There is insanity in IT

I suppose this is usually the part where I’m supposed to say this is my first post and blah, blah …

Now that has been said and done, with great appreciation of the minds that did it before, I will get on to the real issue.

For all the time I have been involved in the IT industry, I have seen some great things and some really bad things. I have seen enough to make a grown man cry. But don’t worry, I didn’t — I was raised to believe that real men don’t cry — but please share the sentiment with me and feel free to cry.

This entry is titled “There is insanity in IT”. I want to focus particularly on the software/application development sector.

Granted, we have some pretty good developers out there, but the biggest problem lies with the designers, who by the way most of the time are the same guys who get to develop the system. Why do I think there is an element of insanity here? Here we go…

There are many definitions of insanity out there, but I like this one: it is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. An advert on 94.7 Highveld Stereo emphasised that it’s OK to do the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results is a total no-no.

Where am I going with this? We as designers/developers, myself included, want to tackle different problems in the same way, and yet expect to find a solution that will suit the current problem. Then you will get someone asking: “I did it exactly like this last time. Why is it not working?” Answer: “Because that is the solution for the last problem.”

Get the right solution for the right problem or else we are going to end up with a problem similar to the one identified by Mr Goldstuck at the Reserve Bank.

Do not use the same solution for all the problems, or be declared insane.