What You Want To Hear

When I entered the field of computer programming, I had some illusions about knowability, about absolute truth, about right and wrong. I thought that there were real answers to vague questions such as "which of these approaches is better?" "Who is the better coder?" "What should we do to solve this problem?"

Instead of fact-based, rational discussion I find myself often mired in religious and political muck. Specifically, I am watching a client move a data repository from a lovingly handcrafted environment to a standard environment, which standard environment blows up every time.

How did we get here? The data repository is several years old and has been a spectacular success. It was custom built for its purpose and its environment. No radical changes were indicated; so why are we watching them try to move to a dramatically different implementation?

I do not object to the idea of change; I have some sympathy for the desire to update this implementation:

• The custom environment is getting long in the tooth--almost 6 years old as of this writing--so I find it reasonable to consider replacing it.
  
• The custom environment runs Linux which is not the Unix of choice in this particular shop, so I understand their desire to port to their standard, AIX.
  
• The custom environment is based on ReiserFS which is  bit out of the mainstream, so I can see reevaluating this implementation.

What strikes me as sad is how the next implementation was chosen: the proposed implementation is what they have lying around. While the current implementation was carefully researched, painstakingly prototyped and carefully constructed for just this purpose, the proposed implementation was none of these things.

So far as I can tell, this is how the technical design decisions were made:

• The current system is old, so it must be outdated.
• The proposed system is from IBM, so it must be reliable.
• The proposed system is expensive, so it must be capable.

Conclusion: what they already bought is just the ticket. With this conclusion, everyone's judgement is validated: the techs picked the right things, the execs paid for the right things, everyone is right. Moving from the custom environment to the standard environment becomes a no-brainer: cheaper, faster, better. As I mentioned before, everyone loves an easy decision, right?

Well, there is a problem: ReiserFS is great at what it does. AIX's standard offerings have not caught up. Neither has whatever their Network Attached Storage (NAS) is running. So they can't get to step 1: copy *most* of the data to the new home. We are working on our third attempt here.

Is it a surprise that the result-oriented process yielded better results than the blind assertion of capability? No; the surprise is that anyone thought that simply declaring what was in hand to be the best solution was a good idea.

When will they admit that this proposed implementation is unworkable? I am guessing that they will never admit that and nothing we say seems to make any difference: it just isn't what they want to hear.