Someone Behind the Software

I enjoyed the introduction. I just picked up “The mind of the Maker” by Sayers, which Fred Brooks cites in The Mythical Man Month: “ Dorothy Sayers, in her excellent book, The Mind of the Maker, divides creative activity into three stages: the idea, the implementation, and the interaction. A book, then, or a computer, or a program comes into existence first as an ideal construct, built outside time and space, but complete in the mind of the author.” He goes on to say how the user meets the mind of the maker in the interaction: “The creation is complete when someone reads the book, uses the computer, or runs the program, thereby interacting with the mind of the maker.”

A practical problem with the intuition approach is that you have no possible way to measure two people’s intuitions against each other. In smaller organizations that’s fine, but anytime you get larger you can’t weigh the intuition of 50 people against each other

Give two different people the same problem, and you'll likely get two different solutions shaped by differing experiences and ways of thinking. I think software is an example of this manifested.

Linear is an unusual enterprise company in that it carries the consumer ethos of caring for design, and the user. This is what's absent in the product-by-checklist enterprise companies, whose economic buyer often has the same mindset.

This is everything not just software. Although a lot of what we wear, eat and drink come from factory, if it didn't, you can always tell the someone behind it. Handcrafted things easily have more value and I find myself thinking more about it only after it affected what I did daily (software). Since Industrial revolution, countless things have gone to the factories. Makes me think how little we really empathize as humans.

I wholeheartedly agree with this perspective.

As with most creative pursuits, the best things happen when there's a clear point of view.

Unfortunately, the best things aren't always the most commercially successful, because products are only a small part of what makes a company successful. I think we're seeing this play out in the software market.

JIRA might be objectively awful, but it still manages to print money!

> I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work.

Couldn't agree more. It does reflect many of the values of what an ideal product should be based on the developers' experience.

> I wonder whether some of this comes from how the work is organized. Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently, each operating a small software factory. Each change might make sense on its own, but together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.

Well... when you look at the org chart of many companies, the answer is obvious. Either there is no person responsible for anything at all, and everyone works for themselves, or there are dozens of little fiefdoms, competing for budget, staff and anything else.

But it's rare these days to have one person or even a committee that actually takes responsibility for a product as a whole and most importantly has a joint, shared and agreed-upon vision: how should the product look like, what should the product accomplish and how should the product be architected?

"You will love this next piece of software. Completely hand-made. Each line of code, each piece of the visual design, was carefully and artisinally crafted by a real human, using techniques passed down for generations between craftsmen. Some of those techniques survive in books like Code Complete and such. They don't make 'em like this anymore. "