In my organization AppDynamics' reputation couldn't be worse, they could never deliver on their promises even after months of consultancy, never ending back and forth with support to fix what ended up being a network issue on their side, in the case of my team they caused 2 P1 production incidents with their buggy agents. And that's without mentioning their slow UI. Wouldn't recommend this to anyone, we hacked together in a few weeks a solution with graphite/grafana that runs circles around it. Perhaps they have more value for client facing systems because otherwise I cannot understand how they are still in business.
Count me in as somebody with taste that knows something about film and finds this movie a waste of talent. The real Kubrick underrated masterworks are paths of glory and the killing.
this one of the many examples of the anti-intellectualism that is so pervasive in the software development scene. Are the inflexible, detail-prescripting methodologies he describes any good? of course not, but I haven't seen a single seriously used methodology be like that in real life unless it fell on the hands of negligent/incompetent management and/or engineers.
You are lucky if you've never seen a methodology misused or misapplied. I have seen it many times, in my own work experience and in the failed projects I've taken over.
I'm not sure how you got the idea that I'm anti-intellectual. My intention was to express my own opinions and experience and start a discussion. I wasn't trying to wave anything away.
There's a difference between enterprise IT and other environments. For example, if you are a government tax department, your agenda is driven by legislative changes, and you want a fairly rigid process to ensure that things are done accurately and correctly.
1) Industries don't learn; people do. We have a lot of turnover and growth in this industry, so a lot of new people. 2) Although there are high points of genius we may never reach again (Turing, etc), we are making progress. Software today can do things hardly imagined a few decades ago. 3) Part of how we make progress is to try "unlearning" things; throw out conventional wisdom and try something "crazy". Maybe it will fail the same way as before, or maybe this time it will work. Maybe the constraints that produced the conventional wisdom have changed. 4) People problems will always be hard, in every industry. Productivity is a people problem.
I am against a general ignorance of where the industry's been, which manifests as a refusal to learn basic software engineering concepts that are laid out in a book like the Mythical Man Month. Seems like every new medium (such as the web) starts with masses rallying around a figurehead who proclaims "this time it's different! We don't need any of that engineering stuff!" A few years later, they do.
This trend of anti-intellectualism is worrying. I doubt it's new -- Dijkstra had similar sentiments -- but the worst part is the developers who seem to enjoy being ignorant.
This is not a fair analogy. Open heart surgery is a repetitive and well-defined procedure with clear goals and context. Software Engineering is a complex and creative endeavour where individual talent makes a big difference. There is no methodology that will help a mediocre writer produce a great novel. It takes skill and talent.
This is exactly why software engineering needs to professionalize.
I don't see developers always having more leverage than their business counterparts. Really, I'd love to see developers wholly accountable to their peers, along with some sort of entrance exam. I think the world at large would take developers a bit more seriously.
No sarcasm intended. You don't have to agree with SEI or IEEE, but the complaint was that there wasn't an organized body of knowledge. My response was to show that there is.
I'd be interested in knowing what you find so objectionable about SWEBOK.
Actually, there are surprisingly large and persistent differences between hospitals in their complication rates for various surgeries. It is fueling a debate about how to evaluate them and how to promote the methodologies of the more effective places. Not really all that different from the software industry.
