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 dalliance with computer programming back in the dim pre-history of the digital age. 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, one that must be going through the mind of every IT person: program those financial meltdowns away.
I'm sure the "capital assets manager" who suggested this in a KGO-TV interview at the Oracle "Open World" fest meant well, in the terribly earnest by-the-way-I-can-save-the-world kind of Silicon Valley boosterism we've come to know and love. The problem with Wall Street, he says, comes 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 no human miscreant gets away with nuthin'.
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 accidently delete key functions.
But the problem goes deeper. It's our old buddy the man-versus-machine debate, dusted off for service in the latest debacle. On one side is "man is fallible, machines aren't". On the other is "man has judgment, machines don't". Oddly enough, no one seems to realize that the most plausible position might be "none of the above".
On the face of it, man has been on the losing end of this debate for the past 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 incorruptibility give it an apparently insurmountable edge: real estate sales. Ten years and much semi-mystical hot air later, consumers still use—and still complain about—real estate agents.
Why are we so robust? Let's go back to the sixth-grade science class that designed and "upgrades" the MLS search program I use. None of these sixth-graders sells real estate, so none of them know what the average agent wants in a MLS search program. They only know what the average sixth-grade geek wants in a MLS search program, or would want in the unlikely event he used one: bells, whistles and gee-whiz complexity. Speed? Why? Is time money? Only in the real world. Accountability? Being a hot-shot programmer means writing cute error messages that earnestly beseech me for input that's filed and forgotten. Reliability? That's so Windows 98. The average geek eagerly trades 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 don't use the program, so they don't have to deal with its drawbacks. And all the time, money and ego invested in it guarantees the program 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. So I'm pretty sure 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.