Caffeinated Coder

A friend of mine recently revealed a super, ninja-level consultant secret to me.

Whenever his work pipeline floweth over and an unknown client approaches him with a job, he quotes them a ridiculously high rate that he assumes they would never accept.

He calls it his “Go Away” rate.

The only problem is that these clients often do accept his proposal.

In fact, my friend admitted to me with a certain amount of amusement that he has noticed that clients are actually much less likely to balk and haggle over his “Go Away” rate than they are his normal, more reasonable hourly rate.

It reminds me of a recent wine tasting experiment that I read about where subjects did a taste test for a variety of wines and the only piece of information they were given was the price.

Not surprisingly, the subjects of the experiment overwhelmingly reported enjoying the pricier wines more even though the sneaky researchers often swapped the price labels between the cheap and expensive wines.

What is surprising, however, is that according to brain scans that were conducted by researchers during the experiment, people actually did experience more pleasure while drinking the cheap wines that they thought were pricier and not simply falsifying their answers to avoid looking uncultured.

In other words, the wine actually tasted better to them simply because they believed that the wine was higher quality.

While that improves the prospects for many consultants hoping to take that 4 week vacation to the Bahamas this year, what lesson can us poor salaried corporate slaves glean from this experience?

Although most developers don’t have the luxury of being able to quote a “Go Away” rate, they often do (at least on a subconscious level) have the option of giving a “Go-Away” estimate.

Don’t believe me? Consider the following scenario.

Your boss asks you how long it takes to code a CRM system from scratch using your dream technology stack. Do you actually sit down and give him the bad news, which is that the project probably won’t be finished until after he retires or is fired for incompetence or do you succumb to the typical developer’s hopeless optimism and mumble a couple of months?

Now, what if on the same day your boss asks you to give an estimate of how long it would take to change the color of some text on a legacy PowerBuilder app?

Just to make it interesting, let’s assume that the app in question is written using an unsupported version of PowerBuilder. Moreover, the data travels through no less than 6 rube goldbergian layers, the highpoint of which is an excel worksheet written by a disgruntled accountant and a 5000 line .bat file written by the network admin who just sent to prison for embezzlement. To top it off,  it interacts with a mainframe you’ve never heard of that was scheduled to be retired a decade before you started working there.

In the second scenario, would you err on the side of optimism or would you promptly ask your HR person how much time is left before you vest and then multiply that answer by 8 in order to derive your very own “Go Away” estimate?

If you noticed yourself leaning towards the second option, then you may want to stop and consider what we’ve just learned from the wine researchers.

If you over-inflate your time estimate too much, then you may inadvertently make your boss want that change all the more.

Quote too high of a “Go Away” estimate, and you’ll soon find yourself in a product kick-off meeting heading up a team of “high quality” consultants, all of whom are charging “go-away” rates, and listening to your CIO give a sunshine up the arse speech about how the new TCII (Text-Colorization Improvement Initiative) is going to revolutionize the way you do business.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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I’m deeply sorry.

The post you are about to read is mental masturbation in its purest form.

Its sole purpose is to release the mental tension that has been distracting me and otherwise preventing me from moving on to more productive lines of thought.

Yes, you guessed it. I am about to add yet another blog post to the already tedious list of reactions to Joel Spolsky’s now infamous Duct Tape Programmer Post.

So let’s skip the cerebral foreplay and jump straight in to my naked thoughts on the matter:

1. Did Joel really think that anyone would feel flattered by the Duct-Tape metaphor? – If you’re resourceful, then you might be able to use duct-tape get a car to the closest mechanic without the aid of a tow truck or keep pipes from flooding the house until the plumber gets there. If you’re McGuyver, you might even be able to fashion a bomb out of it. However, duct-tape is not typically a tool ascribed to artists or a material associated with fundamentally important work. Even Jamie Zawinski, the hero of the post, appears to have taken it for a back-handed compliment. Many of Joel’s ideological allies in the mini-flame wars that ensued also conceded that it was an unfortunate choice of words.
2. Is Netscape truly the ideal poster child for the ‘Just F__ing Ship It’ movement? I’ll concede that Netscape deserves a prominent place in history for its role in opening the web to the masses, but its long term track record for both quality and business success is problematic at best. Early versions of the browser were widely criticized for being excessively bug laden and the company eventually went bankrupt shortly after the failed rewrite debacle that ended up causing a three year lag-time between releases. Although there’s definitely room to debate exactly who was at fault for the spectacular failure, it seems to me like Netscape wasn’t the best choice to use as a centerpiece for this argument. Perhaps it would have been better to practice the Separation of Concerns principle, one of those crazy design fads that Joel rails about, and split apart the book review thread from the other tangled ball of themes in this post. Then he could have selected a more effective example to illustrate his point.
3. Does Joel really think multiple inheritance, templates, design patterns, and COM are good examples of the “fadish programming craziness” espoused by today’s architecture astronauts? – Perhaps he just forgot to insert “Imagine you were coding back in 1994” before he went off the latest installment of his architectural astronaut rant. Then again, perhaps it has been a little too long since he’s been on the developer end of things and its time that he stick with the marketing and managerial topics that he have become his staple in recent years.
4. Does he really not see the conflict of interest in starting a “shipping over quality” crusade while at the same time selling bug tracking software – At the risk of falling victim to a circumstantial ad-hominen, Joel arguing against Test-Driven Development is a little like the proprietor of a fat person’s clothing store attacking the medical establishment for advocating diet and exercise as a way to lose weight. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been the recipient of quite so many pithy twitter jabs if he spent more time over the last few years focusing on substantive topics and less time pimping FogBugz on his blog.
5. Why the “pretty boy” disclaimer? – This was the most confusing aspect of his post for me. It felt vaguely reminiscent of an old grade school “then I woke up” ending that I used to tack on to stories when I was just too afraid to to commit to their fundamental premise. Was he backpedalling because he realized that extolling “shipping above all else” as a heroic virtue was a fundamentally flawed premise when applied to the software industry at large? Perhaps he was trying to compensate for his unfortunate choice of the duct-tape analogy and reassure Jamie that he wasn’t actually making him the butt of a subtle joke. Then again, perhaps it was just a poor choice for an ending that served only to water down an already questionable piece of writing.

Ah. So much better…

The morning after

So…Um…Joel…AWKWARD…I guess that was pretty harsh in hindsight.

Did I mention that your original book is still among my favorites and that I would probably ask you to autograph on some decidedly non-phallic-looking peripheral device if we ever met in person?

Unfortunately, I still think that your post pretty much sucked. Sorry.

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