Re: A Brief Look at History

Stephen Pelc wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Mar 2008 12:09:14 -0600, John Doty
> <jpd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
>> I agree. But "good" often requires great flexibility, the opposite of 
>> the "should not be tolerated" rigidity Elizabeth says is necessary to 
>> make Forth work well in groups.
> 
> Change requires flexibility. But Elizabeth's point is that house
> standards are a necessity to produce maintainable code. If you
> make a mistake and hire a programmer who will not produce
> maintainable code, the cheapest thing to do is to get rid of
> them.

Then you get nothing. Unmaintainable code can be cleaned up: I've done 
that fairly often myself. But nothing is nothing.

You can only "get rid" of someone if you somehow can economically 
replace *every one* of their project-critical capabilities. Otherwise, 
you have to find a way to help them. A large part of good management is 
detecting the need and directing help where it's needed. In any 
challenging project, everybody involved will need some kind of help to 
do their job well: if you "got rid" of everyone who needed help, you'd 
have nobody.

> 
>> At the cutting edge, you don't even know which of your objectives are 
>> achievable, and you have to accommodate a diversity of standards which 
>> still contain holes. It's jazz: sometimes you just have to make it up
as 
>> you go.
> 
> As a statement of the bleeding obvious, that's wonderful. But in
> those cases you need project management even more.

I agree. But you need the kind of project management that's based on 
thought, not ignorance and knee-jerk reaction.

> 
>> In scientific projects the participants often have intense personal 
>> commitment to the project: the challenge is to harness that energy 
>> without draining it away through management bull****.
> 
> Project management and the leading and bleeding edges isn't
> bull****.

No it's not. But inflexible, ignorant, dogma-based project management 
*is* bull****. And sometimes it's very hard to get managers to 
understand this.

> 
>>> MPE has done several multi-company,
>> There's that word again: company. Why does this discussion always turn 
>> back to the subset of projects that only involve companies? Innovation 
>> often requires a broader base. Companies usually don't really 
>> collaborate in the sense that I'm using the word. That's the kind of 
>> collaboration that produces shared code bases.
> 
> But you haven't defined what you mean by collaboration!

Yes I have. You are collaborating when there is no common management 
authority, and no common set of standards.

You know you're collaborating when someone over whom you have no 
authority can hurt you badly just by quitting.

-- 
John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
--
History teaches that logical consistency is neither sufficient nor 
necessary to establish practical, real world truth. Those who attempt to 
use logic for that purpose are abusing it.