africa have a model that may help? What about the environmental issues? It seems to me we have an opportunity to really help the people of Iraq and the entire region if we can get our act together before Bush declares victory.

My only possible answer to Dave is that we had the organization. It’s called the UN. What he asks for is what the UN is supposed to do. But it does no good if the UN is disregarded by the US and other members of the coalition. Creating a new UN like infrastructure won’t be any more successful.

I can respect what Dave’s saying, but it seems to me — just my own opinion — that what might be happening is that he, and others, are being overwhelmed by the emotion on both sides and they just want it to stop. They want to war to reach its conclusion and the fighting to stop, and for those who protest the war to stop and to give everyone peace, which in this case is silence. Or perhaps not silence, but the absence of emotion.

Normalcy. A return to normalcy.

The peace movement, or whatever we call it, does need to focus, and I think this conversation now is a good one and I’m appreciative that it’s started. But I also think there’s a deep disappointment underlying some of the pushback against the movement. Ultimately, we failed people — we didn’t stop the war and we didn’t come up with a alternative that would stop this war in time. Now, the coalition of Bush and Blair and Howard have invaded Iraq and we’re in for some nasty, nasty times. We failed the world by not stopping this. So now, we’re being asked, what are we going to do about it?

Categories
Connecting

Baby, walk the walk

D responded quickly to my little nudgeback earlier. And she’s sticking by her guns: But, dang it, this time I am not wrong.

Good on you, Dorothea. I like people who stand their ground. I rarely do so it’s very refreshing for me to see it in others. However, I have to respectfully disagree with your assessment that software can only be created by people who’ve done the work – walked the walk, so to speak. In some ways…, well, okay in some twisted ways, that’s the same as saying I can’t really understand what happens in the massage parlor business just from the explicit requirements given me by the Madame.

Good, well trained programmer/analysts are expert in interviewing clients and putting their words into requirements that other developers can follow. After you work in an industry for a while you pick up the talk, as I have with manufacturing; but you never need to actually do the work to get this understanding. It’s a question of meeting with the folks who are expert and knowing how to maximize their time. The key really is respect.

As for commercial software, at Sierra Geophysics, a petroleum industry software company, we would meet with engineers from the parent company, Halliburton, on a regular basis to check the requirements, and also to test out prototypes as well as review the manuals for completeness. We also had domain experts on site, which isn’t unusual for specialized software companies such as ours; but most of the requirements came from working directly with the clients.

When I worked at Skyfish, I also met with folks who ran airports and who manufactured planes to capture requirements from them. And our software was good because it was the only thing of value when the company crashed and burned.

If I had to walk the walk in each of these businesses in order to capture and document the requirements, as well as build the applications, I would be the first commercial pilot who knew how to drill oil wells, while working on an assembly line. (This in addition to being able to give a darn fine massage.)

Now, as Ralph mentioned in my comments, not all programmers can work with clients, or record requirements, and that’s cool, because not every programmer needs to. As long as everyone follows the spec, the application works.

The issue about having to be a domain expert in order to develop software just isn’t so. Not only that, it can be harmful to a company. A case in point: at one of the insurance company’s I worked with as a consultant, a group of insurance people who came over to the dark side and became programmers tried to convince management that it was impossible to document their application – too complex said they. You’d have to be a domain expert to understand.

Now, it is true that some of the calculations in the insurance industry put NASA to shame. However, the manager wasn’t buying it and called me in. His concern, rightfully, is that this group was about to split off into a separate company, forcing the insurance company to have to ‘contract’ for the software. The manager was a bit peevish about this because the insurance company had paid to develop the software in the first place.

I met with the manager as well as the lead developer and listened to the latter’s spiel about how the calculations were too complex to document, only a domain expert could understand them. He emphasized this by waving around an actuarial manual that could have killed a small dog if it landed on it. How to Intimidate Programmers, 101 – wave around a really big manual.

When he was done, I told him that if he could document the calculations within a programming language well enough so the computer could understand him, he could document them enough in English so I could understand them, because if I wasn’t a domain expert, then neither was the computer.

Ralph also weighs in on this subject.

Categories
Weblogging

Comments redux

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve decided to re-enable comments for the weblog. Too quiet. At least the comment spams are a variation on the other email spam I get, and warblog baiting could become a favorite game of mine.

As for comments and their impact on writing and what we write – I found that web log statistics and page accesses provide more of a blunt assessment of writing than comments ever did.

Categories
Connecting

Too much noise, too much chatter

A weblog I’ve been following forever is Dan Lyke’s Flutterby. Dave Winer pointed out an item at the Weblog User’s online discussion forum where Dan mentions that he’s been having problems with comments lately:

I always thought I wanted a daily readership of 10,000 or so, but recently I and my co-contributors made a few comments about the war, one of which ended up as #2 on a popular Google search, and we’ve attracted some real schmucks to the comment areas, and I’ve gotten more than usual incoherent paranoid and frankly just dumb emails.

Almost every weblog I went to this weekend that had comments enabled had either comment spam, a comment war, or, as Dan calls them a comment from some “real schmuck” included. Junk, junk, junk. Nice junk, bizarre junk, or nasty junk, but junk.

Thanks to the efforts of the warbloggers and those who have pushed weblogging as the Next Great Thing, our intimate circles have been crashed. The digital termites have invaded. The days of thoughtful discussions on-topic within weblogs are over. Long live the flame, the spam, and the hit and run Google searcher who can’t resist a comment form.

Dan wistfully discusses the possibility of sneaking off somewhere and starting a new weblog among a small intimate group of friends. If you do Dan, make sure you turn off Google. And, invite me.

Personally, I’m beginning to think the thing to do is stop weblogging until the war is over, and the warbloggers have moved on. But I’m afraid it’s too late. Weblogging’s personal and intimate side has been lost.

Categories
Books

Now, what were those requirements?

In a puckish piece of provocative titling, Dorothea boldly flings Why Software doesn’t Work out into the midst of a group of bloggers who are guaranteed to fall upon it, like ravenous dogs on a poor, defenseless baby bunny. If she continues this type of writing, I’m going to have to consider passing the Burning Baton of *Inciteful Blogging to D, I seriously am.

Dorothea writes about the eBook business and the Cult of Programmers who seem to want to have little to do with the actual users when it comes to designing software:

Even the Alan Cooper brigade doesn’t seem to favor (or even talk of) direct experience feeding into software design. Instead, developers sit around and imagine what real people in real jobs do. That such imaginings all by themselves are a vast improvement over what has gone before is a pretty strong indictment of software development, to my way of thinking.

(Adherents to the Cult of the Programmer too often display a lamentable contempt for the implicit knowledge in other professions, incidentally, while vociferously insisting that no one else in the world is capable of absorbing theirs. Definitely this is part of the problem.)

I’ve not worked in the eBook industry, but I have in the technology, government, manufacturing, aerospace, academic, energy, and finance industries and can assure Dorothea that the number one complaint from programmers in these fields is that we don’t have enough user requirements and access to the users. I’ve seen meetings where some poor user has walked in and had technologists tripping over themselves trying to get direct access to the person. Geeks on stampede is a scary sight.

My favorite example of getting close to the users was when I prototyped a touch screen application for a door manufacturing company in Wisconsin. Every day found me donning my head phones, to protect against the noise, and heading into the product line to test the previous day’s efforts. I used a set of hand signals co-developed with my clients to check their reception of the current efforts. Too hard to use? Thumbs down. Just right? Thumbs up. Confusing? Scratching head, with an occasional finger pointed at the screen and exaggerated shrugs of the shoulder. After I would brush the sawdust off my clothes, back I would head to the computer to incorporate the day’s feedback into the next iteration of the prototype.

Perhaps that’s the difference between my previous efforts and the eBook industry – not enough sawdust.

Dorothea also takes on the Cult of Programmers as she calls them (us?), and has some points:

Not to mention that the Cult of the Programmer mandates that Real Programmers be computer hobbyists from youth. Real Programmers are never ex-accountants or ex-typesetters. Heaven forfend they should be ex-secretaries! Like, er, me. Yes, I know the Cult of the Programmer is not exactly representative of the entire field, but it does wield significant and in my opinion excessive influence on commercial-programming and open-source practices.

Liz will attest that this does tend to happen. In fact, one of the differentiators between men and women in the computer field is that men tend to be computer hobbyists in their youth more than women. What’s interesting though is that men’s earlier exposure to playing around with computers doesn’t typically increase their chances of success with technology, academically or professionally.

I consider myself a Real Programmer, for whatever that’s worth, but I didn’t play with computers at an early age. Heck, I didn’t even enter the computer field until I was 28. Before that I worked in a succession of jobs, including secretary, insurance underwriter, and photo studio manager. One of my more unique jobs was steam pressing ties for the Britannica Tie Company in Seattle. It was my only union job, and we would all take our vacations at the same time in the summer because the heat would get too much and people would start passing out.

(I still catch myself checking out the press on ties when I pass a rack in a department store. Old habits die hard.)

I’ve also had too many waitress jobs to count. In fact, my first real job was when I was 15 and a runaway from home living in Salt Lake City. I lied about my age, pretty easy back then, and got a job in a diner working minimum wage and tips. It paid enough for my boarding house room, but just barely. I didn’t make much, but it was better than the alternative, which happened to be in the massage parlour that several of the other boarders worked in and tried to recruit me to.

I did check the parlour out once because my friends seemed to have so much money. The head of the parlour showed me around this classy place with saunas, and showers, and clean, brightly lit massage rooms. All the women wore immaculate pastel colored uniforms, were quite attractive and seemed very professional, as they moved briskly from room to room with their massage oil and fluffy white towels.

To demonstrate their work, she boss lady had one of the other masseuses give me a steam/salt massage in a cedar lined room, soft music playing in the background. It was an incredible experience, I can still feel it now. This convinced me that the operation was the real thing. However, just when I was ready to sign on the dotted line, the head of the parlor explained all the requirements of the job.

I wasn’t a prude by any means, and I’ll have to admit, I thought about the job requirements for some time, and waivered more than once about signing up. Eventually though, I stayed with my minimum wage job, providing food for business people who used to leave an extra quarter just because I smiled at them when I poured their coffee.

Of course, once I got my degree in CompSci and entered the field, I knew I’d never have to wait a table again, answer phones, or press ties. Or work under the nom de plume of Candy at the local House of Delights.

*not a misspell