Analyse this
June 4th, 2005One of the many interesting (well, just many) books I am reading as part of my dissertation research is Gerald Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming. Although (as it acknowledges) short on experimental data, the anecdotal evidence in the book is immensely interesting (as well as some stories of nightmare developers and managers that are fun to recount in geek circles). It’s most striking aspect is how it describes the programmer’s ego, the concept of cognitive dissonance (i.e. how people deal with conflicting or contrary mindsets, such as the moment you find out the code you’ve spent all week writing is actually a load of garbage), and the idea of ‘Egoless Programming’ - subjecting one’s work to peer review, taking suggestions and changes warmly without going on the defensive, and how it produces much better code as a result. This philosophy is along the same lines as the Open Source movement’s own - what makes it so visionary though is that this book was written in 1971 - the Middle Ages of computing; long before the Internet, Microsoft and the PC, in a time where people still used punch-cards and programming was done on a single mainframe that different developers had to timeshare. It initially struck me as amazing that despite the many technological changes that have occurred over that time, the same human and social practices are advocated as being most likely to lead to success; as a sociologist of technology, on reflection it isn’t that surprising, but the computer scientist in me certainly was.
If you can get over the slightly old terminology and use of FORTRAN and other languages of the time, I recommend reading it - there was a silver anniversary edition released in 1996 (which I have been unable to get hold of), which probably updates it into the modern computing vernacular. At the very least, it tells some good anecdotes about how not to manage projects; in fact it’s probably the very first book collection such woes, and thus possibly the grandfather of the Dilbert culture.
June 9th, 2005 at 15:35:36
hi qwghlm,
without knowing anything about yr dissertation and visiting yr site only sporadically, i’d nevertheless suggest reading, if you haven’t already, the work of sharon traweek. she;s one of the few ppl doing empirical research into the way science generally (and physics in particular, but her analysis is generalisable) is taught, learnt and performed.
well, that’s not entirely true - there are whole realms of actor-network theory ppl doing research into how science is performed; but in terms of how individual scientists (and by extension programmers) learn to work the way they work - the ways in which they’re disciplined to work in specific ways ;) - traweek is doing work you may well be interested in.
June 10th, 2005 at 10:51:15
I hope you’ve also read The Mythical Man-Month, which is the grandfather of all this stuff.
Its technically outdated but still a great read.