On the methodology of angling Baltic herring
Most mornings I pass by foot over the long and tall bridge linking the western tip of the Helsinki peninsula with the island of Lauttasaari, where our company premises reside. A breathtaking view to the Gulf of Finland opens to the south while resplendently white swans go about their business near the shore. I suspect they eat algae, but then so do the clever Japanese, so it might be a useful taste to acquire. Well worth watching, both of them. On this bridge, during late autumn, you are bound to find a group of elderly, silent, stationary men leaning on the railings. Looking from afar you might think them old sailors staring at the sea, brooding the passing of the times when the seas were reigned by ships made of wood and men with appendages ending in iron hooks. This might indeed be the case for some of them, but they do share another purpose on the bridge, as they are fishing for the Baltic herring. Each year when the waters cool enough, giant schools of plankton feeding Baltic herring invade the shores to lay their eggs on the rocky bottom of the sea. In their spawning frenzy they are an easy catch - if you know what you are doing. They are also a delicious catch; hence the presence of the potentially brooding old pirates-turned-fishermen. These gentlemen may be somewhat set in their ways in many things, like disapproving sea travel powered by steam, but they do show amazing versatility in their fishing methodology. If you examine their instruments in detail, you are likely to find as many different setups as there are men on that bridge. Shiny objects (to attract the swarming herrings) are common to most, but not all. Some even use live bait, perhaps for the odd chance a hungry trout or pike-perch has been attracted to the scene by the herring brouhaha. The ones who do not catch as much as they would like are sure to spy on the ones that do and adjust their efforts accordingly. Lets correctly assume that I am a fresh herring aficionado, but too busy to catch my own. Obviously I could buy the fish from the market, yet for some reason not revealed in this context I do not wish to do so. Instead I convince four of these fishermen to do the fishing for me, paying them in live parrots. We agree that I provide the means, while they do the actual fishing. They will receive a meager number of parrots regardless of the catch, but because I have recently read an article on motivational management in the Chief Executive magazine, I instate a bonus plan - if the giant basket I provide is at least half full, double the birds. Next morning we meet up on the bridge and I hand them the gear (which in this case also pretty much defines the usage), four of your ordinary rod-line-hook-worm sets, familiar to most... and near completely unsuitable for catching any herring. My select fishing squad is likely to mutter many a yarr and arr behind the bushy beards, shaking their heads sadly. There might be a lousy landlubber or two that I promptly ignore. They do not speak my language, fishing is fishing, any fool knows that! Yet loot has been promised, so they set on their work. At sunset I approach the bridge with great anticipation, grinning like a fool, to find a single small ruffe in the giant basket I had provided for the catch. I also find four eloquently signed letters of resignation and instructions to deliver the avian compensation to a nearby tavern at my earliest convenience. I am not a ruffe aficionado. Ruffe, to me, is a smelly, slimy, useless fish. So what had I done? I had taken four experts of their field, forced them to use wrong tools in the wrong way. In short, I had made decisions the team would have been much better equipped to do. Left to their own devices they might not have topped up my over-optimistically sized basket, but for certain its bottom would have been covered in precious fish. The described scenario is hardly realistic. It would be obvious to all to allow the men the proper use of their expertise. Yet in software development similar mistakes are still, this very day, done on regular basis - often with disasterous results. Perhaps this is due to software development being such a young, infant art compared to fishing? The waterfall project going wrong resembles a man taking his casting set and favorite lure out on the lake, finding the lake frozen, but proceeding to cast his bouncing lure on the hard ice and reeling it back over and over again, for the entire day. At the end of the day (unless the lure wears through the ice) all he has caught is a cold. Now a fisherman equipped with normal possession of his wits would either give up the fishing as hopeless, before too much time was lost, or return to his hut to fetch a drill and other gear suitable for ice-fishing. He would adapt to the situation as quickly as possible. I have strived for agility in my fishing hobby for eight years now and it is showing some promising results. For the first time ever I hold the first position in our annual not-too-serious competition. (In your face, my fishing rivals at Profium. Your fancy Semantic Webs are useless in catching fish!) Working at Futurice, which I recently joined, I finally get to apply similar common sense and best practises on software development projects. There is no going back.
