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Recently, I was asked to review Coderspeak for Teach Secondary magazine, so I reviwed it with an eye on the Computing Programme of Study in England. However, a couple of things in it struck me as potentially interesting from a writer’s point of view.
The underlying assumption of Coderspeak is that programming is a purely objective-based affair that involves identifying a problem, breaking it down into its component parts and writing some code to address the issue. In the real world, however, there’s rather more to it than that, as this examination of the field from an anthropologist’s perspective makes clear.
“Introducing and applying Conway’s Law, Gresham’s Law and the sunken cost fallacy to the practice of writing.”
Conway’s Law, for example, states that an organisation’s systems reflect the way people within that organisation communicate with one another. I had never heard of that ‘law’ before, but having dealt with a few large organisations I would say it is pretty accurate.
I remember one company contacting me to ask if I could do a piece of writing for them with a very short deadline: a week. I agreed in principle, but it was downhill from then on, because they kept changing their minds about what exactly they wanted. I had the impression that everyone and their dog was involved. The only thing that did not change was the deadline.
The author, Heurich goes on to also consider whether code should be ‘beautiful’ or ‘brief’, and when it’s best to simply ditch legacy code rather than continue building on it. I think the parallel here for writers is: at what point do you keep trying to improve a piece, or abandon it altogether?
Last week, for example, I made three attempts to write an article. When I say ‘attempts’, I mean two half articles and one whole one — and remained unsatisfied with all of them. In the end I decided to write on a different topic altogether, asnd the piece virtually wrote itself. This reminded me of two concepts from Economics: the sunk cost fallacy and Gresham’s Law.
To take the second one first, on the face of it there is nothing relevant to writing. The law is about the debasement of currency, and was stated as ‘bad money drives out good’. So it made me think: does bad writing drive out good? If you’re not happy with a piece, if you think it’s less good than it ought to be, then surely if you publish it then the quality of your writing will be debased in some sense. Probably not if it’s just the odd one or two pieces — even great writers have published articles that are not likely to set the world alight, because they had a deadline to meet and simply did the best they could. But if there’s too much of the below par output I should think readers, or potential readers, are going to vote with their feet so to speak.
As for the sunken cost fallacy, it’s to do with the tendency for compannies to continue pouring money into a no-hope venture on the grounds that if they stop now all their previos investment would be rendered a waste. I think of it in terms of time. It’s annoying, when I’ve spend three hours on various drafts, to abandon the piece altogether, but the alternative is possibly to waste even more time. In that case, giving up and turning to something else would seem the most rational thing to do.
Does that mean all the previous effort has been wasted? No, I don’t think so. Keep the drafts, and one day when you’re looking for an idea, you might just happen to come across it. With the passage of time, and a different perspective, the next time you tackle the article it might just flow with almost no effort on your part!