Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic

You’ve heard me talk about the concept of smart servant on more than one occasion (HLL Vs. VHLL, What Is A Software Product, Ruby on Rails Value Proposition, Verbal Communication and Software Industrialization or Software Craft?). I first heard of that concept ten years ago, when I made the switch from the machine-centric to human-centric software development. I’ll continue to explore this fascinating subject, but today I’d like to make a slight detour and talk a bit about the flip side of the coin — the smart master.

Two Kinds of Servants

The situation is basically very simple — if you can afford to have a servant (or servants), you can either enjoy the services of smart servants, or the services of not-so-smart servants. Smart servants are the ones who have the ability to understand you well. They can take hints, read between the lines, and thus save you a lot of hassle.

Dumb servants lack the ability to spare you the grief. With such servants, you are forced to spell everything out. You need to hold their hands, explain every little detail to them, and be prepared to keep repeating yourself till you’re blue in face.

You may find yourself wondering if having dumb servants is actually worth it. Since you have to explain to them everything anyway, and you also have to hold their hand and clean up after their mistakes, maybe you’d be better off without them?

Still, you may find it tempting to keep the servants, even if they’re unbelievably dumb. Having servants in your employ is a symbol of a certain status, so it may be worth the extra grief of keeping them around.

Two Kinds of Masters

In the same way how you can have two kinds of servants (smart or dumb), you can belong to one of the two categories of masters — smart or dumb. If you luck out and manage to hire smart servants, you’re not out of the woods yet. It is incredibly easy to mess up the otherwise advantageous situation with having smart servants around you.

All you need to do to mess things up is start being overbearing with your smart servants. Start breathing down their neck. Try holding their hand, explaining each little detail to them. That is guaranteed to piss them off, and make them resent being in your employ.

If you are to take the advantage of being incredibly lucky to have smart servants at your disposal, you need to make sure that you yourself are a smart master.

Tools are Our Servants

Similar to the situation with human servants, you should also view tools as your servants. Tools are made by humans, for humans. Their only purpose is to serve human needs. And similar to the human servants, tools can be dumb or smart.

Typically, mechanical tools are dumb. These tools don’t have mind-like qualities. But software tools tend to be much more powerful than mechanical tools, and can exhibit certain mind-like qualities.

Still, just because software tools are many orders of magnitude more complex than mechanical tools, that doesn’t automatically mean that software tools are guaranteed to be smart. Quite the contrary, most software tools are incredibly dumb, even right down stupid.

It is very unlikely that you’ll easily bump into a smart software tool, but even if you did, you still won’t be out of the woods. Same as with human servants, in order to take advantage of a smart software tool, you need to act like a smart master. And that’s easier said than done.