
The Emperor's Old Clothes (1980) - micaeloliveira
http://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-emperors-old-clothes
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drostie
This is really funny, but it's a bit of a time investment and the early
sections don't really hint at the awesomeness to come.

The most emotionally gripping anecdote for me, in short form: they got really
cocky and promised the moon (a new operating system that would be a
programmer's dream); then scopes crept, and deadlines slipped; as they tried
to understand better why they were totally sucking, they realized that nobody
had solved the actually-hard problem that they needed to and everyone just
assumed it would be OK; even after significant optimization work they were two
orders of magnitude slower than their competition. Clients had waited for
years for this thing, bought hardware for it, and now they were being told
"look, we're cancelling this project, we just can't do this well enough."

Hoare expresses his then-disbelief that he wasn't fired for the massive
failure, especially given his then-belief that MIT was going to succeed doing
its variant of the same thing (Multics -- insert notes of irony). Then,

> At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a
> general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised
> that he had even heard of me. "You know what wen wrong?" he shouted -- he
> always shouted -- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do
> not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch
> with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole
> of a modern software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system?

> I realized later that he was absolutely right, he had diagnosed the cause of
> the problem, and he had planted the seed of its later solution.

After a grueling meeting of "what the @#$% just went wrong and how the @#$% do
we fix it?" he describes the reorganization, and it's remarkably anticipatory
of something like Agile. He establishes small teams who visit clients directly
and figure out what they need; he discards clients' huge-project requests in
favor of incremental improvements; those teams then have to convince him
personally that this feature is important/useful and not too hard to
implement; finally they work on the feature.

It's very much describing a management style which provides some sort of
quality-control and pushback, but does not micromanage or mistrust. And it's
got a sort of fractal structure: Hoare is only able to succeed because his own
supervisors did not destroy him for his failure but trusted him to learn; his
system is to act as a filter for the requests hitting his programmers, but he
still trusts them to write awesome software if they have a strong sense of
direction.

~~~
jff
> his then-belief that MIT was going to succeed doing its variant of the same
> thing (Multics -- insert notes of irony)

And yet Multics did in fact succeed, delivering an operating system that was
used throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, with the final installation shut
down in 2000. Unix history has, I believe, tended to exaggerate the early
challenges to the extent where people now simply believe "Multics was a
failure".

~~~
drostie
I mean, I agree, it's not a total failure--but I'm sure people in this
community can appreciate the feeling of "dammit I failed at this stupid
problem, these other people are kicking ass at it and I just suck" when
hindsight says "actually, that was a really hard problem!"

It's well worth remembering that one-in-three is a really good batting average
and one-in-four is MLB average. Actually that's why I like baseball as a sport
in general; it's not usually as exciting as other sports but when you play it
and you swing and the ump calls "STRIKE ONE," you have to swallow any
disappointment and pick up that bat and get ready again: because that next
pitch is coming, a new opportunity.

