Happiness is a direction, not a place. – Sydney J. Harri


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Happy programmers are more productive, healthier and live longer. It is pleasure to work with happy programmers. Are you a happy programmer? Do you have feeling of joy and satisfaction every day? Do you want to know how to become happier?

This post considers programmer’s satisfaction with live as a whole (I had another post dedicated to happiness at work).

Programmers as other people are happier if they have

• more money
• successful marriage
• excellent health
• good friends
• live in a beautiful place with wonderful weather
  

But we have what we have. It is not easy to achieve all of this: become rich, find perfect spouse and friends, be completely healthy and move to the best place on the Earth. But the most nasty news is that even after achieving all of this happiness is not guaranteed to last forever.

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I can’t wait to share this simple secret with you right now.

The Secret: Effective Software Systems are the systems that easy to understand and operate with human brains.

Programmers are more productive with effective software systems. Programmers can better learn and grow these system. Programmers have less problems, work faster and make better decision with them.

Now, you can avoid spending time reading this post if you already know this secret and you know how to avoid building the software system that:

• almost impossible to understand in reasonable time
• has confusing and convoluted swamp of logic and structure
• scary to change as nobody has any clue what will be broken, but sure that it will be broken

If you are still interested, lets find out what makes software systems effective.

Software Development is a pure mental endeavor (except typing on keyboard) that includes 3 main activities:

• Understand – learn and know system concepts and implementation
• Evolve – build, modify and support growth of the system ideas in the code
• Share – communicate and exchange ideas about the system

Programmers should care about 7 areas to make the system better suited for our brains:

1. Knowledge Creation and Retention – parsing, memorization and comprehension of the system ideas
2. System Organization – elements, relations and structure in the system
3. Sustaining Emerging Order – support evolution of the system and gain control over chaos
4. Minimize Noise and Purify – avoid adding unnecessary stuff to the system
5. System Discovery and Learning – making sense of the system
6. Mental Models – our internal explanations for how things are working in the real system
7. Shared Knowledge – ideas exchange, reconciliation of opinions and creation of mutually enhanced knowledge.

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Who are the perfect programmers?

Popular blogger Alex Iskold answers in Top 10 Traits of a Rockstar Software Engineer:

1. Loves To Code
2. Gets Things Done
3. Continuously Refactors Code
4. Uses Design Patterns
5. Writes Tests
6. Leverages Existing Code
7. Focuses on Usability
8. Writes Maintainable Code
9. Can Code in Any Language
10. Knows Basic Computer Science

It is a solid list, but this list concentrates on the secondary traits, which are just consequences of the deeper set of qualities. And it is an idealistic list. Do you expect the same qualities from a Flash programmer for kids websites and a software engineer for B2B financial transaction services? But how can we recognize a perfect programmer in the crowd of developers?

The Ultimate Criteria for finding The Perfect Programmer: The perfect programmer delivers good software that meets client’s expectations.

Therefore, the shocking truth is that perfect programmers could know only one programming language, don’t have any idea what are design patterns and don’t program all nights in their basements creating the next Google. We cannot objectively measure the programmers perfection like you could measure diameter of your biceps. The perfect programmers are simply perfect if they deliver a quality, usable and maintainable software system [a good system] in time and meet client needs.

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“The important thing is not to stop questioning” – Albert Einstein

A typical programmer faces thousands lines of code, huge number of details and millions of situations and states during the software system execution. A programmer should understand the system, know how to modify it and support knowledge about the system with explanations, justifications and answers. How can a software developer gain, maintain and operate this knowledge and make sense of these volumes of information and complex logic changing every day?

The ways how our memory works could give us few hints.

Our Human Memory Architecture

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“Variety is the spice of life”

Did you see a software team with members that are

• always stressed and full of fear to fail or completely indifferent to end results?
• totally agree with each other and satisfied with their product, but very far from harsh reality?
• competing and fighting for the true solution, but cannot achieve common goals?
• always inventing something interesting, but cannot focus on work and deliver software?
• overly disciplined, planning everything, but deliver mediocre boring results without any spark of imagination?
• having excellent communication, rapport and environment, but spend most of the time talking than working?
• sitting in separate cubicles without talking, barely understanding what others are doing?

Can these teams be successful? What is the root cause of their problems? How these problems could be prevented?

Our personalities

One of the most interesting things about humans is their personality. We are different in behavior, reactions and feelings in the similar situations. These wonderful personality traits make our life refreshing and sometimes totally unpredictable. Do they matter in software development, apparently logical and rational activity? I believe that people are the most important factor in the software development and they determine success. A programmer’s personality affects behavior and therefore it must have significant impact on the work itself.

Empirical research shows five broad dimensions of personality:

• Openness – appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience.
• Conscientiousness – a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior.
• Extroversion – energy, positive emotions, and the tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others.
• Agreeableness – a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
• Neuroticism – a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability; sometimes called emotional instability.

What are the best personal traits for the programmer? Before answering this question, I want to mention research of rudimentary personality traits in wild animals. Small birds, great tits, have personality ranging from highly exploratory to more cautious one. Scientists found that the both personality types are optimal, but under different conditions. When resources were scarce it paid the birds to dispense further. However, when resources are abundant more cautious birds were more likely to survive. Morale is that our evolution preserved different personalities for the good reason. They help us to survive and advance under various unpredictable conditions. They made overall population resilient to changing environment, threats and challenges.

Software teams need diversity not only in skills, experience and knowledge. They need the optimal balance of personalities to effectively build software, especially in our rapidly changing technological, business and social worlds.

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“Ruin in community is not caused by witches with broomstick but it’s something that starts in people’s heads.” – Prof. Preobrazhensky (Michail Bulgakov’s “The heart of a dog”)

The newborn software system looks beautiful inside after the few weeks of development. Several talented programmers put their souls together into this amazing software idea. But week after week the system become older and uglier. It could still look exciting for users, but the system rots inside. It is much more difficult to modify, it breaks often, development time and cost soars. Programmers become scared to work with it. The system becomes Frankenstein. Why could it happen?

Three reasons

There are hundred objective reasons why it could happen – complex technology, changing customer needs, management pressure, time to market and many more. But some teams still deliver a good system under these conditions. And some teams cannot deliver even in the most favorable conditions. Why?

Degradation of the system starts in the people heads and there are three main reasons:

1. Incomprehension – developers don’t understand the purpose, ideas, design or technology behind the system
2. Inarticulateness – developers unable to express ideas through clear and effective architecture, design and code
3. Inconsistency – developers cannot act consistently or don’t care about the system

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New Scientist published three interesting articles related to the human psychology. This post tries to apply these findings to the programmer’s mind.

Should a programmer trust gut instinct

In the article The subconscious mind: Your unsung hero, author argues that contrary to common beliefs non-conscious thinking is better in some cases than rational, conscious thought:

• where people have to make difficult choices based on large amounts of hard-to-assess information. Subconscious thought processes allow us to integrate complex information in a more holistic way
• in problem solving, verbalizing what they are doing has no effect on people’s ability to solve analytical, mathematical or logic problems but actually hinders performance on insight problems, such as solving a riddle
• subconscious thinking is the source of our inspiration – it is central to creativity. In highly creative people subconscious information is more likely to overspill into consciousness, giving them richer mental resources from which to make creative connections

Creativity and problem-solving are required for any descent programmer. This article shows that these skills are dependent on quality of our subconscious thinking – gut instinct. Can we consciously improve our subconscious thinking? Yes, and the best way is getting experience and making many mistakes. Certainly, it will work only if you learn from them. As famous quote says: “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” Especially it is true in the software development.

Short Summary: trust and develop your gut instinct.

How a programmer could keep focus

Many of us struggle with distractions during our work. They really hurt our productivity. Psychologist Nilli Lavie says in the article Focus feature: Keeping your mind on the job:

You don’t have voluntary control – you can’t say ‘stop’ to a ‘distracter’. If you wish to ignore something, that doesn’t mean that you will succeed.

Surprisingly, he found that when a more visually intensive task “loads” the brain’s attention, we become increasingly blind to distractions, and our performance on the task will improve: reaction times get faster, and error rates drop. That means that the harder you are forced to concentrate, the less likely you are to be distracted.

Therefore, conclusion is simple for programmers – a challenging task will force you to ignore distractions, a boring task will make you very susceptible to them.

Short summary: load your brain to avoid distractions

Procrastination in programmer’s life

Another productivity killer is procrastination. Piers Steel at the University of Calgary in Alberta found a formula for procrastination:

Utility = ^{E x V}/_{G x D}
This calculates how likely you are to do something immediately – the task’s utility – by taking into account the four key variables: how confident you are of succeeding in the task (E); how pleasant you perceive the task to be (V); how easily distracted you are (G); and how much time will elapse before the reward for completing the task arrives (D).

He suggests strategies to cope:

• Make a firm commitment to your boss or partner to finish a task by a certain time.
• Strip your workspace of all distractions.
• Get a good night’s sleep and try tackling the most unpleasant and difficult tasks early in the day.
• Set a series of realistic goals.
• Promise yourself a reward for each goal that you meet.
• Believe in yourself.
• Outsource your motivation. Get someone else to regularly goad you into action.

I can promise – you’ll find even more strategies in various sources. I had a related post too: 5 steps to cooperate with you unconscious mind. But after all, you’ll get results only if you have desire to improve and change yourself. As Plato said: “The first and the best victory is to conquer self.” Chinese wisdom adds: “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

Short summary: it is possible to fight procrastination… if you really want

Links (unfortunately, all require New Scientist subscription):
The subconscious mind: Your unsung hero
Focus feature: Keeping your mind on the job
Procrastination: The thief of time

Agile approaches insist that customer cannot come up with the reliable requirements at the beginning of the project. Martin Fowler provides four reasons:

1. Software development is a design activity, and thus hard to plan and cost.
2. The basic materials (technology and tools) keep changing rapidly
3. So much depends on which individual people are involved, and individuals are hard to predict and quantify.
4. In today’s economy the fundamental business forces are changing the value of software features too rapidly.

However, the most interesting reason is inside customers minds – they cannot reliably predict what they will need from software in the future.

Lets face inconvenient reality – most of the software ideas, decisions and requirements are not the result of scrupulous research, well prepared theories and mathematical models. If it were so, software development would take so much time, money and energy that it will almost eliminate any business benefits. Also it is very difficult to formalize anything related to irrational human beings (who accidentally are the main users of the software). In the most cases, software ideas are born from intuition, insights, copying other ideas and own experience mixed with some vague expectations. This empirical mess becomes source of the vision, requirements and future problems.

Customer dissatisfaction with software is the problem number one in software development. And the root cause is that many of customer’s expectations and predictions are in vain – mostly because future is fundamentally different than it appears in their thoughts. Why? There are six challenges that customers are facing to predict the future and get their ideas about the software right.

1. Subjectivity and our individual experience

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Software ideas are mainly based on our individual experiences, thoughts and understanding. Our individual experience is unobservable to everyone except ourselves. It is very difficult to communicate it right and completely understand other people. Translations and interpretations of software needs are unreliable – too much depends on what experiences we had, our memory and level of knowledge.
We see problems and possible solutions through lenses of our individual experience and often they shape and distort what we see. In addition, even if software customers can get objective view on their problems, they would see it from completely different perspective than domain experts, developers and end-users – people who shape ideas, build and use software. Subjectivity makes expression and understanding of software ideas very difficult.

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Surprisingly, Jim Highsmith, respected agile guru, argues against one of the core agile principles of self organization, associating it with anarchy. On the contrary, surprisingly again, the Army experts, Don Vandergriff and George Reed, embrace ideas of adaptability and decentralization in traditionally command-oriented military units.

Jim Highsmith says:

“I’ve been thinking recently that the term “self-organizing” has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced. While self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, become confused with anarchy in the minds of many. Why has this occurred? Because there is a contingent within the agile community that is fundamentally anarchist at heart and it has latched onto the term self-organizing because it sounds better than anarchy.”

Army experts say:

“A culture of adaptability is one that accepts a lack of absolute control over events on and off the battlefield. Implementation requires revisiting mission orders or trust tactics. It necessitates raising the bar in the education, training and coaching of leaders and soldiers. It seems trite to suggest that an adaptive institution will reward those who, when the need arises, act without waiting for orders, but this also necessitates a climate that is supportive of those who act and fail to achieve stellar results. Instead of seeking perfection or optimum solutions, operators will find a solution that works locally and then exploit those results as a continual evolution facilitated by an organization adept at receiving and communicating such information.”

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Part 1. Gaining processing power
Part 2. Becoming intelligent
Part 3. Interacting with humans
Part 4. Building useful programs
Part 5. Future of human programmers

Is it easy to build useful programs for humans? Failure rates and dissatisfaction with the software projects (more than 50% still fails or challenged) show that it is not quite easy task. Can AI help to build more successful projects, compete and eventually replace human programmers?

From ideas to specifications

Human programmers face objective challenges in building software systems, which AI will face in the future:

1. It is difficult to understand what people need.
2. Customer’s ideas are shifting, once they start using the real system and experience all the consequences and effects for interacting with it in the context of their problems.
3. Customer’s needs are changing constantly reflecting outside business and company trends, situation and problems.

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