My previous post about version control and the 80% deserves a follow-up post, mainly because it caused such an uproar, and because I don’t want people to think I’m an ignorant narcissist. Some people agreed with my post, but a huge number of people took offense at my gross generalizations. I’ve seen endless comments on my post (as well as the supporting post by Jeff Atwood) where people are either trying to decide if they’re in the “80%” or in the “20%”, or are calling foul on the pompous assertion that everyone fits into those two categories.
So let me begin by apologizing. It’s all too easy to read the post and think that my thesis is “80% of programmers are stupid mouth-breathing followers, and 20% are cool smart people like me.” Obviously, I don’t believe that. 🙂 Despite the disclaimer at the top of the post (stating that I was deliberately making “oversimplified stereotypes” to illustrate a point), the writing device wasn’t worth it; I simply offended too many people. The world is grey, of course, and every programmer is different. Particular interests don’t make you more or less “20%”, and it’s impossible to point to a team of coders within an organization and make ridiculous statements like “this team is clearly a bunch of dumb 80% people”. Nothing is ever so clear cut as that.
And yet, despite the fact that we’re all unique and beautiful snowflakes, we all have some sort of vague platonic notion of the “alpha geek”. Over time, I’ve come to my own sort of intuition about identifying the degree to which someone is an alpha-geek. I read a lot of resumes and interview a huge number of engineering candidates at work, and the main question I ask myself after the interview is: “if this person were independently wealthy and didn’t need a job at all, would they still be writing software for fun?” In other words, does the person have an inherent passion for programming as an art? That’s the sort of thing that leads to {open-source participation, writing lisp compilers, [insert geeky activity here]}. This is the basis for my super-exaggerated 80/20 metaphor in my prior post, and hopefully a less offensive way of describing it.
That said, my experience with the software industry is that the majority of people who write software for a living do not have a deep passion for the craft of programming, and don’t do it for fun. They consume and use tools written by other people, and the tools need to be really user-friendly before they get adopted. As others have pointed out, they need to just work out of the box. The main point I was trying to make was that distributed version control systems (DVCS) haven’t reached that friendliness point yet, and Subversion is only just starting to reach that level (thanks to clients like TortoiseSVN). I subscribe to a custom Google Alert about my corner of the software world, meaning that anytime Google finds a new web page that mentions Subversion or version control, I get notified about it. You would be simply astounded at the number of new blog posts I see everyday that essentially say “Hey, maybe our team should start using version control! Subversion seems pretty usable, have you tried it yet?” I see close to zero penetration of DVCS into this world: that’s the next big challenge for DVCS as it matures.
Others have pointed out that while I scream for DVCS evangelists not to thoughtlessly trash centralized systems like Subversion, I’m busy thoughtlessly trashing DVCS! I certainly hope this isn’t the case; I’ve used Mercurial a bit here and there, and perhaps my former assertions are simply based on old information. I had previously complained that most DVCS systems don’t run on Windows, don’t have easy access control, and don’t have nice GUI clients. Looking at wikipedia, I sure seem to be wrong. 🙂
