Progress bars—those little horizontal bars that fill from left to right as your laptop or phone updates—are notoriously unreliable. One moment, a progress bar might be 10% full. The next thing you know, the work is done. If a written estimate is provided (e.g., “10 minutes”), you might notice it change dramatically in an instant.
As it turns out, building accurate progress bars is extremely difficult. In most cases, it's almost impossible for the computer to know how long the work will take without actually doing it.
This is the problem of software project estimation in microcosm.
About two years ago, I wrote that the Beatles never set OKRs. It was the punchline to a larger point, but at the time, I was working for a company in the music industry, and I didn't want to criticize music manager types.
Now that I've moved on from that company, and especially because my car sports a custom bumper sticker with the phrase, I've decided to share the unabridged version:
I tend to believe that working too hard to come up with a name for a brand or product is pointless. A name doesn't need to be good to stick. I could point to Facebook or Apple, but there may be no better example than The Beatles. It really is a strange name. It's a pun! It's a dad joke! And yet, I can't imagine them being called anything else.
Can you imagine what a committee would have named the band? For that matter, can you imagine The Beatles writing roadmaps and setting OKRs? Sheesh.
Now that's a t-shirt. “The Beatles never set OKRs.”
I obviously feel the same way today. Speaking of music, maybe that's why one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs, both lyrically and musically, is “Have a Cigar”. A lot of management—certainly not all, but certainly too much—is worse than pointless. It's actively harmful.
I hate to criticize an organization as wonderful as Mozilla, but I must say, Proton is the company I wish Mozilla had become. We need an alternative to Google, a suite of competing web applications that put users first and protect privacy. Proton is accomplishing exactly that.
If cost is fixed and you measure speed, you'll get speed, but not quality. If cost is fixed and you measure quality, you'll get quality, but not speed. If you measure page views or ad impressions, your company may become a clickbait factory. If you measure messages sent within your app, your app might begin boosting outrageous content that makes people argue all the time. (Yes, I'm talking about social media.) If you're a bank and you measure account openings, your employees just might commit fraud to “get those numbers up.”
Incentives rule the world. If you decide to incentivize something by making a measurement a goal, be sure you understand the unintended consequences. Better yet, don't make a measurement a goal at all. As they say, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when a metric becomes a goal, people will inevitably game the system, and you might be surprised by what they do to “win.”
I met Matt Cutts once in 2011. He was very kind, and he explained to me that he worked to combat search engine spam at Google. At the time, I didn't really understand what he was talking about, but boy do I understand now. Perhaps that's the best compliment I could give him; few notice anti-spam efforts when things are going well.
Matt Cutts has since left Google, and now, I get lots of results which provide very little value. What a shame. Apparently, Google needed him more than he needed Google.
I’m a long time Mozilla supporter, I’ve published free and open-source software, and I desperately want Mozilla to charge for Firefox. If that sounds like a contradiction, please keep reading.
There should be an app, browser, browser add-on, or some other tool called Deshittify which does everything accomplished by uBlock Origin, Pi-hole, Unhook, DeArrow, SponsorBlock, Fakespot, ClearURLs, and more, with reasonable defaults and in one convenient package. God, that's a long list. For those who aren't familiar with those tools, they block ads, trackers, addictive designs on YouTube, fake reviews, and more. The web is a mess.
If anyone wants to steal this idea—not that the idea is all that original—please, go right ahead. Mozilla, Brave, someone: do this!
I enjoy the craft of computer programming, the endless desire to solve problems better than I did last time. I may enjoy it more than any other aspect of my job, and it’s served me well in my career. I’ve become a good programmer. I may even be a very good programmer. I don't know. I’m not sure I can make that distinction myself.
Is that enough? I don’t know. In all commercial art, the artist needs to sacrifice some amount of beauty and perfection to pay the bills. (I don't mean for that to sound too pretentious, but I do think of software development as art, or at least much more like art than most people imagine.) Too many sacrifices, though, and the work becomes painful. Where's the line? How much should one allow it to move? I don’t know.