33.1. Isn t Personal Character Off the Topic?

33.1. Isn't Personal Character Off the Topic?

The intense inwardness of programming makes personal character especially important. You know how difficult it is to put in eight concentrated hours in one day. You've probably had the experience of being burned out one day from concentrating too hard the day before or burned out one month from concentrating too hard the month before. You've probably had days on which you've worked well from 8:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. and then felt like quitting. You didn't quit, though; you pushed on from 2:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. and then spent the rest of the week fixing what you wrote from 2:00 to 5:00.

Programming work is essentially unsupervisable because no one ever really knows what you're working on. We've all had projects in which we spent 80 percent of the time working on a small piece we found interesting and 20 percent of the time building the other 80 percent of the program.

Your employer can't force you to be a good programmer; a lot of times your employer isn't even in a position to judge whether you're good. If you want to be great, you're responsible for making yourself great. It's a matter of your personal character.

Once you decide to make yourself a superior programmer, the potential for improvement is huge. Study after study has found differences on the order of 10 to 1 in the time required to create a program. They have also found differences on the order of 10 to 1 in the time required to debug a program and 10 to 1 in the resulting size, speed, error rate, and number of errors detected (Sackman, Erikson, and Grant 1968; Curtis 1981; Mills 1983; DeMarco and Lister 1985; Curtis et al. 1986; Card 1987; Valett and McGarry 1989).

You can't do anything about your intelligence, so the classical wisdom goes, but you can do something about your character. And it turns out that character is the more decisive factor in the makeup of a superior programmer.