Humour

The toy aspect of technology

A CIO can visualize himself as a kitten while playing with technology, writes T A Balasubramanian

“Now, further down the line, we have other curious cats to be taken into your IT fold, according to these job descriptions,” continues Gulabi Manpowa, the very soul of patience.

As the HR Head at Baffle Corporation, she is sitting across the table from you, Papyrus Bytewala, the long-running CIO of Baffle. This session is intended to bring sanity, perhaps even clarity, into your meandering ‘people requirement projections’ as part of the annual ritual. Prepared earnestly by Brooke Bond, your intrepid project team leader, the document plods on relentlessly, exposing the inside workings of the computer programmer’s esoteric landscape.

“Brooke’s next set of coding—sorry, software engineering—cats is what he calls aspiring felines—they want to attain a shining state of some new level of programming nirvana that only they can imagine. He calls them the Purists. He says that these are highly driven software creatures that have the one and only Alan Turing as their role model. Who was Mr Turing, Papyrus?”

“Ah, well, you could say he was the godfather of software engineering. In the 1920s, he tried to resolve a long-standing debate over whether any one method could prove or disprove all mathematical statements by imagining a ‘universal machine’ that could be directed to perform many tasks. Being the ultimate Purist, he spoke of a ‘machine’ only as an abstraction, or rather as a sequence of steps to be executed. What we call software programming today is just the fallout of Mr Turing’s brainwave that the data fed into a system could also function as its master directions. But that’s not the only reason Mr Turing is revered by the Purists.”

“So what else did he do?”

“Well, he left behind a challenge for Purists that has yet to be cracked. In 1950, Mr Turing dreamed up the ‘Turing Test’—a bold measure for machine intelligence. If you could have a typed conversation with ‘somebody’ else unseen by you, and not realize that a computer is the hidden ‘somebody’—then that machine could be deemed intelligent. There is an annual contest with a $100,000 prize that goes to anyone who can design a computer that can pass this test. Mr Turing would, no doubt, be delighted that Purists the world over are still trying.”

“I see,” says Manpowa, looking suitably impressed. “Anyway, Brooke goes on to say that the Purists will never write shortcut code, not even under duress.”

“Hmm, quite true. And this is often the problem. The Purists are obsessed with purity, while I am concerned with tomorrow’s project completion date and producing good enough software recipes in my kitchen.”

“So why do you need these devotees of Mr Turing, the God of Purism?”

“Well, Gulabi, most Purists are useful when the going gets tough in the kitchen—which is when lesser mortals scamper away. Their ideas are often needed in solving particularly hairy coding problems. We just need to keep watching out to make sure that all that purity-pumping adrenalin does not overshadow practicality. The Purists and the Mechanics we described earlier on have some common traits—they both value the complex problem. So what we CIOs do is to value the brainwaves of the Purists and use their offerings when needed, maybe as a sacrifice. But we keep an eye open—they can leave a giant grizzly ball of complexity behind if they have too much freedom to code.”

“That is your call, then, Papyrus”, says Manpowa. “Next on the line is what Brooke calls the Fireballs. They are like greased lightning, these speed demons, he says. These creatures are fast and furious.”

“These are the guys we need on the assembly line to make projects fly, Gulabi,” you nod, “Though sometimes the Fireballs are just new to the profession and want to impress me because they think speed is the primary behavior that we expect as a CIO. And I must admit that we often give that impression.”

“Hmm, so when we users want things done yesterday, you turn around and whip up a frenzy among the Fireballs, eh?”

“Guilty as charged,” you admit sheepishly. “Perhaps we CIOs are to blame for instigating Fireballs. What do we do, tell me? My bosses hand me down the stone-engraved milestones that they gather from some confabulation of the corporate titans, and our job is to make it happen in the galleys. At every seminar I go to, I hear of how foolish it is to establish a project deadline before the requirements are even gathered into my basket.  But who cares for us CIOs?”

“Get over it, Papyrus. The real world is like this, and we users are impatient devils as well. What do you think I have to do on my job? I am asked to promise delivery of a dozen cats before I can plan where to herd them. Welcome to the fast, cruel, and unforgiving world of corporate time crunching. Which brings me to Brooke’s next item on the hiring menu—the Kitten. This creature, he says, goes gaga over the childish joys of technology.”

“Well, Gulabi, this is a creature after my own heart—the Kitten is a cat that never grows up, and revels in playing with new toys.  I must admit that all of us in this business—even old hounds in the CIO pond like me who you possibly consider to be dour and grim—love the toy aspect of technology. My first computer was a delightful analog machine. We  turned dials that closed switches in a glitzy hardware program. It was like a music system on steroids and I enjoyed working on it. I still go gaga when working with cool technological tools. In these Kittens, I see a lot of myself. So it takes quite an effort to remind these playful cats to temper their love of gizmos with the lofty purpose of their work—which is to produce business solutions.”

“So you admit being a Kitten under that scruffy exterior, after all, eh?” giggles Manpowa.

“Let’s just leave me out for the moment, Gulabi,” you mutter. “I keep telling El Gizmo, one of the unrepentant Kittens in my herd, that he has to pull up his socks. Just because he manages to neatly squeeze 30 user interface controls on a single screen does not mean that he has met a user need. Kittens, while showing a good grasp of the technology, fail to consider the end purpose of the software. They think that their job is to have fun with the tools, rather than considering how best to make future maintenance less of a tar pit for the next generation.”

“It bewilders me, Papyrus, that you CIOs would even want these assorted hard-to-manage creatures in your teams.”

“It’s a scruffy lot, I admit,” you say, philosophically. “But the strange thing is that when they all get together, and projects become time bombs waiting to go off, they get things to happen. Nobody knows exactly how, but they do it. That’s why cats are such mysterious creatures.”