Commercial and technical dilemna, death and the structural bug!

Hello dear readers, in fact I don't know how many you are. But you don't know who I am, and this is pure justice ;-)

I had a funny dream last nigth... you think this man is crazy and uncurable, you may be true, but no more than you and I'll give you the proof !

This dream was interesting because it was a common situation in modern companies who make benefits out of "high tech". And as we lack myths that fit the "modern" intellect, I decided to make one of it.

One upon a time there was a commercial manager that wanted to agree with the programmer team about the status of bugs in software, and the possibility to shorten the delay between the discovery of the bug and their resolution. Of course, the whole company was challenged and the bonus and carreer of all individuals was depending on the rules that were going to be defined, and also depending on their capacity to follow them, unless the story wouldn't have any interest at all !

It was impossible for them to agree. First, the commercial team wanted the speed resolution of bugs to be accelerated regardless of the complexity of the bugs. Quickly programmers and commercial began to agree somewhat that there was different levels of complexity, and that sometimes the delay would be longer. But after a while, a dead lock occured. Experimented programmers refused to make a clear definition of what is an easy bug, and experimented commercials abandonned the discussion with a vague feeling of fatality. I realized suddenly the source of the misunderstanding, but the meeting was closed, because the passion had raised too high and nobody wanted to continue.

The more complex a bug is, the more time programmers take to discover it, and the longest is the life time of the bug. There are some particular bugs that are never correctly solved, except if the whole underlying system or hardware is fully redesigned. I call them "structural bugs". When such a bug occurs, its lifetime is the lifetime of the underlying technology, because the cost for solving it is unacceptable by commercial people, or it would break down the usability of the product. And every experimented programmer have met this situation one day. Before such a bug falls into the responsability of a real recognized expert that can correctly explain its status, many people will have tried one after the other to solve the unsolvable and had made nightmares out of it. So in fact, many programmers have experienced such a situation with various levels of criticity or complexity depending of their own knowledge and role.

This is what I call the programmers trauma. End users have a similar feeling when they reach the limits of their technological gadgets, or when they suffer from strutural bugs, some of their desires never being satisfied by the product they have chosen.

It is only the end of the commercial life of the product that will allow a new one to be designed, the structural bugs to be cleared out, and a new perfect software to be dreamed. Marketing people have the role to make people believe that the next generation product will be natively "trauma free" with no structural bugs.

In my dream there was a guy who accepted to listen to me after the meeting but he smile to me gently, considering defeatively that nobody would never accepted to hear the truth, each one having a vital pression of productivity in their work. (and you know that it's true, don't you ?).

This is the high point : there is a link between the vital problematic and the commercial products structural bugs. Only the death can make evolution possible. Replacement of old products by new products, old generations by new generations.

Everybody lives with the contradiction of the company meeting myth in its mind : our personality is based on the feeling of eternity and there are some main structural bugs that reveal themselves when time is passing. This is why such meetings can become really tragic in fact ! And the company roles are represented in our inner psychological world (commercial, programmer, expert, marketing, publiscist end user, ...), each one having a preferred one in normal life.

This preferred role is the one that helps us the best to believe that death will never occur. The ultimate expert is the one that can drop the fear of death and accept both the impermanence of all things and is able to downgrade the personality to a practical tool to enjoy life better.

Several considerations can follow :

1. This is why we are all fools. I promised to give you the proof !
2. This is one of the hidden reasons of the success of consumption society and the underlying companies organization : it creates scenes where the personal drama can identify itself and try to exorcise.
3. We try unconsciously to hide our real existential condition to our children, because we want them to have a strong personality that will not suffer, and more obscurely, because we want them to believe in us, and also because the lie gives us some power over them (see previous post about generations).

So :
1. Accept that you are a fool,
2. Remember that the mechanism of the consumption society will never help you,
3. Reconciliate with your mortal condition so that your children won't be fooled too much.

Next step, it could be interesting to clarify how your preferred role intricates with you fear... If you dare ! So you'd become an expert too ;-))