There’s probably no IT God…

Don’t get me wrong! I do not want to hurt any of your religious feelings! As long as you are not knocking on my door at Sunday early in the morning to convert me and to tell me what I have to do to please your god, I do not have problems whatever you believe in.

But what I have seen in the last years is that a lot people in IT (no matter if they are atheists or religious) tend to apply pattern that come from religion in their work. These pattern have a bad influence. They make projects fail, the make good ideas impossible and lead to enormous extra efforts.

The Fundamentalist Pattern
“Billy lo vult – Billy wants it!”… “The holy evangelist that kicks a Linux product out of production shall be free from sins…”… “Blessed is the open source crusader, who fights the holy IT war!”… “In the sign of the penguin, we declare our allegiance to Open Source and fight the evil empire of …”… “Use Open Source, Luke!”… “We follow the teachings of our prophet Richard Stallman, who brought the commandments of open source to the community…”…

The fundamentalist pattern describes someone who is fighting a IT crusade or a IT djihad (it does not matter how you call it, basically it is the same). There is only one goal: Your idea (the good one) must prevail over the other (the bad one). The other one is evil as it can be.

The fundemantist did not get that the world is more than 1 and 0. In his work, everything is binary; black and white, true and false.

Crime and Punishment Pattern
But before we talk this religious pattern, we should be more concrete what we are talking about. As religion is quite a large topic, we might narrow this topic down to the term “theism”. Theism conceives God as personal and active in the governance and organization of the world and the universe. In comparison to other beliefs, a theist believes that somebody is watching over him (god, angels or whatever) and that this god guy – or whatever you call him or her – takes it very seriously, if you do not follow his rules.

In terms of the “Crime And Punishment Pattern” people believe that there are higher forces that are responsible that some things work and others don’t. We are talking for example about the “Compiler god”.

The compiler god dwells somewhere in the processor of your computer, the holy temple of 01. Just as the guy with the long white beard, he is a very changeable god! One time he grants you all the resources you need, with his power you are able to finish your application by just some clicks…. But on other days, if he has not received enough work sacrifice, you better get the hell out of the office… All the clauses and subroutines, that were never tested thoroughly before going into production, will then turn out as evil. And be assured that the customer will call the procedure that has been least tested.

The baseline of the “Crime and Punishment” Pattern is… You do not have to do something extraordinary to make it work, just pray. So your god want it, it will work. But be aware! As soon some god has cast the Loser-Curse upon you, you will suffer a lot of pain. Because once you are a loser, you will never get anything done then.

Conclusion
So what’s the point in saying “So god will, the application will run without troubles in the customers environment”, “we are this technology” or “let’s wait what our IT-prophet super guru says, before start thinking”? Maybe this works out sometimes, but most time you will run into troubles. Mostly, you will realize believing and having faith is not enough for making good software. Something that is very important for you, may crash and you have to explain, why you just believed in its stability instead of verifying it.

To prevent troubles, you have to act, you have to verify that certain requirements are met and “thou shalt not rely on the slackness of your customer” that he will never push some buttons to start routines the first time ever in a running environment. I am still amazed that some people with rather wait for some kind of IT miracle instead of trying to fix the problem in the process

Although is it funny to imagine white bearded hacker in heaven, who says things like “Thou shalt talk about requirements before coding” and very down below in deeper regions of some metaphysical worlds some poor sinners chained to Workstations having to reengineer application with lots of gotos as punishment, let’s get serious. We are working in an abstract environment. “I believe…” is something very easy to say and proofing something in IT is sometimes hard. But in general being able to say “I know and I have verified” is the way to go instead of being always the “I believe” guy.

So in the end… It is good to be religious in IT? What do we reach by being ending as a martyr for your holy IT cause because you don’t want to get rid of your fundamentalist mind pattern? Well, think about one thing.

… Nowadays there is a reason or lets better say a very considerable explanation why somebody is a virgin. It does not have to do anything with Free Will any more. So if you imagine yourself now being in a large computer room full of geeks. Geeks as nerdy as you can image. If you think then, who of these guys probably has no or nearly no sex, ask yourself the one big question: What is the reason for that! I am sure the reason is obvious.

So if you want to die as a martyr for Billy, Linus or Steve, it is okay, but keep this one in mind. The martyr gets 72 virgins. The number of “good” virgins in your heaven is probably not as high as may expect. So your god must fill them up… For keeping good manners – will stop this blog now.

So then… now stop worrying and enjoy your life

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