Vast and Infinite

This post has been eight years in the making.  I’ve seen the following story repeat itself throughout my IT career.  It is at least part of the reason I don’t do IT any more.  Here is the concrete example that spurred me write this tale at long last.

A business hires a software consulting firm to write them a system.  The scale or type of system doesn’t matter at all.  Right up front, the consultant needs to give the client an estimate of how long the project will take and how much it will cost.  The consultant will, without fail, massively underestimate the cost and duration of the project.  Why?  Several reasons.  First, because software estimation is the blackest of black arts and nobody really knows how long a project is going to take.  Second, because the consultant needs the business, he wants to avoid saying anything that could prevent the client from signing the contract.  Clients like low estimates.  Third, because the consultant may be in competition with other bidders.  In such a case, the contract goes to the biggest liar who doesn’t get caught.  We’d like to believe that cheaters never prosper, but in this case, honesty is a sure road to no contracts.

In software, only cheaters prosper.

So now a project is underway that is guaranteed to be late.  But nobody has bothered to tell the developers this and it’s rarely the case that anyone has bothered to ask them how long they thought it would take.  If they were asked, their estimates were shaved down for political expedience and to get that contract signed! Once the project is started, managers are good at making this problem the developer’s fault for not completing on time.  And in order to complete closer to deadline, developers are pressured to cut corners.  As deadline approaches, steaming piles of dung get pushed out the door and called “software.”  This is a disaster for the consultants, you might think.  But oh, no, this is a goldmine!  Watch what happens next.

The budget and the deadline run out.  Alas, the software is entirely unfinished or so broken it needs another phase to meet even a fraction of the requirements.  Who could have known?  But now the consultant gives the client a choice: either stop the project and get nothing for the money they’ve already paid, or extend the contract with more time and money, further enriching the consultants.  And the beauty of this game is it can be played over, and over, and over again with the same project and the same clients.  I’ve seen it go on for years.  The bigger the sunk cost, the longer the charade can continue.

So if you ever wondered why software is almost always late, why most software is crap, and why software developers work 60+ hour weeks and are perpetually grumpy, the answers to all these mysteries are found above.  It is the story of almost every software project I have worked on and I expect it will be the fate of most commercial systems to come for the foreseeable future.

And that’s one more reason why it’s great to be a therapist.

I give you…Susan Boyle!

Georgia weather is just weird.  Yesterday it was 60+ degrees.  Today, a little after noon, this started…

(Think of this as the afterword to Death of a Programmer)

On Friday, I turned in my ID badge and left my tech writing job at Equifax. On Monday, I’ll begin an internship that will allow me to become licensed to practice as a professional counselor (a psychotherapist) in Georgia. To an outsider, this seems like a sudden, radical change, but actually it has been many years in the making.

When I went off to college in 1990, my plan was to become a clinical psychologist and a therapist. Due to youthful foolishness, I followed others’ advice instead of my heart’s desire and allowed myself to be diverted onto another path. Two years ago the desire reemerged in me to become a therapist and it wouldn’t go away. The sense that I would regret not going down this road was so overwhelming that I was driven to begin the process. I’ve been taking classes towards my Masters in Counseling and this Winter I was able to land an internship which will complete my education. Blogging all my preparations for this move would have been delightful, but I kept my dream under wraps lest my employer cut me loose ahead of schedule. Perhaps I’ll do some retroactive blogging about my semi-secret life.

Making big life changes is scary. It churns up a lot of doubt and negativity both from within and from those around me. Questions like “Will I enjoy this?”, “Am I going to be any good at this?”, “Can I make a living at this?” and “What am I doing changing careers AGAIN?” come up over and over. They’re all valid questions. I’ve answered them to my satisfaction, if not everyone else’s.

At the same time, I’ve had an incredible surge of support from those around me. Of course my classmates were terrific. My friends were too. I felt like a traitor putting in my resignation at work, but everyone there was 100% positive, including my manager who will probably have to do my work on top of his until they find a replacement. Thanks, Rob.

My friend Marlena told me about a coworker who worked at the same job for 20 years. The office threw a party for her and in the midst of the celebration she admitted she was still there because she didn’t make good on the other plans she had for her life. Thoreau wrote that men lead lives of quiet desperation and I’ve felt that desperation myself. Taking up arms against it comes as a huge relief.

I feel both very proud and very privileged to be taking a big step towards doing exactly the kind of work I want to do. Whatever risks and hardships there are ahead, I choose this path because I believe it fulfills me and allows me to make a tangible, positive change in the world.

How easy is it to put video on the web? Very, very easy. I was at WalMart today and saw a webcam for less than twenty bucks. That sounded like a cheap experiment to me, and I wanted to try out Google Video Chat anyway. Once I got it working, I went over to YouTube and recorded some video.

It works! Now let’s watch a real expert at work: our first YouTube President (-Elect), Barack Obama.

People like to think of Bill Gates and Microsoft as the devil, but if the devil was real, he’d be pushing Macintosh.  You see the devil is suave and seductive, not lame and clunky like Microsoft.  The digital devil makes offers like the hot new MacBooks, the iPod Touch and the sexy, sexy iPhone 3G.  Tempting.  Very tempting.  And “everybody” is using Mac.  Especially people who are hip and happening, like our President-Elect.  (Who is not the devil-give it up, haters.)  But there’s a nasty catch in this Faustian bargain, and I’m not talking about the price premium: it’s DRM, in all it’s sundry forms.  Of course there’s iTunes.  But don’t forget that Apple decides what you can run on your iPhone and can and does deny applications that might compete with their own.  The latest gotcha is what Apple’s done with HDMI.  Now studios can decide which devices you can and can’t use with your HD content.  Devices that work today may not work tomorrow: no guarantees.  The devil giveth and he taketh away.

So as much as I covet a Mac Air slim enough to fit in a manilla envelope or a MacBook milled from a single seamless block of aluminum, I’ll pass for now.  My computer is mine and the data on it is mine to do with as I please.  I’ll be very reluctant to give money to anyone who thinks otherwise.

Here are some computer symptoms.  See if you can guess the cause:

• You can’t log into GMail using Chrome.  Google claims you have an unsupported browser, then gives you bizzare circular http redirects.  Firefox is fine.  Clearing cache and cookies does nothing.
• Google Reader shows that you have umpteen new items, but when you click on “All Items” or any of the categories, it says “no new items”.  Same behavior in Chrome and Firefox.
• AVG Antivirus (free edition) complains your virus definitions are out of date, even though you just updated.

Pretty whacky, eh?  What could be causing it all?  Turns out it’s all due to having the system clock set one month into the future.  

And how could that have happened?  Easy!  Suppose someone in your family (who shall remain nameless) wants to look at a calendar for December.  They double-click on the clock in the lower-right corner of windows and advance the month so they can see the calendar.  Then they forget to click “cancel” and the time resets.  It’ll be a while before Windows time synch kicks in and fixes things (or somebody notices).  Until that time, all the symptoms above will persist.

(Sigh.)  Why must my computers be so difficult lately?

That’s “Shut The Fan Up“, BTW.

So I used the procedure recommended here on my old Dell and sure enough, it’s a lot quieter.  I still hear a bit of fan noise, but I can totally live with it.  Speedfan says my processor is nice and cool, too.

To celebrate, I present you with Bjork singing “It’s Oh So Quiet”

In my ongoing struggle with computer noise, I decided to attempt to drive all the dust bunnies out of my case.  Stopping off at Best Buy, I got a couple of cans of air and started puffing.  Lots of dust came out (all over my desk) but more remained in vents, fans and nooks throughout the machine.  Then I got serious and brought the upright vacuum into play.  With the hose and corner attachment, my vacuum devoured dust that the canned air couldn’t touch.  I don’t claim to have it all out, but the case is a lot better and I think the noise may have gone down a few decibels.  Next time I’ll save my money and skip the canned air altogether.

I also found this recipe for hushing a Dell XPS Gen 2, which I’ll try out tomorrow.

There’s a lot of finger pointing going on in regard to the banking collapse, the government takeovers, and resulting market turmoil.  If blame is to be assigned, then I think it needs to be assigned broadly.  We’re in this fix because when it comes to finances, almost nobody really understands what they’re doing.  This applies to bankers facing illiquidity as much as it does homeowners facing foreclosure.  A lot of very tricky deals got created in the 90’s and 2000’s.  People didn’t understand them so they believed what they were told.  Sometimes the dealmakers were crooked but sometimes they were unwitting accomplices to the destruction that followed.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m part of the problem.  When I went to buy my home in 2000, I got a call from my agent telling me to come to the closing and sign papers.  I asked if I’d have a chance to read the papers first.  My agent (sighing at my newbie question) told me that the papers were a stack three inches tall and that there would not be time for me to read them all.  I’d have to sign them blind or there would be no house for me.  So I came in, sat down, and signed and signed for what seemed like three hours.  The lawyer gave me one-sentence summaries of each document as I signed, but there wasn’t much I could do to check up on her.  At the end, I had a stack of papers three inches high and some keys to my house.  I trusted the lawyer.  I didn’t know what I was doing.

I own a number of ETF’s (Exchange Traded Funds) which are supposed to simulate stock market index performance.  How they accomplish this, I don’t know.  But if the index goes up, my shares go up.  I also don’t know the compositions of the indexes beyond a one-sentence summary.  Once again, I don’t understand what I’m doing.

Add in some malfeasance and you get cases like this one, where a homeowner in foreclosure thinks she’s making a deal to stay out of foreclosure, but in fact she’s giving away her house to the crooks.  She didn’t understand what she was doing.

Banks bought bundles of mortages without being able to determine what the default rate would be.  They treated these vehicles as “good as cash,” but they weren’t.  Not even close.  They didn’t know what they were doing.

I install software all the time without reading the EULAs.  Even if I read them, I doubt I would understand them.  I don’t understand what I’m doing.

So why is anybody really surprised that after doing things we don’t understand, we get results we don’t expect?  I’m not sure I know what the answer is.  Can we live in a modern society and truly understand all the underpinnings of everything?  Maybe this is a user interface problem in disguise?  Maybe we don’t need to know everything about all our investments and contracts, but just the basic properties they exhibit.  Perhaps this is what regulators aim for with “transparency.”  Or maybe we just all need to be a lot more cautious.  Even if we have to engage in deals we don’t fully understand, maybe we should keep those deals as simple and as standard as possible, understand as much as we can, and hire advisors on our own dime to check the fine print.