Mad Computer Scientist

I recently inherited a large set of files from a coworker who had moved on to greener pastures, by which I do not mean I received a zip full of Excel spreadsheets. These are honest to goodness paper files and folders. Working in IT, you would think that if the paperless office had arrived, it would at least be present in that department, if no other. Alas, it has not. This is the second set of files that I have inherited during my time here and my own set of files is getting to be fairly large. Most folders are stuffed with hand-written notes I took during various planning, scoping, and implementation stages.

The point here being, I am throwing no stones, but am making an observation: even in technical fields, few people are actually implementing paperless offices. If anything, the laser printer allows us to run off far more paper than ever before because its low threshold of use and expense allows people to use it for far more trivial things than would have ever been justified in the dark ages. Computers allow us to store more information than is readily doable with paper, in a more portable fashion (most laptops have enough hard drive space to carry libraries of information, available at the brush of the finger), more safely (some laptops and spare drives are a lot less of a fire hazard than cupboards stuffed with paper and cardboard), and more intelligibly (typed notes will be legible by anyone, whereas many people, like me, have terrible handwriting).

Here, it would almost be convenient to scapegoat the older workers and simply blame them. It is their dedication to the old order that keeps the rest of us from making progress. There is some small amount of truth here. We have probably all seen that one person who prints off every darn e-mail only to turn around and file it in a cabinet. However, this would be greatly oversimplified. When I was in college, I noticed that few computer science students used their laptops for notetaking. There were plenty of laptops in the room, mind you, but most of their owners were surfing or playing solitaire (I played solitaire through a solid semester of Jewish History–did well on the tests, though). The students who actually took notes did so, by and large, on notebooks or in binders. So, that old guy over there might abuse the printer a little more than usual, but he is not the real issue here after all, the younger generation who is growing up on iPods and Facebook, takes notes by hand.

The reasons for this, then, are more deep seated than a simple matter of generation. The sad truth for the proponent of the digital office is that computers are simply not convenient enough, yet, for this purpose. Notepads are still much more convenient than laptops for most purposes. When taking notes, it is not uncommon to be scribbling down diagrams and making outlines in ways that a computer may present better, but require a little more effort upfront. If you are typing your proposal, those extra few seconds to make the bullets look good is well worth it. If there is a flurry of talk in a meeting or during a lecture, those extra few seconds put you too far behind. Similarly, those diagrams may take, for a fast user, ten minutes to put together–but that ten minutes is simply too long when everything is happening realtime, especially when they can be sketched in seconds.

Laptops, as light as they are, are appreciably heavier so it is a lot more convenient to grab a notepad than to haul out the laptop. Battery life is also a concern. Despite advertising to the contrary, the best you can usually do is a few hours of battery time at full use. Sure, you can get more life if you don’t use the machine as much, but then it isn’t as useful either. This particular group of objections should be handled within the next few generations of hardware. With netbooks becoming more common, general laptop size decreasing, and battery life increasing, this should go away quite soon. Cost does not really seem to be an issue anymore. Most college students have laptops–virtually all have computers and could have had a laptop should they have so chosen. Like I wrote above, the problem was not that students did not have laptops, but that they were not using them to go paperless.

All right, then, if we can’t get people to use their computers yet, what about digitizing the output? At least, we could save the storage and remove that old fire hazard. Not necessarily a bad idea, but retyping and resketching all notes is quite time consuming. Scanning presents another option, but at several times the amount of storage (so, storing those notes as TIFFs instead of TXT or DOC will tax your drive space more) with greater difficulty reading (scans are often, especially with penciled or highlighted text, harder to read), loss of the ability to search (which, as Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all realizing, is one of the most important abilities of computerized documents), loss of flexibility (when things change, altering those TIFFs is a lot harder than changing a text document), and poor software interfaces (have you seen most document management systems?) make this a loss.

The real problem is ultimately one of convenience. We could bring our laptops to everything. We could type it all in Word or OpenOffice. We could use the touch pad to do all of our diagramming. But we don’t because it is not sufficiently convenient for the problem at hand and the reasons lie in both the hardware and the software.

On the hardware side of things, we need to see laptops that are even lighter (without loss in functionality; about the only thing I see being able to go is a CD drive–more and more software is web driven or, at least, could be deployed from another machine and more and more music is being stored digitally) with even longer batter life. Additionally, an easy way to make quick sketches is key. I am sure advancements could be made in diagramming software, but until someone can take a stylus and make a quick sketch as readily as they could with a pen, the laptop will still not be good enough. It would also help if the laptop screens were more like paper–in short, if we could see digital ink making its way from niche ebook readers onto laptops so that notes can be viewed cleanly and crisply in a way that will not tire the eyes the way traditional displays do.

On the software side of things, we need software that is more conducive to taking notes in the way that people take them in real life. Outliners are good, but people do not take perfectly outlined notes on the fly–nor can they be expected to. Often times, notes are taken in brainstorming or design sessions. These meetings cannot be organized or else they will lose all utility. One of the benefits of paper note taking is the loose, semi-organized way in which notes and diagrams can be taken and mixed up. This would need to be made available through software.

There is still the X factor. Speaking for myself, I enjoy the feel of handwriting and the look of paper. It is a relief after using computers and technology all day long to be able to look at and feel something different. I doubt that for me, personally, this will ever go away. However, by and large, except for a few strange people (like me; I even have a manual typewriter) this will fall away in the next generation or so leaving only the items above.

So, will we ever see the paperless office? I do not think that question can be answered with any degree of certainty. My personal point of view is that the hardware will be there within the next ten years. The software is a trickier proposition–it could happen at any time. Tomorrow someone could write the perfect software or it could take another thirty years. Even once this happens, paper will linger a while longer.

Like many a working programmer, I get to see the results of cargo cult programming a lot. To those of us who know better, it is evil, but I decided to sit down and write up a quick article on why it is evil. After all, the very reason that most cargo culters cargo cult is that they do not believe that it is evil.

Here is my composite picture of a cargo cult programmer: our cargo-culter is Joe Cargo (I’m feeling creative today). Joe’s interest in computers is mild. There is probably a fascinating story of how he got stuck in IT in the first place. Maybe it started out by setting up a wiki for a few friends. Or doing a quick and dirty website for a local ma and pa shop. Perhaps he worked at Megacorp, where the path to IT aid is a mile long trail of paper and he got conscripted by his real department to fill the gap in their IT resources, only to find his stopgap skills worth more than whatever it was he got hired for (as though anyone could remember). In any event, he never really moved beyond that point. He surfs the web and slaps together whatever kind of, almost, sort of, probably, if you don’t look at it cockeyed works to complete the task at hand. He has no formal training and has never given any thought to what “best practices” would be. Manual, repetitive work is a way of life. He does not give it a second thought. Almost every other job in the world is based around repetitious labor, why should this be any different? Joe meanders from project to project and company to company always in the dark as to the real world of programming and computer science. If Joe ever meets a true practitioner of the craft, he would regard him as a wizard, dark and terrible, but useful.

Joe Cargo is probably fairly proud of his work. Not excited by his craft, but satisfied with a job that he believes is well done. It runs, after all and there are a lot of lines packed into a lot of files. He probably has no clue that someone more skilled than he, let’s call him Sam Sixpack, views the whole creation as the spawn of Satan. Sam Sixpack looks at Joe Cargo’s work and sees unnormalized tables–and I don’t mean the kind that should be 5NF. No, I mean the 250 column wide variety with repetitive data and would-be primary keys that are based on names that are not always consistent. He sees work that takes hours to run, rather than minutes, worst case. He sees code that has been copied and pasted all over the code base, rather than centralized in a function, class, module, or what have you. When Sam sees this, he groans at the hours it will take him to fix or update every single instance of that one block of code. Sam sees code that feels dirty, rather than clean or elegant. It lacks formatting, it rambles, it does unnecessary work. In general, it just does not make sense.

If we assume that this is a reasonably accurate composite of most cargo culters, it is not too hard to examine it and pick out the hows and the whys. Why is easy. Cargo culting is the result of laziness. Larry Wall once wrote that one of the virtues of a programmer was laziness, but this is another kind of laziness. The laziness that Wall wrote about was a programmer who refused to do work that could be automated and, so, would put in extra work to save manual effort in the future. Cargo culting is based on a laziness, not of overall work, but of the mind. They cannot be bothered to think. They see something, but it would require straining the brain too much to understand it. If everyone took this approach to technology, we would still be pushing rocks around with our bare hands because no one would have seen the utility in investing in tools.

What can those of us who care more do? Unfortunately, not much. Cargo culters got where they are through sheer sloth. If they could not be bothered to learn on their own, when computer books, articles, and resources are plentiful (or even just learn from the code they steal on a regular basis) there will not be much that you can teach them. Those who want to learn, learn more from having a knowledgeable person nearby. Those who do not, will not learn anything either way. In the final analysis, cargo culting is like any other form of laziness in business. It can only be handled by the person in question shaping up or shipping out.

It is sad because it is bad for everyone, whether they realize it or not. Businesses get sloppy, second rate software. Users get a tool that is often the bane of their very waking existence. Next-gen coders get headaches from trying to clean up the mess sufficiently to keep their own jobs. Finally, the cargo culters themselves get a bad time of it. The fruits of this mudball building cannot be hidden indefinitely, even if the cause of it can. The cargo culter may be fired, or leave under increasing pressure to maintain the impossible. In any event, they do not get the best they could have, had they built something well. Their own skills (what few they have) decrease in value, since the culter does not learn (if they did, they would not remain cargo culters) and keep up with an ever changing industry. So, just remember, when you see a cargo culter, you see a history of everyone involved losing.