[FRIAM] I am accepting wagers

[Prof David West]

I started as a programmer (COBOL for business apps / Assembler for internals) in 1968. I have held almost every title up to and including CIO. I was a professor of, essentially, management information systems but also taught the non-math CS stuff, like O/S, programming, database, and AI.

Spent the last part of my career making wild and fantastical claims about how information systems could be orders of magnitude simpler and therefore easier, faster, and cheaper to develop, with no loss of quality. The jeers were loud and rude.

Only had two opportunities to prove, in the real world, I was "right." One a national company that produced forms (loan applications, disclosure forms, mortgage documents, etc) for banks in all fifty states. They employed 50 attorneys to review changes in law and generate requirements for programmers, and fifty programmers using C++. My system, written in the then still quite primitive Smalltalk) reduced the programming staff to five.  The other was an insurance company rewriting and updating a legacy system supporting sales and management of commercial insurance (car fleets, boats, commerical real estate). They planned a 500 million, five-year, 1000 developer effort with multiple subcontractors and off-shore teams. Ended up being an 18 month project with a third of the development staff (still some off shore, and one subcontractor) at a cost of 20+ million. 

In both efforts the company had to fight a continual rear guard effort by traditionalists. In the case of the banker forms company that effort was lost and last I heard they were up to 100 Java programmers.

Not a brag — I have no idea if my approach could be promulgated across the industry with similar effect. Certainly am not claiming some kind of philosopher stone for simplicity and low cost.

Just anecdotal support for Jon.

davew


On Sun, Mar 14, 2021, at 11:41 PM, jon zingale wrote:
> Ha, *bringing some more reality* is what I listen for to know when I have
> some naysayers on the ropes. Much of the last decade of my career has been
> working to reconcile data whose interfaces radically vary. Claiming it to be
> an 11 billion dollar problem is a rhetorical move that smells of
> *abstraction* rather than *reality* to me. Barry states the problem clearly,
> but it isn't IMO an insurmountable problem, just an intentional one with
> lots of particularities. At least one small start-up that I wrote for
> managed a similar problem surprisingly well (up to Google's data standards,
> for instance), and sold for orders of magnitudes less than the number above.
> Stating the problem is great, working the problem is best, but the rest is
> simply whining.
> 
> 
> 
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