How Software Companies Die

By the ScienceFiction novelist OrsonScottCard, available here:

http://www.things.org/~muffy/pages/life_work.html

From his essay:

Bee Keeping

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money than they know what to do with. But that's less than you might think. You see, all these programmers keep hearing their parents' voices in their heads saying "When are you going to join the real world?" All you have to pay them is enough money that they can answer (also in their heads) "Geez, Dad, I'm making more than you." On average, this is cheap. And you get them to stay in the hive by giving them other coders to swarm with. The only person whose praise matters is another programmer. Less-talented programmers will idolize them; evenly matched ones will challenge and goad one another; and if you want to get a good swarm, you make sure that you have at least one certified genius coder that they can all look up to, even if he glances at other people's code only long enough to sneer at it. He's a Player, thinks the junior programmer. He looked at my code. That is enough. If a software company provides such a hive, the coders will give up sleep, love, health, and clean laundry, while the company keeps the bulk of the money.

He goes on to say that everything is ruined when CluelessManagement? comes in and imposes WorthlessStructure? on everything; the good programmers leave and the product goes to pot.

I wonder what his take on ModernSoftwareEngineering? would be?

-- DerekWoolverton

And then sells itself to ComputerAssociates, who charges an arm and a leg because you are dependent on the software, but otherwise does diddly-squat as far as service and maintenance.