Coding @ Kape ni LaTtEX

Among the most profound quotes I found when the world mourned the passing of Steve Jobs is a tweet by Jonathan Moss:

Steve Jobs was born out of wedlock, put up for adoption at birth, dropped out of college, then changed the world. What's your excuse?

Not mentioned in the tweet is the fact that Steve was also fired from his own company.

In the midst of a society that is now embroiled in huge resentment vs. the economic elite, the promise of "go to school so you would have a nicely paying secure job and lofty retirement" is being broken across the western world.

The sad thing is, people don't even believe there is any other way of doing it. This is particularly pronounced in societies where people want to introduce graduates to the workforce as fast as possible, completely sold to the broken system, completely disregarding the lack of value such an "education" holds.

Yet we expect kids to succeed that way.

Following what you are told to do doesn't work anymore: you should think different, you should work different, you should make yourself indispensable.

And then you would understand why everyone is giving so much attention to the passing of the man from Cupertino.

Last week, a devastating typhoon arrived in the country, which found itself in the middle of yet-another-calamity. As the typhoon went on its onslaught, towns were inundated by storm surges. These floods were later exacerbated by the necessity to release water from upriver dams filled to the brim, which in turn were made more urgent by the approach of a second typhoon. Amidst these scenes of chaos and despair, the locals found reason to pat themselves in the back for their "resilience". They believe that their ability to withstand one calamity after the other without losing neither hope nor faith is a testament to the strength of their will to live, as well as their faith and character.

I disagree.

When The Netherlands suffered the devastating North Sea flood of 1953, they devised what is probably the largest water management project in the world called the Delta Works. The project was so massive, while parts of the project were started prior to the great flood, as early as 1950 (note that at that time the Netherlands was in economic shambles recovering from World War II) its final components were finished only in 2010. Sixty years of effort to end the scourge of a seemingly uncontrollable foe. If the Dutch were as "resilient", they probably wouldn't have felt the need for such an enormous project.

Resilience is also a problem if you're a software developer withstanding and tolerating these conditions:

• Substandard development and build machines
• No source control
• Manual builds
• Absence of continuous integration
• Absence/decay of automated unit tests
• Severe scope creep
• Enforced/continuous/arbitrary/rewarded overtime
• Enforced/arbitrary shifting schedules for no better reason than "standard company practice"
• Nonsensical/arbitrary rules
• Etcetera etcetera...

When resilience has come to mean tolerance of bad practices (or tolerance to calamity and disaster), it immensely loses its value.

It's okay to be a little resilient, you'll need that for when you absolutely need to pull all nighters to finally ship your product on a product launch. But don't be resilient enough to tolerate having to build manually, or develop on a netbook, or treat arbitrary overtime as normal. The alternative hopefully doesn't take 60 years to put up, but even if it does it will all be worth it.