Re:The Art of Failure (2000)
by neilk on Saturday August 01, 2009 @02:26PM
(#736497)
I'm not sure this quite applies to programming as done by programmers. Gladwell is talking about conscious processes interfering with unconscious processes. For us, pretty much the whole thing is conscious.
You could think of the entire organization as the athlete though. Especially in programming, the organization is unaware of exactly how things really get done, it just has certain reflexes. Under crisis it may feel the need to switch modes.
Panic: OMG the project is late! Hire more programmers! Buy someone else's thing and try to make it work!
Choke: What we're doing isn't working -- we need to hire a lot of consultants, we need more metrics before making a decision, we need to carefully plan out our scaling strategy before we make a prototype...
You could think of the entire organization as the athlete though. Especially in programming, the organization is unaware of exactly how things really get done, it just has certain reflexes. Under crisis it may feel the need to switch modes.
Panic: OMG the project is late! Hire more programmers! Buy someone else's thing and try to make it work!
Choke: What we're doing isn't working -- we need to hire a lot of consultants, we need more metrics before making a decision, we need to carefully plan out our scaling strategy before we make a prototype...