“Software is Easy, People are Hard”

It’s (not so?) surprising how contentious the above statement can get. The responses to it exists on a spectrum, with one end consisting of Libertarian-types who hate the very concept of Management, and the other end consisting of Dictatorial ass-hats who are convinced that things would be just fine if only people did exactly what they were supposed to in the project plan!!!

The thing though, is that there is an element of truth in the above statement, but, as with all things, semantics matter.
Let’s break “Software” into two categories

• • Engineering: The process of finding the appropriate solution to the problem at hand. Frequently, this also involves figuring out what the problem is in the first place!
• • Coding: Implementing the solution that was identified in the Engineeringstep above.

When broken out like this, Coding is “hard” in the sense that there is skill involved. It may take years — or 10,000 hours — to become great at this, but it is still largely a factor of time. 

Engineering, on the other hand, is just plain hard! A huge chunk of becoming a good engineer consists of solving multiple problems in this and other fields, in learning formal methods and disciplines that help identify solution spaces, in avoiding rabbit-holes, and, frankly, by screwing up a lot (we do learn better from our mistakes!)

That said, the vast majority of the Engineering problems that we deal with tend to be somewhat straight-forward. Oh, we’d like to think that we spend our time implementing a formal verifier for a payment protocol, but the reality is that most of us are trying to figure out how to get the stupid CSS element to shift a wee bit to the left .

Let’s turn this around though. Consider what it takes to get a bunch of Engineers and Coders to work together towards a common goal. In a perfectly rational world, this would be quite straightforward, but hey, this is not that world. You need to

• • Motivate each of them individually. Some of them respond to one or more of the Cardinal Sins (Lust, Greed, Envy, etc.) while others prefer Virtues (Kindness, Patience, Diligence, etc.
• • Motivate them as a group. Ensure that the ones that need interactions get them, the ones that don’t are closeted away, that the over-bearing ones don’t impose their wills on everybody else, etc. All these interactions result in their own feedback loops, which can affect what motivates the individuals (“Why does Bob get to lead that component? Alice is better suited! Now I’m depressed and am going to sulk”)

Unfortunately, unlike herding cats, this is an exercise that never ends. Whats more, the thing to remember is that these are humans that we are talking about. Humans, whose wants, needs, desires, etc. change constantly. Regardless of the management methodology you espouse — dictatorial vs nurturing — you still need to know and deal with these motivations to be able to succeed. (Unless, of course, people are cannon-fodder to you, in which case please go away, I have no time for you)

So yeah, given the above semantics, Software is Easy, People are Hard.