My first term is ending at the University of New South Wales. Students are staying up nights finishing reports and studying for finals. They anguish over the peculiar marking strategy that this strange American may be inflicting on them. Some pad reports with extra pages of detail. Others strive for neatness or flair in their presentations. Just like the old days when I was in school.I used the exam week lull to finish my latest book. Even after months of schedule overrun, I still stayed up all night to push it to completion. I anguished over the peculiar tastes of the American programmers who buy most of my books. I ran out of space to add more detail. I spent a morning at the typesetters to capture that last ounce of neatness and panache. Over two decades out of school and my behavior is indistinguishable from the (other) students.
It was the same when I ran a software company. You have to make presentations to win contracts. There's never enough time to do it right and the decisions seem horribly arbitrary. You stay up nights preparing the presentation so you can stay up nights a few months later finishing off the product. At stake is a few hundred thousand dollars instead of an A, but the effect on your ego and your nerves is the same.
Robert Fulghum has made a tidy income lately on stating the obvious. The skills we learned in kindergarten are the ones we need to cope every day as adults. We grownups spend our days cutting and pasting and our nights cleaning up our messes. It's easy to lose track of our basic purposes in the morass of administrivia.
I write programs because I love doing it. I write about writing programs for the same reason. I edit other people's writing about writing programs for the same reason as well. It pleases me no end that the world is willing to pay me comfortable sums for doing what I enjoy. I also like working with people whom I respect and who respect me. That mutual respect is often more important to all of us than the monetary rewards at stake.
The programming profession works to criteria that are often unique. Still, padding seldom helps. And neatness and accuracy really count. Few of us escape the need for tedious meetings and reports that eat our days and keep us from doing what we really love. It seems the payoff, the fun part, the final product still gets done in the middle of the night. I guess I've finally come to accept that as inevitable. This time, I didn't even feel sleepy.
P.J. Plauger
pjp%plauger@uunet.uu.net,
uunet!plauger!pjp