We’ve all seen movies where some protagonist hacker has a gun to his head, whether figuratively or literally. He is told by the antagonist that he has 30 seconds to “hack the mainframe” or “break into the CIA central computer” or whatever it is. He objects, but then manages to get in just before someone is shot. Those of us who work in technology know that this kind of thing is purely fiction. Take another example: think back to all those Star Trek episodes where the captain asks the engineer to do something. The engineer, possibly in a heavy Scottish accent tells the captain, “Aye, it’ll take me four hours.” The captain says something like, “you’ve got two.” Then, of course, the engineer gets it done in two, and just in the nick of time. Apparently people who write scripts in Hollywood are not very good at estimation! And we all know that this is not how things ACTUALLY work, right? Right?
I’m beginning to wonder if some people, particularly non-technical managers of technical folks aren’t really able to separate fact from fiction. Okay, here’s the facts of the matter:
1. Some things actually do take time! Some things can’t be done faster just because we WANT them to be done faster. This is particularly true of creative efforts. When we build software, there is a certain amount of the work that is creative in nature. No amount of desire can make certain work go faster. Take for example painting. If you need to paint a room, there’s not much creative work involved. And if you put 10 painters in the room, they can get the room covered in a fresh coat of paint faster than 1 painter could. But that is very rarely what software development is like. It is much more akin to a painter who is commissioned to paint a portrait. This is a very different kind of painting. Adding more painters to the task does not necessarily make it go faster. It might actually make it take longer and we’d all be suspicious of the quality of the outcome.
2. You can’t know how long something is going to take until you figure out WHAT it is that you have to do and HOW you are going to do it. And this in itself takes time. So the accurate estimate comes only AFTER a significant amount of work is done.
3. In the real world, our performance is not just measured by what we get done. We are often measured by the accuracy of our estimates. In this regard, the protagonists mentioned earlier would not do so well. And in reality, things usually take much longer than is estimated. They very rarely take less time.
4. Most technical people work better and faster when they are trusted and given some amount of latitude. The kind of movie-management where the hacker has a gun to his head is purely fiction. Most of us would not even be able to type three words if we had a gun to our heads. The idea that if pressure is applied, the effort will go faster is utter hog wash. It is no substitution for real motivation and real management.
These are the facts as I see them. And despite the overwhelming amount of literature that is out there to support these ideas, it is still an alarmingly frequent thing to run into the movie-management philosophy. I hear about it all the time and regularly run into it myself. It is a shame! As a whole, technology professionals could probably be much more productive if management didn’t take their cues from Hollywood.