Today, on Twitter, I have received a reply with a phrase that, in its own sake and without connecting back with the original topic of the thread, I found significant of the dread I feel with working as a developer, particularly in many opensource communities nowadays.
Most things don’t work the way I think they work. That’s why I’m a programmer, so I can make them work the way I think they should work.
I’m not going to link back to the tweet, or name the author of the phrase. This is not about them in particular, and more about the feeling expressed in this phrase, which I would have agreed with many years ago, but now feels so much off key.
What I feel now is that programmers don’t make things work the way they think they should. And this is not intended as a nod to the various jokes about how bad programming actually is, given APIs and constraints. This is about something that becomes clear when you spend your time trying to change the world, or make a living alone (by running your own company): everybody needs help, in the form of a team.
A lone programmer may be able to write a whole operating system (cough Emacs), but that does not make it a success in and by itself. If you plan on changing the world, and possibly changing it for the better, you need a team that includes not only programmers, but experts in quite a lot of different things.
Whether it is a Free Software project, or a commercial product, if you want to have users, you need to know what they want — and a programmer is not always the most suitable person to go through user stories. Hands up all of us who have, at one point or another, facepalmed at an acquaintance taking a screenshot of a web page to paste it into Word, and tried to teach them how to print the page to PDF. While changing workflows so that they make sense may sound the easiest solution to most tech people, that’s not what people who are trying to just do their job care about. Particularly not if you’re trying to sell them (literally or figuratively) a new product.
And similarly to what users want to do, you need to know what the users need to do. While effectively all of Free Software comes with no warranty attached, even for it (and most definitely for commercial products), it’s important to consider the legal framework the software has to be used on. Except for the more anarchists of the developers out there, I don’t think anyone would feel particularly interested in breaching laws for the sake of breaching them, for instance by providing a ledger product that allows “black book accounting” as an encrypted parallel file. Or, to reprise my recent example, to provide a software solution that does not comply with GDPR.
This is not just about pure software products. You may remember, from last year, the teardown of Juicero. In this case the problems appeared to step by the lack of control over the BOM. While electronics is by far not my speciality, I have heard more expert friends and colleagues cringe at seeing the spec of projects that tried to actually become mainstream, with a BOM easily twice as expensive as the minimum.
Aside here, before someone starts shouting about that. Minimising the BOM for an electronic project may not always be the main target. If it’s a DIY project, making it easier to assemble could be an objective, so choosing more bulky, more expensive parts might be warranted. Similarly if it’s being done for prototyping, using more expensive but widely available components is generally a win too. I have worked on devices that used multi-GB SSDs for a firmware less than 64MB — but asking for on-board flash for the firmware would have costed more than the extremely overprovisioned SSDs.
And in my opinion, if you want to have your own company, and are in for the long run (i.e. not with startup mentality of getting VC capital and get acquired before even shipping), you definitely need someone to follow up the business plan and the accounting.
So no, I don’t think that any one programmer, or a group of sole programmers, can change the world. There’s a lot more than writing code, to build software. And a lot more than building software, to change society.
Consider this the reason why I will plonk-file any recruitment email that is looking for “rockstars” or “ninjas”. Not that I’m looking for a new gig as I type this, but I would at least give thought if someone was looking for a software mechanic (h/t @sysadmin1138).
I suspect that a lone developer, making something that “works the way it should work” will make something that works perfectly sensible for one, or possibly a small few, people. But to make something that is successful, one will need a variety of input.
Oh, slight jib against emacs aside, you MAY find that TempleOS as an almost perfect illustration of a single person writing an operating system that works exactly as that person thinks an OS should work.