

Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef [2001] - swombat
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html

======
tef
Mystery: Why is that when I make a huge generalisation, I don't back it up.

You see, consulting is very similar to cooking. I think I read a book about
this 'Hackers and Bakers'

...

More seriously, I think this comment sums up this style of article:

'This review captures what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an
unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed
experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing
stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works.'

~~~
solutionyogi
I think the article is SPOT ON. And here's little background about me before I
tell you why.

I am from India, graduated in 2001, worked for Infosys for little over 2
years. I have been in US since 2004 and I have been doing independent
consulting for 5 years now. I have quite a friends who work for
Wipro/Satyam/TCS or IBM/Accenture.

Let me share my experience working with Infosys. I worked on 5 projects for
Infosys and all of them were disaster. Infosys hires fresh college graduates,
trains them in programming langauges and asks them to do coding for the
project. They have processes for _everything_. Requirements documentation,
design documents, the actual code, deployment, you name a task and I can bet
that they have a document which tells how you are supposed to do the task. And
you can't really divert from the laid out process very much even when you know
that the process doesn't make sense. Compound this with the fact that they
have many employees who are not really in to technology, so if you suggest an
alternate way of doing anything, you will get shot down. [Infosys hires
graduates who have no prior Computer Science/Programming experience and some
graduates join Infosys because of the brand name and the salary even when they
have zero interest in technology.]

Let me give you a concrete example. In 2003/2004, CMM
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model>) was all rage.
Infosys was obviously CMM Level 5 compliance company. As part of the
certification, every project needs to do analysis of the bug count after every
release. So it's like, there were 30 bugs during the first release of the
project and 25 bugs during the second release of project which means that bug
count went down 16% which is less than 25%, the number required by CMM. So we
need to fudge the bug tracker. Unfortunately, you can't delete bugs. So we go
back and add dummy bugs for the first release increasing the bug count from 30
to 40 and match up the numbers. I called it bullshit and no one would listen
to me. In fact, I was threatned that I will not get good performance review
(don't get me started on performance reviews) if I don't follow 'the process'.
I left Infosys after 2 years and sweared that I would never join a consulting
firm again.

Based on my heated discussions with friends, I can assure that the story is
similar at other consulting companies.

I am sure when Infosys was started, it was full of smart people who did the
right things and made it into a billion dollar company. But as it got bigger
and bigger, the net output is of low quality.

And this validates Joel's main point in the article:

1\. Some things need talent to do really well. 2\. It's hard to scale talent.
3\. One way people try to scale talent is by having the talent create rules
for the untalented to follow. 4\. The quality of the resulting product is very
low.

I started reading Joel in 2003/2004 when I was really frustrated with Infosys
and this article hit a home run for me. If you think his analogy doesn't
describe the state of big IT consulting companies, I can gurantee that you
have never worked at one.

------
mikeryan
I'd have read more if he could have done it without continually calling
McDonald's workers idiots.

My wife worked at McD's in high school. She's now an attorney who graduated
with honors.

~~~
solutionyogi
Please. Joel did not write that ALL McDonald workers are idiots. He wrote that
McDonald created process that anyone can follow to create a burger which has
certain taste. To quote Joel,

"The rules have been carefully designed by reasonably intelligent people (back
at McDonald's Hamburger University) so that dumdums can follow them just _as
well as smart people_." (emphasis mine)

~~~
ekanes
You're missing the point over a technicality.

Yes, while he didn't say that all McDonald's workers are idiots, you don't
write sentences like this if you're saying it's like any other workplace, with
it's share of smarties and dumdums, to use his term.

If it's like any other workplace, it's not noteworthy for his essay and he
wouldn't have brought it up.

(worked there for a year, age 13)

~~~
solutionyogi
No, I am not. The OP wrote 'continually calling McDonald's workers idiots' and
Joel didn't write anywhere in the article that McDonald's workers are idiots.

~~~
mikeryan
Maybe I'm paraphrasing or reading too much into it, but this line implies as
much

"The other secret of Big Macs is that you can have an IQ that hovers somewhere
between "idiot" and "moron" (to use the technical terms) and you'll still be
able to produce Big Macs that are exactly as unsurprising as all the other Big
Macs in the world."

~~~
solutionyogi
Let's read the sentence again.

""The other secret of Big Macs is that _you can have_ an IQ that hovers
somewhere between "idiot" and "moron"

He did not say that you must have an IQ of an idiot or moron to work at
McDonald. He said that _even if_ you have IQ of an idiot or moron, you can
make a Big Mac which tastes like other Big Macs in the world. It's a big
difference.

~~~
mikeryan
You can read it as many ways and with inflection wherever you like. But even
if the insult is indirect, I don't think most would feel better when told they
"could" be an idiot as opposed to they "are" one.

For me he could have made a more compelling argument without ever using the
terms "dumdum", "idiot" or "moron".

------
ShabbyDoo
Perhaps our collective sensibilities have evolved so much since 2001 so that
this article is no longer novel.

~~~
hubb
yeah, really. i'm not a fan of submissions like that aren't at least tagged
with the date. sometimes it's not until the fifth paragraph when you read
something suspect like 'dotcoms bursting... high-end c++ gui programming.. the
hell?' that you realize you're reading a fossile.

~~~
swombat
Sorry.. I didn't even realise it was from 2001 until now... I've updated the
title now!

~~~
ShabbyDoo
I actually like the article but simply wonder if, in the context of 2001, it
was not widely believed that organizations like Accenture were incapable of
building wonderful software. Reading this is kind of like reading an article
from the 1950's arguing that black people ought to have the same rights as
whites. The premise is still valid, but the doubt which justified the
article's existence has since been erased.

------
cschneid
The takeaway I have is a question. Why isn't there a good equivalent to the
big mac in the consulting world?

Every time you go cheap, or with the "big consultants" that joel describes the
expected outcome is massive time overruns and massive budget overruns.

The closest thing to the big mac model I can think of is installation of
existing software, with customization for the environment, but even there you
get the 3 year long SAP projects that cost tons.

What prevents software from being put into a manual? I'm hoping the answer is
something beyond "requirements don't match up exactly to previous problems...
ever", but I fear that's all it is.

~~~
gvb
I think there is: the Microsoft product line. They are the company everybody
loves to hate for their mediocrity. If you want an office suite, email,
calendaring, etc., they are what most of the consultants install.

On the other hand, when you (metaphorically) want the same consultants to go
beyond
"twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun",
like a McBurger flipper trying to make basil aioli, it usually doesn't turn
out well.

------
mschy
_Imagine that The Naked Chef gets bored doing "telly" and opens a restaurant._

Like his venture 'Fifteen' that is not only a top restaurant, but also a
program for troubled youth? Or more like the half-dozen or so "Jamie's
Italian" that have opened?

Or like the dozens of additional "Jamie's Italian" that are planned for Europe
and Asia in the next couple years?

Come on, Joel. If you're going to use a metaphor, please make sure it fits...
at least a little. Jamie Oliver is already executing on the exact thing you
say he can't do; creating a repeatable process to make delicious food and
opening a chain of restaurants that sell it.

~~~
blasdel
Spolsky has a talent for using very specific examples in his just-so-stories
that then later turn out to be the purest counterexample he could have picked.

Like using Netscape -> Mozilla as your example of why you should never ever
rewrite software from scratch.

~~~
wallflower
Mozilla Firefox was forked from the rewritten Mozilla codebase

From the original Spolsky:

> Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta...Well, yes. They
> did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any
> software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

<http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/0.1.html>

[http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-users@linux-
sxs.org/msg067...](http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-users@linux-
sxs.org/msg06717.html)

