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February 2001 |
Developers are diverse, well-adjusted, and have experience the "real world" should pay attention to. So why are we still imagined as dweebs with tape on our glasses?
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On Going Mainstream B y the time you read this, the 2000 presidential election will have been decided. As I write, though, it's still being hotly contested. Don't worry; I'm not turning this page into a political soapbox. I just thought the Florida vote-recount-lawsuit endless loop was a hilarious example of what happens when laymen try to build an Internet-scale interface (the ingenious butterfly ballot) and database (which has an accuracy of +/-14 percent). See what happens when you send in a politician to do a programmer's job? Regardless of which candidate you were behind, you probably noticed a few things as soon as you found out the U.S. hadn't elected a president after all. For example, you might have noticed that the problem with the Florida ballot is a scalability issue. A few punches on a card works fine, but once you've got a huge grid of tiny punches, the system falls apart. Next, the medium doesn't match the method: You're only allowed to choose one option per section, but the mechanism allows you to choose as many as you want—that's like putting checkboxes where radio buttons belong. Finally, the ballots should be binary (punched or not punched) and Write-Once-Read-Many, but instead they're more of the trinary (punched, not punched, kind of punched) and come from the Write-Read-Degrade school of media. Why would you notice such (or similar) things? Because, as a VC++ developer, you make a living creating interfaces to request information (or, if you're at a big company, you work with UI developers to do this), collect that information, store and perform some operation on it, and then return a result. You're used to the problems you can encounter at each step of the process, and have developed working, secure, stable solutions that scale essentially to infinity. So where were you before the election? Well, you weren't called for, and you probably didn't volunteer. I suspect this is because nobody—neither programmers nor non-programmers—considered what I believe will more and more often be the case: The experience programmers have is directly relevant to physical applications. What do I mean? This: The skills you have developed (and are developing) in managing massive amounts of information are practical for managing inventory, people, or nations. The rigorous standards you apply to your development efforts—as well as the foresight you have for enhancements and future expansion—would be welcome at the top of corporations. Your ability to gather and process data accurately and instantaneously would—or should—be invaluable on Election Day. And yet, I don't often hear of developers stepping out of their traditional roles as programmers and into the spotlight. Why not? Once again, probably because nobody has asked you to. And why haven't they? I'm speculating (as usual), but I think it's because it hasn't occurred to them that "Revenge of the Nerds" isn't an especially accurate movie. Even now, people still imagine programmers as hobbyists with short pants and pocket protectors. The knowledge you have is useful only when you're sitting at the keyboard; at all other times, you're helpless. That is, of course, rubbish. My experience with programmers tells me you're diverse, thoughtful, and independent. Very few of you wear shirts with pockets, much less pocket protectors. And your work can hardly be called "hobbyist"; everything everyone does anymore involves computers at some level. But developers as a whole don't do a lot to change society's antiquated perception. You don't care that much about how people think of you. After all, why should you? What does it matter? Well, here's how. The world has more and more people, all of whom must communicate with increasing frequency and try to understand the overwhelming amount of information presented them. With that in mind, the way you think is increasingly relevant. I think it's time some of you VC++ developers apply your experience to real-world problems. And please do it before 2004. One election like this was funny, but the rerun would be intolerable. |
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