Prosthetic Conscience

What a fascinating quote:

From: http://www.mindview.net/WebLog/wiki-0051 (a comment on Bruce Eckel’s weblog)

2004/03/12 10:02 EST (via web):

About the “directing” vs. “enabling” approach, you wrote: “Both approaches are reasonable and neither is wrong. I have been in both situations; for example, trying to prevent interns from ignoring or even actively circumventing coding style guidelines (where more “direction” was required), and on the other hand being frustrated by the loss of productivity that comes from being forced to conform to constraints that I wouldn’t have violated anyway […]?”.

It is interesting that you justified the “directing” approach with an example about directing others, and the “enabling” approach with an example about enabling yourself. Don’t take this as a negative critique - I did the same when I tried to come up with examples of directing/enabling.

I tend to think that others should be directed, and I should be enabled. I worked for teams whose job was developing software methodologies and the relative supporting tools for the rest of their Company. Except that, of course, they flat-out refused to apply the (directing, strict) methodologies that they were developing to their own methodology-building project. To me, that shows how much in software development is about our own relationships and fears. We still have an awful lot to learn from sociology and antropology - and maybe, oriental philosophies.

Paolo Perrotta Bologna, Italy

I prefer “enabling” approaches everywhere, and agree with the statement that if you have someone who can’t handle an enabling approach, they don’t need directing, they need training. But many people (especially in corporate IT) would argue that this places too high a bar on experience and education for programmers. Still, I’d rather see enabling done technologically, and where direction is needed, see it done socially.

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