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"Excellent" engineering management for sure. Politically adept, sounds right to both business and technical minded folks. Sensible. And doomed. > However, it’s

by fargle 5y ago

"Excellent" engineering management for sure. Politically adept, sounds right to both business and technical minded folks. Sensible. And doomed. > However, it’s not the kind of thing where we could hire a journeyman Java programmer off the street, and give it to him or her and and have that person be able to really understand what it was doing A kind of false equivalency. You can't hire a "journeyman (any) programmer off the street" and have them understand the IMF or ALC. Or any complex app. > IRS, he said, in effect would have replaced code it can still deal with, with code no one could So don't do that. Keep the IMF source code and translate it or run on an interpreter. But - they don't want to do that! They are just beating around the bush saying they want a clean-sheet design. OK, then say that. From the article: > teams identify what it’s doing and document the rules. Then it gets passed to an architecture and design team that includes "very senior Java developers" Doomed. You could take the existing code, refactor it a piece at a time into more procedural code in a higher level language and make it more maintainable. If you try to reverse from assembler into OOA/OOD style requirements and patterns in one step and then implement it top-down. Everything by committee. Doomed.

wins32767 5y ago
> A kind of false equivalency. You can't hire a "journeyman (any) programmer off the street" and have them understand the IMF or ALC. Or any complex app. That's true, but it's way easier to hire people to write in a language that's widely used and has other career opportunities. A language on life support isn't going to be attractive to the vast majority of programmers and with government pay so much lower than industry, low pay + dead end skills makes it very hard to hire. It's not like the engineering leader in charge of this project can just go ask for more budget to hire some rockstar engineers to knock this out, they're stuck with congressionally defined pay scales. So what they're doing is building their architecture and process around their organizational constraints. That's really good engineering management.
- fargle 5y ago
  Oh, I agree it's good to have picked a modern language. And yes, I agree with doing it in a proper idiomatic style as opposed to java-in-name-only-basically-still-assembly. But the way they made the argument was disingenuous, I suspect expertly political. No way could they hire engineers "off the street" and understand it right away, that's BS. They say that Wang's method couldn't do this, but slyly imply theirs can. That's what's false. I think this is politics for "if we say clean-sheet re-implementation it sounds scary". The problem is that it is and should be scary and instead of papering over it with cleverly packaged and admirable goals, they should come up with a real plan to do it. That's what makes me think, well excellent politics and strategy, but not-so-expert engineering and technical management.

by fargle 5y ago

wins32767 5y ago

> A kind of false equivalency. You can't hire a "journeyman (any) programmer off the street" and have them understand the IMF or ALC. Or any complex app. That's true, but it's way easier to hire people to write in a language that's widely used and has other career opportunities. A language on life support isn't going to be attractive to the vast majority of programmers and with government pay so much lower than industry, low pay + dead end skills makes it very hard to hire. It's not like the engineering leader in charge of this project can just go ask for more budget to hire some rockstar engineers to knock this out, they're stuck with congressionally defined pay scales. So what they're doing is building their architecture and process around their organizational constraints. That's really good engineering management.

fargle 5y ago
Oh, I agree it's good to have picked a modern language. And yes, I agree with doing it in a proper idiomatic style as opposed to java-in-name-only-basically-still-assembly. But the way they made the argument was disingenuous, I suspect expertly political. No way could they hire engineers "off the street" and understand it right away, that's BS. They say that Wang's method couldn't do this, but slyly imply theirs can. That's what's false. I think this is politics for "if we say clean-sheet re-implementation it sounds scary". The problem is that it is and should be scary and instead of papering over it with cleverly packaged and admirable goals, they should come up with a real plan to do it. That's what makes me think, well excellent politics and strategy, but not-so-expert engineering and technical management.