The "Engineer's Fatal Flaw"

Michael Kanellos - in a well-reasoned piece titled What happens if SCO wins? - talks about coining the phrase "Engineer's Fatal Flaw" with his college roommate, illustrating it with "the belief that you passed physics, so you think you know everything." His roommate "had an answer for everything, and often it involved the death penalty, a flat tax or some other clean, simple solution that would have been absolutely insane to try in real life." He then goes on to say that "there is arrogance inside the scientific mind, and it rarely knows when to stop."

Pow! Boy, does that describe a lot of software "wizards". I recall a conversation with one of them a few years back. We were talking about the the inelligance of some garbage collection code, and this wiz had come up with an example that failed in a predicted but undesirable manner. So his conclusion was "they cannot ship this product without changing this" even though - if you knew of the potential behavior - there was a simple workaround.

I said, gee, lots of people having been doing stuff with the beta that didn't fall down dead. In fact, nobody could come up with a single manifestation of this "critical flaw". But that didn't matter to the wiz who said that he was going to take this "to the top" to make sure it was changed. I suggested that, before he did that, he try to outline the cost - in terms of extra development, testing, and potentially slipping the product - of implementing his change. His response was "it doesn't matter what it costs, this is wrong". I strongly suggested that he not use the approach that cost doesn't matter because - in virtually any domain, including academia - it does matter.

So, what happened? Nothing, really. He talked up his critical flaw, other bright sparks looked at it and said that, while perhaps it wasn't the perfect solution, there were a lot of other factors to consider and it wasn't worth changing. Which prompted the "wiz" to mutter about wholesale firings.

Sometime I wonder what it's like to live in a world where everything is so black and white.

POSTSCRIPT: In college, I learned that the dorm nicknames for me and my roommate were "jazz" and "rock". For a year or so, I figured that Steve was "rock" because he was a weightlifter and built like a brick, and I certainly liked jazz (Steve was more of R&R guy). Well...it turns out that I was "rock" because nobody could convince me of anything! Ah, the arrogance..and ignorance...of youth.