I am a bit young for Bob, but I read about its story in Joel’s book about UI, well Bob failed but at least some of the characters where used to create the Help of Microsoft Office suite hahaha.
Make fun all you want, but I’d rather have Bob on my resume than the nameless, faceless stew of middleware, stored procedures, Windows services and batch processes I’ve worked on and promptly forgotten.
It’s good to see that you didn’t give in to the “Bob was just ahead of its time” nonsense that many of the commenters on the blog post to which you linked did. Maybe that’s just considered the polite thing to say when talking to someone that was involved with a failed project, because I have no idea what they can be talking about. Bob was just plain idiotic (selecting a program from a list is difficult and intimidating, but if I put it in a gift-wrapped box on a shelf in a pretend living room then I’ll feel happier when I run it?).
It’s also good to see that, unlike the author of that blog post, you frame it more as good people that got stuck working on Bob rather than Bob somehow spawing all these great people. The only thing I’d take issue with is you somewhat imply that Bob was not a failure for them because they learned something from it. You know what? I doubt it. It’s more likely they got stuck on the team, gritted their teeth while churning out what they knew to be a really stupid piece of software, and thanked their lucky stars when it was finally over. About all they probably learned was to do whatever they could to avoid being put on a dumb project like that in the future.
Chris McCall would rather have Bob on his resume than nameless middleware, etc. It would be a good conversation starter (“ha ha, seriously, you really worked on that thing?”) and so might be a good interview ice-breaker, but it certainly by itself isn’t going to make anyone more apt to hire you.
“…nameless, faceless stew of middleware, stored procedures, windows services, batch processes…”
Is there a shortcut name that describes such projects? Failjects? Soupware? Broodsoft?
Yeah seriously, wouldn’t it be better to blog about experiences with StackOverflow and some real-world issues? Like @sgh writes, it’s all been quite pedestrian lately. Say this is how we did this or that, or achieve performance of xyz?
It’s gotta be hard though. You start blogging, get popular, probably don’t care a toss about blogging anymore, but have to. lol.
Tea Time.
ps where’s catto lately?
The point about the surgeons sounds like an extension of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The best surgeons are aware of how much they still need to learn about surgery while the worst surgeons believe they know it all. I do have to say thanks for pointing out a good way to determine your surgeon’s self-evaluation.
I love failure, it allows me to learn. I’ve had many failures in my past, and my current project, which I believe will work (You have to believe or it will never!) has been a slow build up of my past failures which were out of my control, now that I have it all in my control, I feel I can do better. Here’s to the future and the past!
When I first saw Bob I was 18 and I, like many other users, hated the thing. My mom, on the other hand, loved it. I guess she couldn’t figure out how the Start menu worked or something. She was all gung-ho about making her “house” in Bob and tried to get everyone in my family to do it too. One day, my 8 or 9 year old brother figured out my mom’s password (probably by just asking her), logged into her house and placed animated fires all over every room. When Mom logged in the next time, she found her precious house in flames. Virtual arson. Gotta love it.
Many of the former software engineers at Williams are fans of the site and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from them. I was working there at the time myself in the slot department, waiting for a spot in pinball that obviously never arrived. Watching it happen was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen though, you’ve never witnessed such dedication, passion, and inspiration. I’ll never forget it, thanks for recognizing and spotlighting a truly amazing thing.
It’s always a crappy feeling to fail, but you’re right. Some of the most epic failures of my life have actually made me better. It applies to much more than programming.
“The road to wisdom? Well, it’s plain
And simple to express:
Err And err And err again
But less And less And less.” - Piet Hien
And A.J. brings up the best anecdote. His mom loved it after she started using it. We digerati hated it with a passion.
Remind you of another much-malinged product?
The lesson is not about failed projects. It’s about how divorced from normal reality we in the tech echo-chamber are. For example, have you ever played Deer Hunter (the computer game)? Do you know how many copies it’s sold?
Great post Jeff. I remember when I came to this realization a few years ago, working on a project that I knew was going to fail even as I was being assigned to work on it - it just wasn’t staffed for success. So every day I had to come to work to do my assigned job, knowing that it made no difference to the company because the project would eventually be canceled. I had to figure out how to keep motivation, and what you mentioned is where I eventually came to: Every day was a chance to become a better software developer, and every day I could take pride in writing great software. Realizing that gave my job meaning again, and made me a much better professional.
So, would YOU hire someone who’s resume is full of failed projects?
This reads like a Full House episode except more retarded.
Great blog! As you write above, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the industry who hasn’t encountered failure. I think after every project one has the responsibility to himself to go back and ask ‘Where are all the places I totally screwed the pooch?’ It’s hard to ask yourself this, though, and even harder to answer honestly. I can’t think of a single project I worked on where there wasn’t at least one thing where I looked back and said ‘God, you were a dumbass’. The people who instead prefer to point fingers at others, lay the blame on fate or circumstance are the ones you really have to look out for.
Yeah, Jeff, I went to the entire trouble of coming all the way to your blog, and I didn’t like this entry. So now I’m going to go to a bunch of trouble to write a comment about how I, with my highly developed blog-assessment skills, now consider your blog worthless and – wait, I’m not done! – and how Real Soon Now I’m going to stop reading it. So there. Hope you read this and reconsider what a failure the blog is. If you want to read a REAL blog that gets a LOT of traffic, be sure to visit … uh, well, I don’t actually blog. I just spend a lot of time complaining about how other people’s blogs suck. On their blogs.
Anyhoo … I was on Bob. Bob had a vision that several people have alluded to, which is that it was a computer UI for people who are 180 degrees removed from anyone who reads a blog about programming. People should go down to the local library and volunteer to teach beginning computer classes to old folks for a couple of quarters, and THEN come back here and talk about how stupid Bob was. Of course, one might ask them to actually use Bob for a while, not just read an Infoworld columnist’s opinion about it.
Did folks on Bob learn from it? Sure. How many people who are dissing Bob here learned from Bob, and what did THEY learn that they then applied to THEIR projects?
Love it! As much as I love clean code I think developers should focus on delivering good products and learning from mistakes in failed products. Sometimes we tend to say something along these lines: “Well, it failed, but the code was awesome”. I try to stop thinking like that. Clean code is the means for releasing a successful product, not the objective.
@John W - If that person says:
Project 1 - Was fun, but then sucked, and it failed
Project 2 - Wasn’t fun, always sucked, and was determined to fail
Now, I wouldn’t hire them. But if a person put on his resume:
Project 1 - Was fun, learned a lot, but unfortunately, didn’t work out
Project 2 - Was tough, pushed through it, still wasn’t meant to be
Then yes, I would hire him. It’s all about how they project themselves and their attitude towards the project, if they are bitter and sour, then they wouldn’t be good candidates, but if the overall description of the failed projects is positive, they are the type of person that learns from failure and is the good candidate, like Jeff explains above.