Worth Two in the Bush

2017-01-16

Idioms are some of my favorite literary constructs to think about. They can contain so many meanings in a single sentence. I think of them as the English equivalent of those hilarious 'Chinese proverbs' that everyone's dad always dropped at Thanksgiving dinner.

A lot of people who aren't native English speakers don't understand idioms. Heck, even some Americans don't understand idioms, but we still use them! They're fun, and they just roll off the tongue so easily. I work with some non-native English speakers, and that leads me to think about idioms more than the average American.

Let's think about a couple idioms. 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.' That's one that we all know. It means, to me, that something that is possessed is worth twice as much as something that is not possessed. Possessing 50 dollars is worth the possibility of possessing 100 dollars. Don't take any bets. Our tendency is to actually do the opposite. We tend to want to give up 50 dollars for a chance at 100 dollars. That's why casinos and lotteries are in business, right?

This reminds me of a quote from one of the people I used to work with. 'Running code speaks louder than words.' Software engineers can be very successful without writing any code. We all know these people. I call them technology hipsters. These are people who think that they have a monopoly on good ideas. Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas. Nobody.

Let's do some math, beginning with an assumption (as all good math does :) ). Let's assume that everybody has one good idea every year. I'm talking real good ideas, like 'hey, feature X would be awesome,' or 'if we had a tool that did Y, it would make my life much easier.' My company, Veritas, has over 7k employees. Let's assume 1k of them are software engineers. The total number of ideas each year is a simple function.

yearly ideas = (total engineers) * (yearly good ideas per engineer)

If we just do simple substitution with these sample numbers:

yearly ideas = (1,000) * (1)
yearly ideas = 1,000

Whew. That was tough. So much math. Time to load back up on chili cheese Fritos.

As you can see from that math, a TON of ideas are sitting in the heads of engineers all the time. The best engineers are the ones who recognize when their idea is good, flesh out their idea, and write the code. The technology hipsters are the ones who have good ideas (just like the rest of us) but never intend to execute. Technology hipsters are unfortunately very popular at traditional top-down companies. These hipsters appeal to higher-ups with their knowledge of buzz words, and willingness to lead whatever initiative would be spun up to take on development of such an idea. Technology hipsters tend to trivialize problems by throwing around buzz-wordy phrases like 'We just need to do some machine learning' without fully understanding the implications of doing such a thing (because they don't do implementation, remember?)

So what does that mean in the context of our idiom? This:

'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' == 'Running code speaks louder than words'

The bird is the running code, and the two in the bush is the words.

We are stuck with technology hipsters. There's nothing we can do about that. We can, however, do what engineers are supposed to do, which is write code. This means that if you're working on a hackathon project, write some code! It doesn't matter if the code only works on odd days of the month as long as your demo is on an odd day of the month. Stopping at a PowerPoint presentation means the death of your idea unless you want to become a technology hipster and work at a top-down company.

At a macro scale, software companies have to take chances. At some point they have to stop maintaining something (a bird in the hand) and take a bet (two in the bush) on building out a new offering. In that case, the company would prefer two in the bush over a bird in the hand.

This was very enlightening for me as a young engineer. I'm trying, as we all should, to strive to be an implementor and not a technology hipster. It's much more difficult to write code than to make a PowerPoint presentation. There's no doubt about that.

This blog will be my dumping ground for things that I've been thinking. This is where I can be a technology hipster. I'll write about a cool idea I have, and maybe talk about running code from time to time. This is a magical place where you can hear about birds in the hand, and those in the bush.