Solution to the financial crisis: spaghetti programming.
I don't know if they still say "spaghetti programming", but the phrase was au courant during my brief run-in with computer programming back in the dim pre-history of the digital age. Back then it meant "programming that takes ten lines of code to do what one would do better", and, as I understood it, in a larger sense it meant any programming that was clumsy and wrong-headed. Which pretty much described my programming.
I was reminded of this a few days ago when I heard a solution to the financial crisis that must be racing through the mind of every IT person: program those financial meltdown blues away.
I'm sure the "capital assets manager" who suggested this in a KGO-TV interview at the recent Oracle "Open World" fest meant well, in the terribly earnest, oh-by-the-way-I-can-save-the-world kind of Silicon Valley salesmanship we've come to know and love. Wall Street's problems, he says, come from the failure of system controls. The solution? More rigorous and objective controls—and what could be more rigorous and objective than a well-programmed computer?—and the miscreants are stopped dead in their tracks.
All I can say is, that's what HAL thought.
Yes, better living through programming. All I could think of was Zillow's home valuation program with its zillion comparables, 99 percent of them irrelevant. Or Yahoo's homes-for-sale search program that dredges up "active listings" that sold a year ago. Or the not one but two freelance programmers who each designed a log-in for my Web site that worked just long enough for my check to clear. Or the sixth-grade science class that wrote the Multiple Listing Service search program I use, giving themselves attaboys for adding useless bells and whistles while they accidentally oops! delete key functions.
But the problem goes deeper. It's none other than our old friend the man-versus-machine debate, dusted off for use in the latest debacle. On one side is "man is fallible, machines aren't, so trust machines". On the other is "man has judgment, machines don't". Oddly enough, no one seems to realize that the most plausible answer might be c) "none of the above".
On the face of it, man has been on the losing end of this debate for the last two hundred years. I haven't been around that long, but I have been around long enough to see the Internet promise to replace man in one of the many functions in which the machine's supposed reliability and incorruptible virtue gives it an apparently insurmountable advantage: real estate sales. Ten years and much semi-mystical hot air later, real estate consumers still use—and still sometimes complain about—real estate agents. Agents: can't live with them, can't live without them.
Why are we agents so robust? Let's go back to the sixth-grade science class that designed and periodically "upgrades" the MLS search program I use. None of these sixth-graders sells real estate, so none know what the average agent wants in a MLS search program. You'd think they'd ask, but I get the feeling their idea of asking is, "Here's your new program. Now kiss my feet". So they know only what the average sixth-grade geek would want in a MLS search program, in the unlikely event he used one: bells, whistles, more bells and whistles, and plenty of gee-whiz complexity. Speed? Why? Is time money? Only in the real world. Accountability? Being a hot-shot sixth-grade programmer means writing cute error messages that sweetly beseech me for input that's apparently filed and forgotten. Reliability? That's so Windows 98. The average geek eagerly trades a boxcar-load of reliability for one more flashy trinket. And every trinket—every cheap glass bead dragged out to dazzle the natives—puts one more straw on the back of a program that would be overmatched running a programmable thermostat.
Junk the program and start over? Why? The decision-makers aren't in the trenches so they don't use the program and don't have to deal with its drawbacks. And all the time, money and ego invested in the program guarantees it a far longer lifespan than it deserves.
There's a lesson here. Probably several. I'll let you draw all but one.
Which is: I don't know how Wall Street got in this mess, but my guess is that it's at least partly because the system became so arcane that no one, not even the people running it, understood it or cared. So I'm pretty certain it's beyond the comprehension of the sixth-grade science class that designed my MLS search program and would be happy, I'm sure, to build a solution to the financial crisis for you!