Andy's Mind

I know someone who recently applied for a job in a recruiting agency and learned quite a bit about their working methods. As it turns out a recruiter at that agency has to handle in parallel 14-16 cases – positions that they have to fill for the agency’s clients – and there is no industry specialization. So, one might have to find three accountants, two C# developers, one scrum masters and three floor cleaners – and five other people from other, completely unrelated fields. With this number of cases to handle and lack of focus on a given industry the recruiters they have can’t be good, even if they wanted to. It becomes a number game, hence retorting to database handling and everything really that can make the process faster. Hence I was not surprised when I’ve learned that on top of all that the recruiters at that agency were required to strictly follow company’s procedures.

And this is not a small agency, they employ some 60 people and have been recently acquired by an investment fund (who, btw, requires them to be more profitable – read increase the load of cases on recruiters).

This corroborates what I was long suspecting and explains why no recruitment agency I’ve worked with was able to deliver really good programmers, IT managers, routing specialists and the like. First – the best rarely ever look for a job or read ads in newspapers. You have to go after them and fish them out of the universities, this or that language users group etc. And you have to know that a typical geek is a completely different type of fellow than a sleek marketing graduate looking for a job. I bet fishing out good accounting & finance talent is equally hard and in this day and age requires much more effort than just shuffling CVs around as they flow in.

Somehow this – and most other recruitment agencies – don’t get it. Why? Well, because the truth is most jobs – especially many corporate jobs – don’t require exceptional talent and outstanding skills. Filling the seats with half-decent people is a success already so anyone who can deliver them in numbers has a business. That’s why I expect also this agency to grow along, congratulating themselves they do the right thing – and still missing the point completely.

Here is the first presentation about our work methods.

I feel it is still a bit too long – people these days expect more punch in less time, my conversational style is suitable for lectures put probably not for that. I already have another one prepared – I just need to record it and share.

Some folks started an inter-blog discussion about why enterprise software is mostly bloated crap. The theories put forward range from a meaningless observation that enterprise software “is not sexy“, through really funny stuff like George Ou lamenting that they are typically not done with “lightweight” languages like C++ but instead with “programming shortcuts like Java” to gloomy statements that it has to be that way since it’s enterprise software – so what else could we expect? Nicholas Carr posits that solution might be in doing enterprise software as web applications (exactly what we offer), which sets him apart from the others. But even that voice included some key elements are missing from the corporate IT experts prospective: who produces enterprise software – and how.

I think you can’t understand why enterprise software mostly sucks by not taking into account that it is the area where most projects are done with ineffective waterfall methods under heavy bureaucracy of traditional project management methods inside corporations. SAP implementation, for example, is mostly expensive consultants doing all kinds of paperwork and producing tons of specifications before any programmer does anything.

All that further amplifies the already bad effects of developers working in a corporate environment (like at SAP or Microsoft), usually not very dynamic, with limited upward mobility and very limited influence a single employee can have on a product. Adding long release times, extensive paperwork and removing any link between developers and clients has to kill any excitement and emotion developers have for their work. Without it what they produce must be crap.

Not that clients or producers of these overpriced beasts care. Clients got educated through their lifetime that enterprise software has to be hard to use, buggy and expensive. Producers are more than happy to earn huge profits from cheaply made products. Until the clients won’t start to ask for more not much will change here.

During the Agile Development Practices conference last week Mary Poppendieck announced that agile is now mainstream. Well, apparently it is not mainstream enough yet for the IT experts I mentioned above – or for the enterprise systems buyers. But I believe we’ll get there eventually.

The last day of the Agile Development Practices kicked off with a keynote by Jutta Eckstein on scaling agile development in really big organizations (Deutsche Telekom I suspect). I have to say it wasn’t all that interesting – the delivery was not spirited and the way they did in Germany smelled of trying to make good all command&control chains sound agile. I used the time to jot down some notes before the Open Space session that I initiated.

It turned out few people were there, but there was another session started by Chris Spagnuolo on agile contracting – which was pretty much the same thing – so we merged the two and had a very good discussion with his other colleague, Zvonimir Durcevic and Rachel Weston of Rally Software. It turned out each of us were in a bit different position even though we all do outsourced agile. Chris’ clients are mostly government agencies, so sadly they are stuck with fixed bids – their clients even if sold on agile just can’t go around the straitjacket of regulations. Rally in turn does what I called “being agile wolf in sheep’s skin” – they first play their clients by the book, offering a bid etc. and then once they have them signed off try to sway them to agile modifying (amending) contract later on. That sounds like an interesting way of getting in, but there is always the risk they will have go against the fixed contract anyway – with known bad results (money lost, quality degraded etc.). Still, again, with some types of clients that the only thing you can do.

Next, I got immersed in a discussion with Richard Sharpe of Enerjy and another guy doing testing, measurement and qa analysis. Guys at Enerjy did some really cool research they are about to go public with, which will basically allow to programmatically find areas in software likely to have bugs based on certain metrics. Now, I’m a metric-skeptic but I think if they really have an algorithm that can do that it’s a big thing. In the course of that discussion I learned they have quite an interesting blog there – and a video blog too, for which Richard was making recordings there. I’d have to check it out.

We also discussed some pretty crazy stuff about how Europe is going more and more socialist – and in stupid ways too. It turns out, for example, that in Germany one is not allowed to track individual performance of employees, for example software developers. When they tried to sell some software that tracks different quality metrics in software they were not allowed to enable the part that does this per developer. Complete utter idiocy.

Because of that interesting chat I kind of missed one session – so I went to next one, which was about thing called Fit. Fit is of course an acronym (it’s US after all) for Framework for Integrated Tests and the idea behind it is to follow business rules and check whether software we build meets them. So it’s not unit test – and it’s not functional test, but rather something in between. James Shore presented all that in a rather dry, academic style which I think scared some of the audience away. I had hard time trying to stay focused as the room was so cold in the end my primary concern was staying warm. But anyway, that was interesting stuff – I’d have to point it to my team, even though I think right now we don’t do anything that we could use it for. And the tool itself is working mainly with .NET – or in other words crap we stay away from.

Last strong accord of the conference was Andy Hunt‘s keynote, which he himself called “a dessert”. It was again a broad reflection on research into generations, their characteristics and the fact, there is certain repeatability to general trends in how generations view world. The catch is that this repeatability goes on every four generations more or less – so the one entering the world has no chance to meet their grand-grand-parents and see how much in common they have. That would explain a lot of the cycles that are clearly visible in history, though it obviously opens another question: what causes this pattern to occur.

In any case Andy’s point was that surprisingly – or not so – the what is considered a good method for developing software reflects very well the outlook on life and everything typical of the generation dominant in a given time. Which means that at some point even waterfall might make sense again. On the other hand, Andy was wise enough to point out that this cozy picture of a generations wheel turning predictably through history can and probably will be disrupted by a black swan event – or a huge event no one can possibly foresee.

Well, we’ll see how it all goes. For now let’s say that this conference was a great learning and networking opportunity. I’ll do my best to return next year.