Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic

In the vast and politically very incorrect sea of typology of human characters, geeks and nerds exhibit the highest intolerance toward common-sense. Their hatred for anything even remotely resembling common-sense and intuitive reasoning is legendary, and I thought maybe it’s time to examine this burning passion. Just to rile them a bit:)

I got enticed to talk about these things after I’ve read a comment to the Peat Bakke’s excellent post (Software and Common Sense, Part II). The comment in question read:

“I say common sense is a menace!” (Topher Cyll)

Typical! Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have a typical example of the highly intolerant attitude that most geeks exude toward common-sense. But why is that, what makes them so worked up whenever common-sense enters the picture?

Disregard for Common-Sense Considered Harmful

The reason I’m making a bit of a fuss regarding this phenomenon is because I’ve been burned plenty of times by the utter disregard for common-sense. Coming both from myself and from my uber-geek colleagues.

Allow me to bore you with just one of many examples in my career: couple of years ago I was hired to revamp a software product that had been fully developed but for some reason couldn’t get off the ground. After examining the core design of the product, I was stunned and shocked to discover that it was designed to allow for infinite sessions. Meaning, once the user gets introduced to the system, anything that user does is logged as deltas and kept indefinitely. Upon each new connection to the server, the client and the server were performing a handshake and replaying all the deltas etc.

No session ever expires. And there are potentially umpteen thousands of sessions that could live on the system!

Now, if you take into consideration that potentially tens of thousands of clients could be connecting simultaneously to the server, and each of them replaying potentially huge streams of deltas in real time, it should be clearer why was the system going down in flames on a daily basis.

That whole charade was happening simply due to the fact that the geeks who designed the system didn’t have even the slightest interest in approaching the problem from a common-sense perspective. Instead, they took the counter-intuitive approach, and thought that it would be mighty cool if they would build a system that will keep track of anything that transpired, ever. That way, clients can replay their state back-and-forth, for ever and ever.

Cool indeed.

Back to the common-sense land. So, a common-sense way would be to ask: “would the users ever find any use for that kind of exorbitantly expensive behavior?” And the answer is, of course, a resounding No! Still, the geeks thought their system was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And who cares if it brings the entire farm of servers down?

This blatant disregard for common-sense is more often than not extremely dangerous. People get carried away, start barking up the wrong tree till they’re blue in face, and then act surprised upon learning that the whole industry has gotten a black eye.