Kyle Brandt, a system administrator, asks Should Developers have Access to Production?

A question that comes up again and again in web development companies is:

"Should the developers have access to the production environment, and if they do, to what extent?"

My view on this is that as a whole they should have limited access to production. A little disclaimer before I attempt to justify this view is that this standpoint is in no way based on the perceived quality or attitude of the developers -- so please don't take it this way.

This is a tricky one for me to answer, because, well, I'm a developer. More specifically, I'm one of the developers Kyle is referring to. How do I know that? Because Kyle works for our company, Stack Overflow Internet Services Incorporated©®™. And Kyle is a great system administrator. How do I know that? Two reasons:

1. He's one of the top Server Fault users.
2. He had the audacity to write about this issue on the Server Fault blog.

From my perspective, the whole point of the company is to talk about what we're doing. Getting things done is important, of course, but we have to stop occasionally to write up what we're doing, how we're doing it, and why we're even doing it in the first place -- including all our doubts and misgivings and concerns. If we don't, we're cheating ourselves, and you guys, out of something much deeper. Yes, writing about what we're doing and explaining it to the community helps us focus. It lets our peers give us feedback. But most importantly of all, it lets anyone have the opportunity to learn from our many, many mistakes … and who knows, perhaps even the occasional success.

That's basically the entire philosophy behind our Stack Exchange Q&A network, too. Let's all talk about this stuff in public, so that we can teach each other how to get better at whatever the heck it is we love to do.

(Sometimes I get the feeling this idea makes my co-founder nervous, which I continually struggle to understand. If we don't walk the walk, why are we even doing this? But I digress.)

The saga of System Administrators versus Programmers is not a new one; I don't think I've ever worked at any company where these two factions weren't continually battling with each other in some form. It's truly an epic struggle, but to understand it, you have to appreciate that both System Administrators and Programmers have different, and perhaps complementary, supernatural powers.

Programmers are like vampires. They're frequently up all night, paler than death itself, and generally afraid of being exposed to daylight. Oh yes, and they tend think of themselves (or at least their code) as immortal.

System Administrators are like werewolves. They may look outwardly ordinary, but are incredibly strong, mostly invulnerable to stuff that would kill regular people -- and prone to strange transformations during a moon "outage".

Let me be very clear that just as Kyle respects programmers, I have a deep respect for system administrators:

Although there is certainly some crossover, we believe that the programming community and the IT/sysadmin community are different beasts. Just because you're a hotshot programmer doesn't mean you have mastered networking and server configuration. And I've met a few sysadmins who could script circles around my code. That's why Server Fault gets its own domain, user profiles, and reputation system.

Different "beasts" indeed.

Anyway, if you're looking for a one size fits all answer to the question of how much access programmers should have to production environments, I'm sorry, I can't give you one. Every company is different, every team is different. I know, it's a sucky answer, but it depends.

However, as anyone who has watched the latest season of True Blood (or, God help us all, the Twilight Eclipse movie) can attest, there are ways for vampires and werewolves to work together. In a healthy team, everyone feels their abilities are being used and not squandered.

On our team, we're all fair-to-middling sysadmins. But there are a million things to do, and having a professional sysadmin means we can focus on the programming while the networking, hardware, and operational stuff gets a whole lot more TLC and far better (read: non-hacky) processes put in place. We're happy to refocus our efforts on what we're expert at, and let Kyle put his skills to work in areas that he's expert at. Now, that said, we don't want to cede full access to the production servers -- but there's a happy middle ground where our access becomes infrequent and minor over time, except in the hopefully rare event of an all hands on deck emergency.

The art of managing vampires and werewolves, I think, is to ensure that they spend their time not fighting amongst themselves, but instead, using those supernatural powers together to achieve a common goal they could not otherwise. In my experience, when programmers and system administrators fight, it's because they're bored. You haven't given them a sufficiently daunting task, one that requires the full combined use of their unique skills to achieve.

Remember, it's not vampires versus werewolves. It's vampires and werewolves.

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Like any self-respecting geek, I'm mostly an indoor enthusiast.

But on those unfortunate occasions when I am compelled -- for reasons entirely beyond my control -- to leave the house, I do so fully armed with my crucial utility belt items. Yes, you heard me, I transform from the geeky Bruce Wayne to the gosh-darned Batman!

At least, that's how I like to think of it.

I've been talking about this every-day carry stuff for quite a while now. The 2010 edition of my personal utility belt is mostly subtle tweaks, but I daresay it's the best one yet.

The art of every-day carry must go on. What you see here is the contents of my pocket:

1. Patriot 32 GB USB flash drive
   
   Now you can have a whole freakin' hard drive worth of files in your pocket. Just in case, you know, you have an emergency need to upload a virus to an alien mothership, or something. Beware the many cheap, slow USB flash drives out there; this one is a real gem. It's inexpensive, and per my measurements, about as fast as they get. This is important because the larger the flash drive, the more important speed becomes. Hard to believe I've gone from carrying a 512 megabyte flash drive in 2005 to a 32 gigabyte flashdrive in 2010.
   
   
2. Leatherman Squirt P4
   
   Ounce for ounce, nothing beats the utility of the Leatherman Squirt. This time I opted for the plier (P) version instead of the scissors (S), and after seeing how much more generally useful the pliers are, I am now a little ashamed to admit I ever carried the wussy scissors version. Pliers all the way, baby. And yes, that is a Pulp Fiction joke you see on it.
   
   
3. Fenix mini AAA LED flashlight model LD01R2
   
   Since I've been carrying them in 2005, the average LED flashlight has gone from bright, to very bright, to amazingly bright, to ridiculously blinding laser-like bright. It's scary how bright these fancy milled aluminum AAA LED flashlights get now. What I like about this one is that it lets you trade off stupid-brightness for something practical, like greater runtime: you can twist the top to switch levels: 9 Lumens for 11 hours, 28 Lumens for 3.5 hours, or 85 Lumens for 1 hour.
   
   
4. Small Nite Ize s-biner
   
   These little nite-ize carabiners are awesome for quick attachment and detachment of your EDC items, but I'll warn you: resist the urge to put everything you carry on a carabiner, because if you do, the weight and "jangliness" goes up a lot -- and this way lies madness. Consider how many items you actually remove from your keychain regularly. For me, the only item I frequently removed to work with was the Squirt, so that's the only one I put on a carabiner.

Rest assured, everything here is carefully selected with the appropriate levels of monomaniacal attention to detail. For this weight and size, I don't think you can do better. (And don't think I've forgotten about optimizing my wallet, either. Oh no. Quite the contrary.)

However, I have to add a special category this year for the other must-have EDC utility belt item: the smartphone. What self-respecting superhero would leave the house these days without their smartphone? I'm not religious about it, but I use and rather like the iPhone 4, and I'm continually amazed how many things it does that I used to carry separate items for:

• cell phone (obviously)
• "Nintendo DSwhatever" for portable gaming
• GPS
• point and shoot digital camera
• near-desktop quality mobile web browser and email client
• mp3 player with speakers
• audio and hi-def video recorder
• DVD player
• ebook reader
• watch, alarm
• emergency flashlight (via front facing LED flash control)
• scanner
• level and ruler

Smartphones really are the ultimate gadget. The list of functions is already enormous, and I'm sure I'm leaving out a few other things that you can do with a modern smartphone.

In a pinch, I could conceivably drop the AAA LED flashlight and the USB flash drive from my EDC kit and substitute the smartphone. Not exactly, mind you, but it's getting closer every year. At this rate, Apple could introduce a flip-out blade on the iPhone 7 and reduce my entire EDC kit to one item.

Anyway, that's what's on my utility belt in 2010. What's on yours?

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On a recent airplane flight, I happened to catch the movie Groundhog Day. Again.

If you aren't familiar with this classic film, the premise is simple: Bill Murray, somehow, gets stuck reliving the same day over and over.

It's been at least 5 years since I've seen Groundhog Day. I don't know if it's my advanced age, or what, but it really struck me on this particular viewing: this is no comedy. There's a veneer of broad comedy, yes, but lurking just under that veneer is a deep, dark existential conundrum.

It might be amusing to relive the same day a few times, maybe even a few dozen times. But an entire year of the same day -- an entire decade of the same day -- everything happening in precisely, exactly the same way? My back of the envelope calculation easily ran to a decade. But I was wrong. The director, Harold Ramis thinks it was actually 30 or 40 years.

I think the 10-year estimate is too short. It takes at least 10 years to get good at anything, and alloting for the down time and misguided years [Phil] spent, it had to be more like 30 or 40 years [spent reliving the same day].

We only see bits and pieces of the full experience in the movie, but this time my mind began filling in the gaps. Repeating the same day for decades plays to our secret collective fear that our lives are irrelevant and ultimately pointless. None of our actions -- even suicide, in endless grisly permutations -- ever change anything. What's the point? Why bother? How many of us are trapped in here, and how can we escape?

This is some dark, scary stuff when you really think about it.

You want a prediction about the weather, you're asking the wrong Phil.

I'll give you a winter prediction.
It's gonna be cold,
it's gonna be gray,
and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

Comedy, my ass. I wanted to cry.

But there is a way out: redemption through repetition. If you have to watch Groundhog Day a few times to appreciate it, you're not alone. Indeed, that seems to be the whole point. Just ask Roger Ebert:

"Groundhog Day" is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable. It unfolds so inevitably, is so entertaining, so apparently effortless, that you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is.

Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase This is like "Groundhog Day" to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something.

There's something delightfully Ouroboros about the epiphanies and layered revelations in repeated viewings of a movie that is itself about (nearly) endless repetition.

Which, naturally, brings me to A/B testing. That's what Phil spends most of those thirty years doing. He spends it pursuing a woman, technically, but it's how he does it that is interesting:

Rita: This whole day has just been one long setup.

Phil: It hasn't.

Rita: And I hate fudge!

Phil: [making a mental list] No white chocolate. No fudge.

Rita: What are you doing? Are you making some kind of list? Did you call my friends and ask what I like and what I don't like? Is this what love is for you?

Phil: This is real. This is love.

Rita: Stop saying that! You must be crazy.

Phil doesn't just go on one date with Rita, he goes on thousands of dates. During each date, he makes note of what she likes and responds to, and drops everything she doesn't. At the end he arrives at -- quite literally -- the perfect date. Everything that happens is the most ideal, most desirable version of all possible outcomes on that date on that particular day. Such are the luxuries afforded to a man repeating the same day forever.

This is the purest form of A/B testing imaginable. Given two choices, pick the one that "wins", and keep repeating this ad infinitum until you arrive at the ultimate, most scientifically desirable choice. Your marketing weasels would probably collapse in an ecstatic, religious fervor if they could achieve anything even remotely close to the level of perfect A/B testing depicted in Groundhog Day.

But at the end of this perfect date, something impossible happens: Rita rejects Phil.

Phil wasn't making these choices because he honestly believed in them. He was making these choices because he wanted a specific outcome -- winning over Rita -- and the experimental data told him which path he should take. Although the date was technically perfect, it didn't ring true to Rita, and that made all the difference.

That's the problem with A/B testing. It's empty. It has no feeling, no empathy, and at worst, it's dishonest. As my friend Nathan Bowers said:

A/B testing is like sandpaper. You can use it to smooth out details, but you can't actually create anything with it.

The next time you reach for A/B testing tools, remember what happened to Phil. You can achieve a shallow local maximum with A/B testing -- but you'll never win hearts and minds. If you, or anyone on your team, is still having trouble figuring that out, well, the solution is simple.

Just watch Groundhog Day again.

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Remember that Scene in Star Trek IV where Scotty tried to use a Mac Plus?

Using a mouse or keyboard to control a computer? Don't be silly. In the future, clearly there's only one way computers will be controlled: by speaking to them.

There's only one teeny-tiny problem with this magical future world of computers we control with our voices.

It doesn't work.

Despite ridiculous, order of magnitude increases in computing power over the last decade, we can't figure out how to get speech recognition accuracy above 80% -- when the baseline human voice transcription accuracy rate is anywhere from 96% to 98%!

In 2001 recognition accuracy topped out at 80%, far short of HAL-like levels of comprehension. Adding data or computing power made no difference. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University checked again in 2006 and found the situation unchanged. With human discrimination as high as 98%, the unclosed gap left little basis for conversation. But sticking to a few topics, like numbers, helped. Saying “one” into the phone works about as well as pressing a button, approaching 100% accuracy. But loosen the vocabulary constraint and recognition begins to drift, turning to vertigo in the wide-open vastness of linguistic space.

As Robert Fortner explained in Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition, after all these years, we're desperately far away from any sort of universal speech recognition that's useful or practical.

Now, we do have to clarify that we're talking about universal recognition: saying anything to a computer, and having it reliably convert that into a valid, accurate text representation. When you constrain the voice input to a more limited vocabulary -- say, just numbers, or only the names that happen to be in your telephone's address book -- it's not unreasonable to expect a high level of accuracy. I tend to think of this as "voice control" rather than "voice recognition".

Still, I think we're avoiding the real question: is voice control, even hypothetically perfect voice control, more effective than the lower tech alternatives? In my experience, speech is one of the least effective, inefficient forms of communicating with other human beings. By that, I mean ...

• typical spoken communication tends to be off-the-cuff and ad-hoc. Unless you're extremely disciplined, on average you will be unclear, rambling, and excessively verbose.
• people tend to hear about half of what you say at any given time. If you're lucky.
• spoken communication puts a highly disproportionate burden on the listener. Compare the time it takes to process a voicemail versus the time it takes to read an email.

I am by no means against talking with my fellow human beings. I have a very deep respect for those rare few who are great communicators in the challenging medium of conversational speech. Though we've all been trained literally from birth how to use our voices to communicate, voice communication remains filled with pitfalls and misunderstandings. Even in the best of conditions.

So why in the world -- outside of a disability -- would I want to extend the creaky, rickety old bridge of voice communication to controlling my computer? Isn't there a better way?

Robert's post contains some examples in the comments from voice control enthusiasts:

in addition to extremely accurate voice dictation, there are those really cool commands, like being able to say something like "search Google for Balloon Boy" or something like that and having it automatically open up your browser and enter the search term -- something like this is accomplished many times faster than a human could do it. Or, being able to total up a column of numbers in Microsoft Excel by saying simply "total this column" and seeing the results in a blink of an eye, literally.

That's funny, because I just fired up the Google app on my iPhone, said "balloon boy" into it, and got .. a search for "blue boy". I am not making this up. As for the Excel example, total which column? Let's assume you've dealt with the tricky problem of selecting what column you're talking about with only your voice. (I'm sorry, was it D5? B5?) Wouldn't it be many times faster to click the toolbar icon with your mouse, or press the keyboard command equivalent, to sum the column -- rather than methodically and tediously saying the words "sum this column" out loud?

I'm also trying to imagine a room full of people controlling their computers or phones using their voices. It's difficult enough to get work done in today's chatty work environments without the added burden of a floor full of people saying "zoom ... enhance" to their computers all day long. Wouldn't we all end up hoarse and deaf?

Let's look at another practical example -- YouTube's automatic speech recognition feature. I clicked through to the first UC Berkeley video with this feature, clicked the CC (closed caption) icon, and immediately got .. this.

"Light exerts force on matter". But according to Google's automatic speech recognition, it's "like the search for some matter". Unsurprisingly, it does not get better from there. You'd be way more confused than educated if you had to learn this lecture from the automatic transcription.

Back when Joel Spolsky and I had a podcast together, a helpful listener suggested using speech recognition to get a basic podcast transcript going. Everything I knew about voice recognition told me this wouldn't help, but harm. What's worse: transcribing everything by hand, from scratch -- or correcting every third or fourth word in an auto-generated machine transcript? Maybe it's just me, but the friction of the huge error rate inherent in the machine transcript seems far more intimidating than a blank slate human transcription. The humans may not be particularly efficient, but they all add value along the way -- collective human judgment can editorially improve the transcript, by removing all the duplication, repetition, and "ums" of a literal, by-the-book transcription.

In 2004, Mike Bliss composed a poem about voice recognition. He then read it to voice recognition software on his PC, and rewrote it as recognized.

a poem by Mike Bliss

like a baby, it listens
it can't discriminate
it tries to understand
it reflects what it thinks you say
it gets it wrong... sometimes
sometimes it gets it right.
One day it will grow up,
like a baby, it has potential
will it go to work?
will it turn to crime?
you look at it indulgently.
you can't help loving it, can you?
a poem by like myth

like a baby, it nuisance
it can't discriminate
it tries to oven
it reflects lot it things you say
it gets it run sometimes
sometimes it gets it right
won't day it will grow bop
Ninth a baby, it has provincial
will it both to look?
will it the two crime?
you move at it inevitably
you can't help loving it, cannot you?

The real punchline here is that Mike re-ran the experiment in 2008, and after 5 minutes of voice training, the voice recognition got all but 2 words of the original poem correct!

I suspect that's still not good enough in the face of the existing simpler alternatives. Remember handwriting recognition? It was all the rage in the era of the Apple Newton.

It wasn't as bad as Doonesbury made it out to be. I learned Palm's Graffiti handwriting recognition language and got fairly proficient with it. More than ten years later, you'd expect to see massively improved handwriting recognition of some sort in today's iPads and iPhones and iOthers, right? Well, maybe, if by "massively improved" you mean "nonexistent".

While it still surely has its niche uses, I personally don't miss handwriting recognition. Not even a little. And I can't help wondering if voice recognition will go the same way.

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After we created Stack Overflow, some people were convinced we had built a marginally better mousetrap for asking and answering questions. The inevitable speculation began: can we use your engine to build a Q&A site about {topic}? Our answer was Stack Exchange. Pay us $129 a month (and up), and you too can create a hosted Q&A community on our engine -- for whatever topic you like!

Well, I have a confession to make: my heart was never in Stack Exchange. It was a parallel effort in a parallel universe only tangentially related to my own. There's a whole host of reasons why, but if I had to summarize it in a sentence, I'd say that money is poisonous to communities. That $129/month doesn't sound like much -- and it isn't -- but the commercial nature of the enterprise permeated and distorted everything from the get-go.

(fortunately, the model is changing with Stack Exchange 2.0, but that's a topic for another blog post.)

Yes, Stack Overflow Internet Services Incorporated©®™ is technically a business, even a venture capital backed business now -- but I didn't co-found it because I wanted to make money. I co-founded it because I wanted to build something cool that made the internet better. Yes, selfishly for myself, of course, but also in conjunction with all of my fellow programmers, because I know none of us is as dumb as all of us.

Nobody is participating in Stack Overflow to make money. We're participating in Stack Overflow because …

• We love programming
• We want to leave breadcrumb trails for other programmers to follow so they can avoid making the same dumb mistakes we did
• Teaching peers is one of the best ways to develop mastery
• We can follow our own interests wherever they lead
• We want to collectively build something great for the community with our tiny slices of effort

I don't care how much you pay me, you'll never be able to recreate the incredibly satisfying feeling I get when demonstrating mastery within my community of peers. That's what we do on Stack Overflow: have fun, while making the internet one infinitesimally tiny bit better every day.

So is it any wonder that some claim Stack Overflow is more satisfying than their real jobs? Not to me.

If this all seems like a bunch of communist hippie bullcrap to you, I understand. It's hard to explain. But there is quite a bit of science documenting these strange motivations. Let's start with Dan Pink's 2009 TED talk.

Dan's talk centers on the candle problem. Given the following three items …

1. A candle
2. A box of thumbtacks
3. A book of matches

… how can you attach the candle to the wall?

It's not a very interesting problem on its own -- that is, until you try to incentivize teams to solve it:

Now I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem by a scientist from Princeton named Sam Glucksberg. Here's what he did.

To the first group, he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem."

To the second group, he said, "If you're in the top 25 percent of the fastest times you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today you get 20 dollars." (This was many years ago. Adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work.)

Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem?

Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. Three and a half minutes longer. Now this makes no sense, right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work. If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Give them bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got a monetary incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity -- and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.

It turns out that traditional carrot-and-stick incentives are only useful for repetitive, mechanical tasks. The minute you have to do anything even slightly complex that requires even a little problem solving without a clear solution or rules -- those incentives not only don't work, they make things worse!

Pink eventually wrote a book about this, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

There's no need to read the book; this clever ten minute whiteboard animation will walk you through the main points. If you view only one video today, view this one.

The concept of intrinsic motivation may not be a new one, but I find that very few companies are brave enough to actually implement them.

I've tried mightily to live up to the ideals that Stack Overflow was founded on when building out my team. I don't care when you come to work or what your schedule is. I don't care where in the world you live (provided you have a great internet connection). I don't care how you do the work. I'm not going to micromanage you and assign you a queue of task items. There's no need.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Because I know you yearn for the vast and endless sea, just like we do.

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