Comment by NitpickLawyer

4 days ago

> there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results. > Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care.

Isn't that pretty much what the US military does? They take in "dumb" teens + docs + processes and get whatever it is they need out of this? It's also cheap (compared w/ industry). And by the end of the exercise the "dumb" teens become skilled in their own niche, some of them highly skilled (see nuclear specialists, ATCs, pilots, navigators, managers, procurement, etc.)

The military processes are at the base of lots of organisational stuff we have in software dev and business as well (agile, scrum, ooda, etc)

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NitpickLawyer

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WJW  4 days ago

Where do you get the idea that this is cheap? Militaries are somewhat famous for being incredible money sinks. They need incredibly specific skills that are not really taught in the civilian world. This means the military needs to train everyone at its own cost. So while the input might be "cheap, unskilled idiots", there is then a significant expense to turn them into expensive skilled non-idiots before they are ready for duty.

As someone who worked inside the military for 14 years, it is also quite a stretch to say they consistently get "great" results tbh.

gnat  4 days ago

I feel like you're saying that education (as practiced by the US military) is a somewhat reliable process for taking unskilled people and making them skilled. I agree.

The US Military have admissions criteria. They bounce people out in Basic Training and in every other part of training. Not everyone gets to be an ATC, a pilot, or a nuclear specialist. Air Traffic Control turns out not to be a process you can put an unskilled person into. It requires training and careful integration, and once you have a skilled person with many hours invested in them, perhaps you can let them direct traffic.

Training isn't a magic process that takes unskilled people who don't care and delivers great results every time. The equivalent in our world would be "I'll hire cheap people who don't know how to program, put them through a Bootcamp process, and then I'll have great programmers." That didn't work.

I am trying to say that: every version of programming where there's been The Process You Just Have To Follow (from Jackson Structured Design) has failed significantly and hasn't been a substitute for hiring smart people who care. If someone came to me with a business plan that was "hire mediocre people who don't care, and we'll achieve great results because of My Process", I'd be veeeeery skeptical indeed.

aleph_minus_one  4 days ago

> The military processes are at the base of lots of organisational stuff we have in software dev and business as well (agile, scrum [...])

The Agile Manifesto was exactly the counter-manifesto to this, and thus any methodology that calls itself agile (e.g. Scrum) is:

Agile Manifesto

> https://agilemanifesto.org/

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

> https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

  • jerf  4 days ago

    "Scrum" isn't really "Agile", though. Maybe someone developed it through a truly Agile process, but then they froze it and held it up as an unchanged ideal and started down the oh-so-appealing road of telling anyone that finds it doesn't work for them that it's because they weren't doing it right.

    I find myself having to distinguish between what I call "Real Agile" and Scrum quite a bit, because Scrum is exactly the sort of thing that Real Agile was a reaction against.

    I've raided Scrum for ideas in my agile processes, but I would never rigidly do exactly it.

    • SAI_Peregrinus  4 days ago

      Royce's original "Waterfall" paper[1] is significantly more iterative & agile than Scrum! It's outdated since at the time (1970) programming was done mostly on paper & then run later on a mainframe or special-purpose computer, but many of the core ideas still hold true for modern programming environments.

      Of course many of the organizations that claimed to be implementing Waterfall omitted the iterative steps, then wondered why it didn't work. That also happens with "Agile" processes. Sticking to the waterfall analogy, it's like if you stopped the evaporation & precipitation cycle that refills the upstream aquifer & wondered why the waterfall stopped flowing!

      [1] https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf