My Thinking is NOT for Sale

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Its 2 o’clock in the morning and I am finding I cannot sleep. A thought that is so off the wall has been gripping my mind for a while now and I am finding it more and more relevant to what I have seen happen during my career as a programmer.

The title is worth restating:

My Thinking is NOT for Sale

This is not so much a shouted response to all those times that good technical effort has been driven carelessly under the steamroller of prevailing economic needs – usually those of the money swallowing monsters that are most companies – than it is a statement of an underlying truth, if only I can express it well enough and in shorter sentences. So here goes…

If you pay for software you will not get what you need. In fact you CANNOT buy software because it is not a finished product. The current economic model we have just does not fit and I believe this is why there is so much trouble in this area.

What is important about good software development?

Over my 30 odd years of work the primary creative and energizing point has been the interaction between the developer and the actual user as a system has come into being. The best of it has been the conversation between the two as they navigate the area of the user’s needs. If the developer is skilled, both technically and personally, they help facilitate both parties in mapping an unknown area, probably only vaguely expressed in the “wants” that the user can currently identify.

This is a conversation of human discovery in thinking.

It is priceless.

It is a gift.

It is a Free process. Capital F.

It cannot be bought.
It cannot be sold.
It is NOT a product.

It only makes sense if the effort is freely given by the developer. The inner costs of doing this are so high that it requires a high level of motivation that can ONLY be internal. To try and shoehorn it into our current ways of thinking about money devalues the process and I think this is what is underlying the problems I have seen happen many times.

The kicker here is that it is likely that it can only be funded by gift money. That means that there can be NO LINK between the funding and the final “product”. I use quotes because that word is a misnomer of what is actually going on.

Unrealistic?

Just go and read a book called Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson and you will see how the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study was funded by donation. This was where John von Neumann worked and developed the architecture that underlies modern computers.

The picture of how the whole current edifice of modern computing was birthed from gift money just blows me away. I find my thinking so bound up in the capitalist model that to separate the resource – i.e. the money to give time for people to think – from the product of that thinking in such a way shows up the illusion of the current funding models for such work.

Is that enough to allow you to see it? Truly?
If you can then maybe you might understand why I am having trouble sleeping because in my tossing and turning my feelings tell me it could change everything…

Or maybe this is all just a dream and I shall be sensible when I wake up.
Hmmmm.

BOUNDARY STORIES 7 : True Colours

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“The look in a lover’s eyes
Mask dropped – no disguise
But is the soul truly awake?
Seeing the other as they really are – with the inevitable scar?

It had been one year since the last note.

Ages.

For Edwin it had been a time of Bliss – capital B – with the girl of the gentle blue eyes and the fondness for Earl Grey tea.

But it all came crashing down. She had now left him, informing him that he had been taking her for granted and she had met this new guy…Blah…Blah…Blah.

She was right. He had fallen into a comfort zone of normality – expecting her to be around.

As he read the note his emotions fell into a dead zone that left him sitting at the bottom of the stairs with tears leaking over his cheeks and falling to dampen his shirt. His mind tried to trace out the exact shape of his sadness and of course the left-brain voice admonished him for being ‘soppy’ as it embarked on the well-worn tirade of ‘Pull yourself together man’.

As if that would do any good.

It was only in a moment of calm reflection that he was able to make sense of the words in the second half of the note.

He realized that the relationship decisions he had made in his life had been just plain wrong for him. They were, in fact, just plain wrong for others too, despite the two-faced, self-mendacious blindingly idiotic stories told by his left-brain self to convince him of their validity.

As he inwardly surveyed the barren aftermath of the violence he had inflicted upon his soul, he realized now just how prolonged the activity of self-destruction had been.

The pit of despair was deep, and it had no ready handholds for climbing out, leaving him to wait for a chance ray of inner sunshine to illuminate his squalid conditions. Getting out was a hard won process, only done by digging steps with the bare figurative hands of his soul and crawling – inch by individual feeling inch – out of his sloth.

The War was still on – and it was still Inner.

He saw how it represented a battle between life and death, no less real for being frequently dismissed because it was Subjective – capital S. The Ultimate Insult.

He could now see that he must keep the ‘Inner Eyes’ of his soul wide open if he was going to survive and stop inflicting more self-harm.

But for now he was just going to have to Cope – capital C.

© Charles Tolman 2014.