Re: [OT] Re: Are / Were you a Siebel Software Engineer?

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/11/04 

Date: 11 Sep 2004 01:33:06 -0700

Christopher Barber <cbarber@curl.com> wrote in message news:<pso1xhadurp.fsf_-_@unicron.curl.com>...
> spinoza1111@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) writes:
>
> > Christopher Barber <cbarber@curl.com> wrote in message news:<psoacvyesks.fsf@unicron.curl.com>...
> > > spinoza1111@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) writes:
> > >
> > > > Fagboy Bush will destroy anyone in his way, we know that. But he's
> > > > still a *** boy and he will always be a *** boy.
> > > >
> > > > And by calling George Bush a "*** boy" I mean no disrespect to genuine
> > > > queers. I mean that the problem with our society include closeted
> > > > queers like George Bush who have evaded life's challenges from day
> > > > one.
> > >
> > > If you don't mean dispresect to gays, then you should not be calling Bush "***
> > > boy". I am kind of amazed that you could be so insensitive.
> >
> > What, did you think me a sensitive guy? After all these years?
> >
> > Seriously, I made it perfectly clear in the paragraph quoted that by
> > calling Bush a *** Boy, I meant no disrespect to gays.
>
> Saying something offensive while stating you meant no offense by it does not
> in any way absolve you. The fact that you think that you can simply say "I
> meant no respect" and think that lets you off the hook makes you no better than
> a politician slinging mud.

Let me ask you this. Would anyone WANT to be a "*** boy", with its
implication of failure to accomplish the tasks of adulthood? In fact,
gays self-criticise and criticise others based on a set of moral
principles which include the need to accomplish the tasks of
adulthood, as gay men. These tasks include things like being
compassionate (not sniggering, for example, at the sufferings of Death
Row inmates) and being loyal to subordinates who give loyalty: not
summarily firing CIA director George Tenet for being retrospectively
right about Iraq while being at the same time loyal to Bush.
>
> Whether you meant to or not, you have in fact disrespected gays.

OK, sure, whatever. But note that if you consequently label me a
homophobe, the label is just as meaningless and evanescent as a
Post-It note, one of those overrated slips of paper with insufficient
goo to actually stick to many surfaces. That's because words based on
a syntactical view which refuses to engage meaning are themselves
without meaning.

>
> > > (Are we on topic yet? ;-)
> >
> > We are, because MIS programmers think in overly syntactic terms and as
> > a result data systems are implemented without meaning and intention,
> > resulting in an 80% failure rate.
>
> What does calling Bush a "*** boy" have to do with MIS programmers?

Because Bush's management style happens to resemble that of many MIS
managers. In particular it is drained of affect.

Bush's summary firing of George Tenet merely for speaking up in a
Cabinet meeting resembles scenes I've seen in the MIS world.

The gesture common to both worlds is affectless betrayal. Paul O'Neill
willingly did the administration's dirty work as Treasure Secretary
including the affectless betrayal of Argentina in August 2001:
Argentina had foolishly tried to express its economic loyalty to the
United States by linking the peso to the dollar and in affectless
betrayal, Argentina has been relegated to Third World status (because
as any economist knows, locking a currency to a fixed standard in a
predepression brings on a Depression).

Nonetheless, O'Neill was cut off when (as was predicted, not by him,
but by economists) a tax cut exclusively for the rich failed to
restart the economy because "affectless betrayal" rounds up the usual
suspects.

Bush is in fact a technocrat who, like many people in MIS, is in
denial of his own negative emotions and feels a need to justify their
expression by references to principles he cannot even describe.

"Software engineering" is programming without the programmer, and it
has never properly even answered Dijkstra's questions first aired
about it in 1968.

Dijkstra at first thought "software engineering" to be a good idea as
a way of excluding incompetent programmers and in fact celebrating
good ones as engineers, but he seems to have discovered over time that
as a form of affectless management (that would systematically exclude
discussion of ultimate ends at all levels), "software engineering" was
nonsense.

In a famous quote, Dijkstra in fact confessed that software
engineering was as far as he could determine "programming for people
who can't program".

The problem in the 1960s for management was that "programmers"
recruited from non-standard, non-elite and working class background
seemed at times to impose non-standard, non-elite and working class
values in a zone then coded as "elite", therefore the attraction of
"software engineering" was "science without the scientist": the
automated production of the right sort of software with no prime mover
EXCEPT the actual manager.

But this runs up against a contradiction noted by the ancient Chinese
philosopher Mencius. The manager, as manager, is pure will and his
"work" consists of saying with clarity and simplicity to others, "do
this".

Which leaves us back where we started, in which software engineering
is the narrative of a production without agents while "programming" is
the distinct narrative of what actually goes on.

The situation may in fact be compared to law writing. Rep. Charles
Dingell of Michigan, interviewed by Mike Moore in the award-winning
documentary Fahrenheit 911, tells Moore that politicians don't in
general READ the laws they sign...any more in fact than MIS managers
READ "code".

Good managers deal with this paradox by solving the problems created
by the way in which the organizations members have, almost (but not
quite) as a condition of employability, spend their time evading
responsibility.

For example, Bill Clinton describes (in a wordy way, trying in other
words to be adequate to his own life) what he actually did as Governor
of Arkansas to resolve a management issue: the relocation of Cuban
refugees to Fort Chafee in 1980. This required Clinton to relive the
negative emotions of weakness and failure he experienced when the
situation at Fort Chafee nearly went out of control on his watch.

But one cannot imagine an affectless manager (whether in MIS or Bush)
narrating the "shadow" side of events in this way.

One thing, for example, that programmers did in the 1960s was to bring
manager's attention to the "shadow" side of computerization including
software bugs, and note that it was programmers (like my former
manager Jerome T. Murray and Bob Bemer) who brought Y2K to the public
attention and got it solved.

However, affectless management offloads the "shadow", typically onto
people it terminates as an auto da fe.

Of course, I don't know whether a different management style, whether
at the company level or at the national level, would be more
effective. The Clinton regime nealry self-destructed over impeachment
because Clinton had to subscribe to the same ground rules as the
Congressional republicans. It may be that Bush, and MIS organizations
that merely self-perpetuate, are the wave of an a-human future.

Anyway, I hope this relates these larger issues back to "programming"
and "software engineering".