Bruce F. Webster

My review of Why New Systems Fail by Phil Simon is now up on Slashdot. Here’s the opening paragraph: Over the last forty years, a small set of classic works on risks and pitfalls in software engineering and IT project management have been published and remained in print. The authors are well known, or should [...]

And I mean no disrespect to plumbers for that comment. Many states require plumbers to be licensed, unlike software engineers. I was reading the comment thread to this Slashdot post on the declining percentage of women studying computer science. All the explanations you would expect are offered, with a fair amount of point and counterpoint. [...]

Today’s New York Times reports that Japan is “running out of engineers“: After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields. Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising [...]

In my post on the “Dead Sea Effect“, I talk about why the overall quality of personnel in large corporate and government IT shops declines over time (short answer: the great IT engineers leave for greener pastures, the not-so-great ones stay and entrench). So, why would IT engineers leave one of the most highly regarded, [...]

[UPDATE: Here are some more observations from Ruby-coloured glasses.] Alex Papadimoulis over at The Daily WTF (one of my favorite IT blogs) has posted a lengthy and thoughtful solution to the problems I raised in my post on the “Dead Sea effect“. Specifically, he refers to the “Up or Out” model, pioneered over a century [...]