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Honeypot Projects

  • Posted By admin on May 22, 2005

I was speaking at the Reston, VA No Fluff Just Stuff symposium this weekend, and the panel discussion got a little out of hand. Here we are at a traveling Java technology conference, and every question and every answer was about Ruby or Python. I’m afraid the attendees walked away from the panel thinking we all hate Java, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Its just that Rails is a soccer ball, and we’re the Forest View 5-and-under Kids Soccer Team.

After loads of discussion of the relative merits of strong- vs. duck-typed languages, and tool support for Ruby and Python and managed versions of dynamic languages, we ended up where we always end up on these talks: how do we deal with all the losers we have to work with? It never ceases to amaze me how the audience, not the panel, always gets around to this question. "I work with a bunch of cavemen; how do I protect myself and my project from them?"

I finally came up with a good answer: Honeypot projects. Just invent something important-sounding but impossible to achieve, set up a $399 Celeron Dell desktop box but put one of the $150 cases on it that you get from Intrex that makes it look imposing and important, tell everyone that its the new Sun Optipylon 4500 server, give the cavemen logins on the box and let them build something. Just make sure the new Sun Optipylon 4500 is on its own subnet, and voila!

I kind of prefer Dave Thomas’ answer, though. If you are really scared of so many folks on your team, you need to either rethink your hiring practices, or rethink your firing practices.

Comments
  1. Gavin — May 22, 2005 @ 02:32 PM
    It seems that the larger the organization, the larger the inertia. For me, I recognized a long time ago that I get to choose whom I spend my time with, and luckily I am now in a position where I respect and admire the members of the team. Life is too short to live with people who are insecure or simply not clever enough to explore new possibilities.
  2. Mike Thomas — May 23, 2005 @ 06:47 PM
    Dave's answer, while witty, is also a pretty flippant answer for most IT departments where programmers don't hire and fire, management doesn't want to spend much money on programmers, and empire-building is the way managers show their worth. I'm lucky enough not to be in that boat, but I have been before, and I have talented friends that certainly are now. In the case where you don't have control over those you work with, you have a third option that is totally in one's control: go somewhere else! I can't believe how many people stick it out in jobs that they don't like with people they don't respect. Oh well, maybe now I'm the one being flippant :-)
  3. Vik — May 23, 2005 @ 07:17 PM
    I was in the audience and a lot of the conversation was about Ruby and Co. But I think that was because 5 of the 8 panel members were so enthused with Ruby at the moment. If I remember, the first question was about Rich Client technology. Then someone asked about dynamic vs static languages and that was when it started. Kito Mann, Ben Galbraith and even Jason Hunter did not participate in the Rubyfest. It was amusing to see Ben's expression -- "ho hum, I'm not gonna say anything". Plus who wants to get in an argument with Dave Thomas?
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