Indo Pak War - A Slightly Different Perspective

Read this and this. Whether one agrees with the author's (admittedly zany) ideas, these articles are a good counterweight to the hyperbole laden "patriotic" articles often found in the Indian Press.

But Martin, Enterprise Software IS Boring

Martin Fowler writes about Customer Affinity, a factor he believes distinguishes a good enterprise developer from a bad one. So far,so good.

He says "I've often heard it said that enterprise software is boring, just shuffling data around, that people of talent will do "real" software that requires fancy algorithms, hardware hacks, or plenty of math."

This is almost exactly what I say.(Just remove the quotes around "real" ;-) ).

Martin goes on to disagree with this idea (which is fine) but then he says "I feel that this usually happens due to a lack of customer affinity." And this is where I disagree.

People who work on things like compilers and hardware hacks and "tough" algorithmic problems can have customers, just as the enterprise folks do. I know I have. The compiler I am writing now has a customer. The massively parallel neural network classifier framework I wrote a couple of years ago had a customer. The telecom fraud detection classifier cluster I worked on last year (along with some other talented programmers) is being used by a company which is very business (and customer) oriented. So the idea that a "customer" (and thus customer affinity) is restricted only to those folks who write database backed web apps is simply not true.

Math/algorithms/hardware hacks and the presence or absence of a "customer" (and thus, customer affinity) are orthogonal (you know, two axes at 90 degrees to each other) issues.

With the customer issue out of the way, let us examine the core issue - the notion that talented developers would prefer to do stuff like compilers and algorithms instead of a business app (by which I mean something like automating the loan disbursal processes of a bank).

The best way to get a sense of the truth is to examine the (desired) flow of people in both directions. I know dozens of people who are very very good at writing business software who yearn wistfully for a job doing "plumbing" like compilers and tcp/ip stacks, but I've never yet seen someone who is very very good at writing a compiler or operating system (and can make money doing so) desperately trying to get back to the world of banking software. A programmer might code enterprise apps for money, but at night, at home, he'll still hack on a compiler.

It's kind of a "Berlin Wall" effect. In the days of the cold war, to cut through the propoganda of whether Communism was better than Capitalism , all you had to do was to observe in which direction people were trying to breach the Berlin Wall. Hundreds of people risked their lives to cross from the East to the West but practically no one went the other way. Of course this could just mean that the folks didn't appreciate the virtues of people's power and the harangues of the comissars but I somehow doubt it.

To see whether living in India is better than living In Bangladesh (or whether living in the United States is better than living in India) look at who is trying to cross the barriers and in which direction.

Economic Theory suggests another way of finding an answer. Suppose you were offered say 10,000$ a month for say 2 years, to develop the best business app you can imagine and say, 8000 $ a month, for the same two years to work on the best systems/research project you can imagine. Which one would you choose? Now invert the payment for each type of work. Change the amounts till you can't decide one way or another and your preference for either job is equal. Finding this point of indifference (actually it is an "indifference curve") will teach you about your preference for "enterprise over systems". I believe that while individuals will choose many possible points as their "points of indifference" on that curve, a majority of the most talented debvelopers would prefer a lower pay for a good systems/research project in preference to an enterprise project, no matter how interesting. And to most developers, an enterprise project becomes interesting to the degree it needs "tough programming" skills (massively scalable databases say.. there is a good reason Amazon and Google emphasize algorithms , maths and other "plumbing" skills in their interviews and an equally good reason why a Wipro or a TCS doesn't bother testing for these skills).

The widespread (though not universal) preference of the very best software developers for "plumbing" over "enterprise" holds even inside Thoughtworks (where Martin works and where I once worked). I know dozens of Thoughtworkers who'd prefer to work in "core tech". While I was working for TW, the CEO,Roy Singham, periodically raised the idea of venturing into embedded and other non enterprise software and a large majority of developers (which invariably included most of the best devs) wanted this to happen. Sadly, this never actually came to pass.

A good number of thoughtworkers do business software to put bread on the table, or while working towards being good enough to write "plumbing", but in their heart, they yearn to hack a kernel or program a robot. (Another group of people dream about starting their own web appp companies). For most of these folks tomorrow never quite arrives, but some of the most "businessy" developers in Thoughtworks dream of writing game engines one day or learning deep math vodoo or earning an MS or PhD. And good people have left TW for all these reasons. And if this is the situation at arguably the best enterprise app development company (at least in the "consultants" subspace) one can imagine the situation in "lesser" companies.

The programmer who has the ability to develop business software and "plumbing" software and chooses to do business app development is so rare as to be almost non existent. Of course, most business app dev types are in no condition to even contemplate writing "hard stuff" but that is a topic for another day.

Paul Graham (admittedly a biased source) says (emphasis mine),

"It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones....Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.

The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random. [3] So it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It's more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers."

Strangely enough, I heard Martin talk about the same concept (from a more positive view point, of course) when he last spoke in Bangalore. He explained how much of the complexity of business software is essentially arbitrary - how an arcane union regulation about paying overtime for one man going bear hunting on Thanksgiving can wreck the beauty of a software architecture. Martin said that this is what is fascinating about business software. But he and Paul essentially agree about business software being about arbitrariness. It is a strange sense of aesthetics that finds beauty in arbitrariness, but who am I to say it isn't valid?

Modulo these ideas, I agree with a lot of what Martin says in his blog post. The most significant sentence is

"The real intellectual challenge of business software is figuring out where what the real contribution of software can be to a business. You need both good technical and business knowledge to find that."

This is so true it needs repeating. And I have said this before.To write good banking sofwtare, for e.g. you need a deep knowledge of banking AND (say) the j2ee stack. Unfortunately the "projects and consultants" part of business software development doesn't quite work this way. I will go out on a limb here and say that software consulting companies *in general* (with the rare honorable exception blah blah ) have "business analysts" who are not quite good enough to be managers in the enterprises they consult for and "developers" who are not quite good enough to be "hackers" (in the Paul Graham sense).

Of course factoring in "outsourcing" makes the picture worse. By the time a typical business app project comes to India, most, if not all of the vital decisions have been made and the project moves offshore only to take advantage of low cost programmers, no matter what the company propoganda says about "worldwide talent", so at least in India this kind of "figuring out" is almost non existent and is replaced by an endless grind churning out jsp pages or database tables or whatever. It is hard to figure out the contribution of your software to people and businesses located half a world away, no matter how many "distributed agilists" or "offshore business analysts" you throw into the equation.

This is true for non businessy software also,though to a much lesser degree. The kind of work outsourced to India is still the non essential "grind" type (though often way less boring than their "enterprise" equivalents). The core of Oracle's database software for .e.g. is not designed or implemented in India. Neither is the core of Yahoo's multiple software offerings - the maintenance is, development is not. And contary to what many Indians say, this is NOT about the "greedy white man's" exploiting the cheap brown skins. You need to do hard things and prove yourself before you are taken seriously. Otherwise people WILL see you as cheap drone workers. That's just the way of the world).

And I say this as someone who is deeply interested in business. T'is not that I loved business less but I loved programming more :-).I'd rather read code than abusiness magazine but I prefer a business magazine to say, fashion news. I actually LIKE reading about new business models. I read every issue of The Harvard Business Review (thanks Mack) and have dozens of businessy books on my book shelf along with all the technical books. (I gave away all (300 + books) of my J2EE/dotNet/agile/enterpise dev type book collection , but that is a different story). I am working through books on finance and investing and logistics. I have friends who did their MBA in Corporate Strategy from Dartmouth or are studying in Harvard (or plan to do so). I have friends who work for McKinsey, and Bain and Co, and Booz and Allen, and Lehman Brothers. If I were 10 years younger (and thus had a few extra years to live), I'd probably do an MBA myself. And of course I have spent 10 years (too long, oh, too long) doing "enterprise" software. In my experience (which could turn out to be atypical),the "plumbing" software is way tougher and waaaaay more intellectually meaningful than enterprise software, even of the hardest kind. I might enjoy an MBA, but I will NEVER work in the outsourced business app development industry again even if I have to starve on the streets of Bangalore. I'll kill myself first. So, yeah I am prejudiced. :-). Take everything I say with appropriate dosages of salt.

And just so I am clear, I do NOT think Martin is deliberately obfuscating issues. I think Martin is the rare individual who actually chooses enterprise software over systems software and is lucky enough to consistently find himself working with the best minds and in a position to figure out the business impact of the code he writes. This is very different from the position of the average "coding body", especially when he is selected more for being cheap than because he knows anything useful ("worldwide talent", remember :-) ).

Btw, Martin's use of the word "plumbing" is not used in a derogatory sense (though I've seen some pseudo "hackers" take it that way, especially since the word makes a not-so-occasional appearnce in many of his speeches) but more in the sense of "infrastructure". If you are such a "hacker" offended by the use of the term, substitute "infrastructure" for "plumbing" in his article. That takes the blue collar imagery and sting out of that particular word, fwiw.

I think Martin has very many valuable things to say. I just think he is slightly off base in this blog post and so I respectfully disagree with some of his conclusions.

But then again, it could all be me being crazy. Maybe enterprise software is really as fascinating as systems software, and writing a banking or leasing or insurance app really as interesting as writing a compiler or operating system.(and Unicorns exist , and pigs can fly).

Hmmmm. Maybe. Meanwhile I'm halfway under the wall and have to come up on the other side before dawn. Back to digging.

[Politics] Tip Of The Hat To Israel

I like to think I am "centrist" when it comes to politics and that the world has shades of grey and is not all black and white.

However, in the present Israel/Lebanon-Hezbollah conflict, I sympathize with Israel.

The key characteristic of a nation is that it has (or should have) a monopoly of violence within its borders. As far as I can make out, the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon was conditional on the *state* of Lebanon reigning in the Hezbollah.

If the Lebanese turn over a chunk of their territory to murdering fanatics trying to impose an archaic religious code on the rest of the world, they can't cry foul when people who lose patience with Allah's foot soldiers invade that territory. Either they control the territory, in which case they should be in control of their borders, not an Islamic militia. Alternatively they don't control it, in which case they have no business screaming about Israeli agression or invasion.

The Israelis, could in an ideal world, have shown a more nuanced approach, but I guess their patience has its limits.

this blog entry says it best.

Missing Comments Fixed

For some strange reason, some comments did not make it through to my mail account and were piling up in the blogger bin. Some of them were excellent (Mujib , S and some "anonymii" ) and have been approved while a few (all anonymous :-D) along the lines of "I hope you burn in hell, Pagan Devil Worshipper" "U R suXorz" etc have been deleted.

The latter are particularly interesting. I can't imagine someone having a life so empty that they first read a blog they don't like and then laboriously compose a "hate comment" and post it with the full knowledge that it will be deleted with a single mouseclick. Oh well, it takes all kinds to make a world, I guess! I get a laugh out of these outbursts of venom, so please keep sending them.

Apologies to those whose comments were in limbo. As to the person who wanted the comments to "popup" rather than be listed in the permalink page, sorry about that, but *I* hate popups. Still if enough readers want popups, I'll re consider the decision.

That ends the administrivia announcement. Have a nice day.

Status Update aka Thank You for the job offers

In my last post, I wrote

"Aaargh! someone give me a job in the USA (or even better, an admission into a good PhD program) please! I give up on this country!"

A few readers (4 in all) were kind enough to write in with job offers in the USA! Nice! Even better, no one offered me an "enterprise" job. Two were in AI (related) companies and two in compilers.One of those jobs is veeeeery tempting.

Must-resist-temptation :-)

Thank you all. I've written to all of you individually.

That reminds me.Here is a long overdue status update.

I will be working on the "compiler project" (this needs a good name) till about the middle of November.

Then it looks like I will be working with KD building some stuff for his startup. KD and I think very differently so expect some fireworks. He will probably throw me out of the company the very first day :-)

My decision to leave India in 2007 is unchanged. I plan to try for a PhD rather than a job. That way I don't have to play the "H1 game" and sell myself into wage slavery immediately:-). Having said that, one of the job offers had a "higher education allowance" perk.

Hmmmmmm.

Update: The "blogspot ban" is partially removed. The "dangerous" sites are still blocked. Most of them are terrible and not worth reading (Of course I read them all. The best way to get people to do something is to forbid them to do so!). The only (somewhat) interesting nugget was Nathuram Godse (Gandhi's assassin)'s speech from the dock. If the Intelligence Bureau thinks these sites are going to "incite violence" they need their heads examined.

Indians can't see this blog entry

because some f##$$$%%^ ing bureaucrat in the Indian Government has mandated that ISPs block access to blogspot.

If I wanted to live under a dictatorial government that condones this crap. I'd go and live in Iran. Or North Korea.

The bureaucrats responsible (and the weaselly ISP bosses who go along) should be lined up against the nearest wall and shot! I don't pay taxes to have my freedoms taken away by you stupid bastards.

Blogger.com is still accessible so I can post stuff using the managements screens [roll eyes] but I can't read any blogs on blogpsot through my browser.

What's next? Book Burning?

Aaargh! someone give me a job in the USA (or even better, an admission into a good PhD program) please! I give up on this country!

I am fed up with the arbitrariness of life in India. For 10 years I refused to go or work abroad because I wanted to live and work in India. But I'll be damned if I support a systems that actively pits nations people against themselves (with caste based reservation - read discrimination - poised to entrench itself in the private industry) and does crazy things in the name of "national security" (like block blogspot). On one side we have the ruling Indian National Congress plus their traitorous Communist Allies and on the other we have religious fanatics led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, who are in the opposition.

I'd rather live as a janitor in a country where citizenship means something than in slowly decaying "world's largest democracy". Any "patriotism" or "national security" that is fragile enough to be destroyed by some s.o.b nutcase putting up an "anti Indian " blog on blogpsot (I offer a bet at ten to one odds that this will be the reason trotted out. Alternatively someone in the government is trying to shake down google) is not worth preserving anyway.

I used to be proud to be Indian. Now I am ashamed.

If I can't get into a decent PhD program this year I'm going to be one of the "cheap brown ill paid programmer doing crap work and desperate for a green card" types in the USA. Or get on a boat and f#%^ing ROW to the West. Anything to get out, so help me God.

Update: The Indian Government has blocked blogspot because "some terrorists are using blogs to communicate". I'm speechless.

Update: How to by pass the ban

Algorithmics In The Dark Compiler Alley

My upcoming "write a compiler" project is about writing a industrial strength compiler. The good news is that it is wonderful to be in a position where you get paid to do something like this (vs say, writing yet another J2EE/dotNet/framework du jour [something that starts with "R"? :-P] "enterprise app"). The bad news is that I have to deliver a 2 person year project in about 6 person months ( 1 person - Yours Truly - and about 6 months starting in August).

One way to "shrink" such a project is to use powerful languages. A compiler, while quite complex, has very few library dependencies. What this means is that you can write a compiler in any language you want and not sacrifice any advantages while doing so. The converse of this is that one can abandon brain dead languages like say, Java, and use something truly powerful, like say, Haskell.

I've spent the last few weeks writing 'compiler like' bits and pieces in various languages, and have short listed 3 - Lisp, Scheme, and Haskell. Besides their power, these languages have another feature in common - none of them have an open source, batteries included IDE. (And "no IDE" implies "use emacs". And the sheer customizability of emacs is exhilarating but more on that in another post).

An interesting (and unexpected) development is that evaluating alternative designs calls for a degree of algorithmic sophistication. For example, in the code generation phase of the compiler the decision to use an RTL (gcc's intermediate language)clone vs (say) a BURS (bottom up rewriting system) based graph traversal needs the ability to (mathematically) analyse the competing code gen algorithms and the trade offs of each. The key to getting a grip on BURS, for e.g., is to understand Dynamic Programming. More interestingly, there is often a need to augment an existing algorithm or data structure to accomodate application specific constraints. The paradigm embodied by the language under consideration determines the "shape" of the runtime. The demands of the runtime and the level of optimization required determines the appropriateness of a particular code gen algorithm, which in turn influences the transformations required on the abstract syntax tree, and so on.

There aren't too many books which teach you to design algorithms and data structures (vs memorizing a few standard ones). Of course if you are an "enterprise" programmer, you don't need any of this and can get by with simple lists and hashtables provided by your language's libraries. But if you (intend to) work in more challenging (and, if I may say so, interesting) domains, learn to analyze and design algorithms (and data structures). It might even help you get an interesting and satisfying job. Companies like Google and Amazon have very algorithmics heavy interviews. As Cormen et al say in Introduction To Algorithms (the best book ever written on Algorithms and Data Structures),

"Having a solid base of algorithmic knowledge and technique is one characteristic that separates the truly skilled programmers from the novices. With modern computing technology, you can acccomplish some tasks without knowing much about algorithms, but with a good background in algorithms, you can do much, much more)".

Another interesting, though less comprehensive and more lightweight textbook is The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skiena. It is more of a complement to Cormen and Rivest than a substitute and has a distinctive writing style. Every chapter has an accompanying "war story", drawn from the author's extensive consulting experience, where he reports how he applied the technique taught in the chapter to solve a real world problem or optimize (sometimes in a very dramatic fashion) an inefficient solution. Imagine - algorithmics consulting - I guess they won't be outsourcing those jobs anytime soon :-D.

The one "problem" with the Cormen and Rivest book is that it calls for a certain level of mathematical sophistication on the part of the student. This is unavoidable in a book that avoids a "cookbook of algorithms" approach and tries to teach how to design new algorithms and adapt existing ones to teh problem space. So, before you buy this book ( and it IS a book that should be on every programmer's bookshelf) be sure to learn basic discrete mathematics, probability, linear algebra and set theory. Working through Concrete Mathematics really helps. The effort will repay itself a thousand fold.

But be warned. Once you taste the power of algorithms you'll never be able to go back to your "build (or even worse, maintain) yet another Visual Blub dotNet banking app in Bangalore" day job. On the other hand, you may find that programming is challenging, meaningful, and above all, fun. Red Pill or Blue? :-)

My blog disappeared!

A few hours ago my blog began to turn up with an empty page! No content visible(but the posta re still visible form the admin interface). Hopefully the folks at blogger will fix this soon.

This is atest post to see if creating anew post will recover the blog! (or at least update the atom/rss feeds)

It has reappeared! But have lost all the minor tweaks like my blogroll. Aaaaaargh!!!! Oh well I am too busy now to do any template hacking. Fwiw, the mailing list reveals that many people are having this problem. Google/Blogpsot seems to lose your template once every so many updates (Java threads running amok methinks. Or some el crappo database like mysql screwingup?

The best defence is to maintain a copy of your template somewhere (and your posts too if you value them enough. I don't :-) ).