A guy I met at a convention last year told me this story:
About five years ago I was hired as a consultant for a very large software company I shall not name. One day I came in and noticed that the team I had been working with had been completely replaced with new people. Every cube on the floor had someone different working in it.
I went in to Chip Dagwood´s office, who was managing the project and he immediately asked me to close the door. "You´ve probably noticed we have made some changes." He told me. "As you know we believe that a development organization should have separate groups to write code and to debug it. Over the last several months I have been tracking the lines of code written by your code creation team and found it to be lacking."
I started to interrupt but he held up a hand and said, "Let me finish. You yourself have a fairly high production rate, and since your contract is for a fixed length we have decided to keep you on for the term. The rest of the team has been let go and we have brought in replacements who have been engaged in a special training program for the last several months."
"So they will be taking over writing new code?" I asked. "Don´t you think some kind of training period would have made sense so we could at least do some knowledge transfer?"
"We don´t feel that would be useful. The code that has already been written will be kept and the new team will add to that." He got a strange grin on his face and pulled me over to his office window in a conspiratorial manner. "Listen to these guys type. I´ve never seen such hard workers. Our estimates suggest they will outpace your team by a factor of ten. The project will be done in no time."
I was impressed. I had thought my team was pretty good, but if these guys could get it done in only 10% of the time then Chip really was on to something. "Frankly," I said, "I´m amazed. Who are these guys and how did you find them."
His smile really lit up. "I had this idea last year, and now it has finally come to fruition. You see, I had noticed that most of the developers were really slow typists, and even those who typed fast seemed to take a lot of breaks."
"I discussed this with Mark Marvin who runs the QA team that we are outsourcing from Elbonia and he told me that most programmers are not really properly trained as typists. They tend to have very bad posture and so they need a lot of breaks."
"That was when I had my idea. What we needed to do was to train some of the typists from our transcription service to write code. That way we could improve our pace."
In a state of shock, I managed to babble out a question. "How do you know if the code is any good? Does it even work?"
His smile widened. "I always know what you are going to say. Sometimes I think I must be psychic. I´ve looked at their code. They seem to have every item in the specification included somewhere in it. I checked for each and every line item out of the feature list and found an almost verbatim comment, followed by a bunch of code. I´ve never been able to find all the functional spec items in the code you´ve been writing."
He was on a roll so he continued. "As long as it compiles I figure we can let the debugging team sort out the bugs. There are going to be a ton of bugs no matter what you do, and this team will have their share as well."
As he gloated, a plan began to from in my mind. "Your time getting that MBA has sure shown its worth," I said in a tone dripping with praise. "This idea would not have crossed my mind in 1000 years."
Trying to put on a determined look I continued, "I´m not one to give up so easily. I can crank out code with the best of them. My problem has been the environment in the office here. Would you let me try to see if I can do better working from home?"
"I don´t see why not," he replied. "Please see if you can submit complete code for items 12.2.34 through 12.6.15 in the FS as soon as possible. We have taken to breaking out assignments in chunks of 100 functional spec items."
That night I wrote what I now call "The Little Gold Mine." It´s about 1000 lines of pure FS parsing Perl goodness that has kept me lounging on the beaches of San Trope for the last five years. I became so efficient that Chip moved the replacements back to the transcription team. I cannot share my trade secret here, but I will tell you that machines are the fastest typists out there. I´m just glad I don´t work on the debugging team!
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