

Commandos, Infantry, and Police - prakash
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000025.html

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gleb
For the military side of that analogy I highly recommend reading Black Hawk
Down. It's a moving account of real-life heroes, a remarkable story of of a
modern army engagement, but besides that it's also a great analogy to the
business world.

The actual 3-way split in the Army is special forces (Delta Force),
paratroopers (Army Rangers) and infantry. The developers analogy would be
"done, and gets things smart", "smart and gets things done", and the rest. In
Somalia we had Rangers and Delta, and the book goes into much detail on the
incredible difference in skill and capability between the two. The analogy to
developers is uncanny.

The point of course is not that developers are like soldiers, they are not,
but rather that there are fundamental reasons that different human activities
are structured in similar ways.

BTW, while it reads like fiction, Black Hawk Down is a documentary, and even
the dialogue has been reconstructed from recordings. The movie is very
faithful to the book, but the distinction between special forces and Rangers,
the political side of the conflict, and some other interesting detail is much
more clear in the book.

------
henning
Projects and companies change over time? Wow!

