The Three Laws of Business

Occasionally you are in the situation where the stakeholder is a bit of a dumbass, you spent last week and a chunk of the budget on a cocaine bender, and there is no way you are going to get things done properly and on time. This is where one of programming’s oldest institutions can help you – I am talking about the Bank of Technical Debt. Here you can take out a loan and borrow some time against your code quality, but you can be damn sure you’ll have to pay this back.

They Thought The Deal Was Legit

In the good old days, doing it wrong and early was a considered strategic decision. Not so now – we are agile, and every dumb fucker is an “independent professional” (read noob), and their strategy is to make themselves look good at the next meeting by getting as many tickets closed as possible with barely defensible code quality. Then when management starts reporting progress to clients using the current flavour-of-the-month Agile management tool it turns a bunch of lazy programmers into an all out race to the bottom.

Be Damned If They Let Themselves Burn And Crash

I can hear a rushing noise on the wind; the ninja-auditors from the Bank of Technical Debt are coming here to violently foreclose on the massive loan that this company has accumulated. I honestly have no idea if this fuckin’ awesome sounding metaphor means the real bank coming knocking for its money, or the stakeholders waking up and realizing just how fucked everything is.

Normally I would have employed Rule #3 and got the fuck out a while ago – but my paychecks (in advance) are still clearing. I’m also saving my best piece of consultancy for last: “You should have listened to me more”. Dumb fucks.

Today I was revisiting the Powerthirst videos on YouTube to work up enough motivation to yell at some morons, when I noticed that their shitty flash video player was sucking down about a quarter of my CPU more than a normal video player would for the same content. Investigating this (checking out a bit of RedTube during my second lunch break) I noticed this is a fairly consistent phenomena.

Flash video performs like the entire multimedia pipeline is written in that shitty ActionScript rebranding of JavaScript it uses.

Gratuitous Amounts Of Energy

That quarter of my CPU is about thirty fucking watts being eaten up by developer incompetence. With YouTube pushing out a billion views per day – average clip length of two and a half minutes – a constant 1.7 million streaming lolcats, emo video diaries, and other pointless crap are being pushed through Adobe’s abomination of a video renderer.

Its not often you can easily slap a monetary figure on developer failure – but there’s no difficulty here. For YouTube alone, Adobe fails at a constant rate of 52MW. At (.au) base power rates we are looking at around 70 million bucks a year burnt up for no gain.

You Will Even Win At Irony

If I gave a shit about the environment I’d probably have a cry over the quarter-million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions this causes as well, around 0.02% of global emissions. So remember kids; every time you rickroll, Adobe kills a penguin.

Fuck you Adobe. Top Score.

A little known fact about Moore’s Law is that average developer incompetence doubles every twelve months, easily outpacing any hardware developments. Your shitty staff phonebook gets its own server, then its own database server… pretty soon you have a bunch of blades, extra aircon units, and an ESX consultant balls deep in your accountant.

Not that anyone gives too much of a fuck – they have many times the pretty blinking lights for their money.

X to the motherfucking Zee

Everyone is happily pissing money up against a wall until CTO Monthly publishes an editorial describing how some Fortune 500 that nobody has ever heard of saved a fat wad of cash with Cloudy Computoring.

The technical staff will drool over on-demand linear scalability. Management is popping boners because capital expenditure gets rolled into ongoing support. You are going to migrate your shit into the goddamn cloud, and yo, that sounds cool as fucking shit, dawg.

I heard you like failing, so we put your shared hosting in a cluster so you can fail while you fail.

You Better Get Ready For the War

The developers will be the first to feel the butthurt of migration into the Cloud. The shitty API that you will be forced to use will be limiting to perform even the most basic of tasks. Then when you get everything working it will run like utter crap. You see, you’ll be sharing these services with people with huge budgets and tiny skills.

The natural evolution of your provider is towards oversubscribed services and you being outbid for the runtime you need by porn and gambling sites. Having limitless power on tap means there won’t be an upper limit on how much of it developer incompetence can eat up. This will only drive up resource consumption and cost. Soon a third of the world’s energy will be powering cartesian products and List.Find.

I guarantee epic lulz when some companies get their first bill for CPU cycles on these new deployments. People are assuming they will get infrastructure for nothing, and they are about to meet our very good friend, the First Law of Business.

From the veritable shit-storm of financial fail the world has sailed into, you would think that managers would have some degree of skepticism towards hippies peddling messages of happy inclusion.

It seems like every damn company is forcing its employees to join hands and attend “team bonding” days, and recite mantras on how there are no wrong answers, everyone is equally valuable, and we are a big happy family.

Handle My Balls

I had the misfortune to attend one of these days. I would’ve claimed to be sick, but the event being held at a pub gave me misguided hope. We spend eight long hours drawing happy thoughts on whiteboards and throwing small rubber balls to each other. Afterwards I felt even more hatred towards the goddamn idiots who actually thought this crap was beneficial. There was no beer.

Still, I got paid – and discovered which of the female employees had the best ball handling skills. What kind of idiot would pay contractors to come on one of these courses anyway?

We Don’t Need No Education

Most answers are wrong. To some it seems like there is plenty of right answers. If this is due to the question being not specific enough then apply the backhand liberally. Otherwise you probably should not be pretending to know what you are doing and giving people solutions that I’ll invariably have to come in and fix. Fuck you.

Texas Instruments made a shitload of cash after training its sales staff on aggressive techniques. The Art of War was mandatory reading. Survival in business doesn’t come from prancing around like a bunch of fairies and giving your co-workers an ego-reacharound over their stupid ideas. People learn from mistakes. Let them know when they have made one.

If you can crush egos before they develop, then your business will run smoothly.

Fundamental to web economics is the Pareto distribution. It usually applied in serious papers or serious hype justifying business plans with no potential customers. There is an illustration here, worth at least thirty words. 3laws’ first image tag. Welcome to Web 1.0.

By coincidence, this shape models the available funding for a typical failing company over time. The green zone represents 80% of their total funds, and somewhere in this zone the main product was expected to be creating that elusive thing known as “income”.

In The Guinness Book; For The Shit I Took

As usual, I’m deep in fail territory, right up the end of the funding Long Tail. Management has decided the project will succeed at all costs, yet they don’t have the balls to keep on spending until the project is done. As the amount of money dries up, they spend less and we start to head deeper and deeper into the yellow zone.

The product was rushed off to the client as soon as a build could be coerced into working. The client is unhappy and lawyering up. Programmers are fixing bugs and salesmen are sucking cocks around the clock.

The company should have filed for bankruptcy last year, but are managing to scrape together enough funds to stay afloat. It’s a hint that cash flow is getting borderline when they need ‘a couple more days’ to find $12k for an invoice when their staffing bill is around a half-million a month. Time to start billing in advance. First law.

Take Your Broke Ass Home

They are cutting costs by random firings and writing stern emails about printer usage. This will be kept up until there is a full complement of sales, HR, and management supporting a single immigrant programmer.

If you find yourself in the long tail then recognize that you are in “totally fucked” territory. The only thing that is keeping your project going is hope and the only thing that will make it succeed is a goddamn miracle. Hope has no place in business. Know when to cut your losses and GTFO. Third law.

What the hell is it with you fucking role-players, anime lovers, fanboys, furries, etc? Its hard enough to find what I want on the internet without your inane and pointless bullshit cluttering up the place.

You’re the one whose choking Trojans

All it takes is a robot in an insignificant little cartoon aimed at 10 year old kids in Japan to collide with a real life product code for something worthwhile, and everything is ruined.  All you can find on the internet for that product code is a bunch of fat geeks discussing how many dice Optimus Prime would have to roll to determine if he was capable of raping said robot while wearing a fursuit.

The internet is for Serious Business. If all of you lovers of make-believe crap and sexual deviants could kindly form a line and GTFO in an orderly fashion then the rest of us will be able to get some useful things done.

Its full fucking steam ahead here. The client has seen the final product. Release day is imminent. Version numbers have been updated to indicate the official status. Directors are fellating each other excitedly in the boardroom. Birds are singing, butterflies are circling around…

You are doing it wrong

I have a huge goldfish bowl of coffee, and a feature request. This feature requires so much reworking of the core model that very little of the app will be unaffected. Large sections based on lazy assumptions and slack requirements capture will have to be chucked out and rewritten. It will take two months.

It won’t take two months. We don’t have two months, the client wants it now. The music swells to a crescendo, and we are about to begin the hilarious dance with management known as the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Lets watch…

Madam, may I have the pleasure?

Its not my place to make business decisions around trading off product quality against time. That role is reserved for the guy who is going to be held responsible when it all fails. The first steps of the dance is for him to say things like “just use your judgment”, “do what you think is best”, and “allow me to blame you when I suck cocks at the project management”. Playing the part of the ho, I then follow his lead with a list of costed and risk-assessed options.

Expensive, late, or crap. Pick any two. Next time you might want to try some foresight with your low-ball estimates.

I had a lovely evening.

First impressions when you meet a client count big. With a decent entrance you can make every suggestible noob in the place think you are the solution to all their problems. In this edition of Protips, you’ll learn a secret pro maneuver, which is guaranteed to increase your rate, and your chance of banging the receptionist.

Every Day I’m Hustlin’

Office buildings have positive pressure due to the air conditioning. You want open up the ceiling hatch of the lift. When the lift arrives at their reception, people will hear the ding and be looking at the doors when they open. People will be influenced by a feeling of lightness due to a slight pressure drop. It will feel like something just happened, and you’ll be casually strolling in with the wind blowing your shit around movie style. You will look like the goddamn messiah arriving.

Get The Most Not The Lesser

The HR chick will feel like you are “a good fit” because she wants to fuck you. Think I’m crazy? You forget that working in HR has only slightly more qualifications than supermarket trolley handling. Metacognition is hardly up there on the skill list. Their laughable aptitude tests won’t be a problem – presumably you know the fuck what you are doing technically.

Well TBH you were odds on going to get the contract anyway – but enjoy the extra twenty bucks an hour, and the hot receptionist.

Right now I feel like Ludwig von Herbgaarten, Landscape Gardener extraordinaire, and three time German Gardening Monthly “Man of Hard Wood”. Ludwig has just laid down a spec-fucking-tacular garden under contract for the Crown Prince of Ubercashistan. He tells the rest of the team to finish up the fence and fertilize it and trots off to spend some well earned time in the palace harem. When he comes back there is a fence through the middle of the fucking duck pond, and the entire place is knee-deep in horse shit.

And all my pretty flowers died, you incompetent noobs.

You just lost the Game

You hand over a polished, well designed product. A maintenance team shouldn’t have any issues adding minor functionality on client branches with your well designed and documented setup. Yet every damn time you get called back six months later to help with some issue they are having, and find the size of the codebase has tripled, functionality is up 10%, and functioning functionality is down 50%.

Not that I claim that software engineering metrics are anything but complete bullshit, but if function points per kloc starts to go down like Paris Hilton, then it must be due to someone playing design doctor with their dick out.

Get off my lawn

Blame can be laid at the door of the juniors of course. They are positively itching to whip out their dicks and do some real software engineering so they can pull chicks at Sharepoint conferences or something. They ignore the fact that all the hard parts have been deliberately done for them because their role is suited to their ability (editing config files, and perhaps a new implementation of IShitSelector for some picky bastard of a client).

When a chance comes up like this to stamp their clumsy boot print all over my nice design, how can they resist? Can we really blame them? Of course we bloody well can. My recommendation is going to involve “your ass” and “fired”. GTFO.

I’m a nice guy. A top bloke. I give credit where credit is due, and I don’t mind yielding when someone else has a better plan. If you’ve done well, I’m going to let you know about it. If it’s saved me time, then I’ll probably even buy you a pint.

That said, if your shit sucks I’m going to drop the cruel hammer of reality on your fragile ego.

I Never Less Than Three’d You

I contract for a place with a problem. Everyone happily works away like little beavers, and there is little interpersonal conflict. The problem is that nobody will ever say “Hey. Your shit is fucked. Fix it”. People are being too nice. It means problems are identified and instead of hurting someone’s ego by asking them for a fix, the issue is worked around. This leads to a great big back-slapping circle-jerk bukkake session, an architectural disaster. You do not talk about Fail Club.

If your server is taking data from 10Gbps fiber link and stuffing it down a low bandwidth connection to a client, then not having rate limiting is fail. Sending “only the changes” when you are talking analogue sensors means “sending shit constantly”. Maybe I’m just “pessimistic”, or just maybe people calling themselves a “Software Engineer” should understand the fucking concept of “less-than”.

Burn the heretic!

Their biggest problem is that their previous version worked – before they had the fiber link, it was 1200cps serial. It worked back then and I’m just being pessimistic. Or, see how my crazy “less-than” theory is holding up here?

This is only the beginning of the fail. Server dropping subscriptions? Add a resubscribomatic to the client. Patch, patch, and patch again. 30% of the codebase is dedicated to working around issues in or fixing issues in other components. The look of horror on peoples faces when I say “Welp, I guess Barry is just going to have to fix the Frobulator” is hilarious. They all hate me.

Solutions? Come up with a terrible design, pass it out for review. Anyone that claims to be happy with it should be immediately fired. Encourage a productive working environment by encouraging your staff to grow a pair of goddamn balls. Problem solved.