“Fashion” is a word we associate with clothes. Software is hard, it’s objective, it’s taught in schools as “computer science.” Software can’t have anything to do with “fashion” if it’s a “science,” can it?
Sadly, software is infected by fashion trends and styles at least as much as clothes. Fashion has a huge impact on how software is built. Understanding this, along with other key concepts like those involved in Wartime Software, can contribute greatly to building great software that powers a business to great success.
Fashion
We all know what fashion is, exemplified by fashion shows like this one:
with impossibly thin female models strutting down cat walks wearing clothes that no one is likely to wear in real life.
Not as often, but guys too:
Far more important than models wearing extreme clothes is everyday fashion. I grew up looking at men dressed like this:
It's what men wore to church and to aptly-named "white-collar" businesses all the time. But there's nothing special about a suit and tie. Here's a look at Dutch fashion in the early 1600's:
Fashion is arbitrary! it's just what people wear. Everyone judges you by what you or don't wear, according to prevailing fashions.
Of course, "fashion" goes way beyond how people dress. It's how you act, how you speak, the accent you use, the interests you express, just about everything. If you don't think it matters, just trying wearing NY Yankee regalia into a South Boston sports bar and start spouting trash about the Red Sox. Lots of people who think they're the kind of people who are "above" fashion are driven by it nonetheless -- just look how they respond to people walking into a room, and if there's any doubt, seconds after the newcomer opens his mouth.
Fashion is about people. It's about belonging, status, fitting in or "making a statement." We live in a fashion-dominated world, like it or not.
Fashion in Software
I was one of those people who was convinced I was "above" fashion. Being above it made me superior, in my mind, to those who were slaves to it. During and beyond college, I bought the few clothes I wore from a local used clothing store and wore hiking boots most of the time. Once when I was in my first post-college programming job, I was called out of the cubical where I spent most of my time, heads-down, programming away, and asked to come into a meeting in the front of the building. I walked in to a meeting populated entirely by men in suits. One of the men I didn't know glanced at me and immediately exclaimed "finally! We get to talk with someone who knows things!"
I had been called into a sales meeting, and one of the visitors had software questions no one knew the answer to, so "the suits" had called in the guy who knew the answers. How I dressed and acted in fact made a statement to the visitors -- I dressed the way a programmer dressed, the kind of programmer who wanted to program, not one who aspired to management. So, like it or not, I was making a "fashion statement," while fooling myself thinking that I was "above" fashion. The hard fact is, no one is "above" fashion. The way we dress and act and talk, the choices we make, says loads about us. Those unavoidable choices clearly establish our place in various groups, social and status hierarchies.
Software Fashions
Given how fashion-driven our lives are, it would be shocking if programmers weren't fashion-driven in their shared activity of software. In fact, they are! Sadly, the vast majority don't think their choices are fashion-driven. They believe they're modern, with-it software professionals who are using the proven, advanced methods for doing software. The trouble is, few of them take the trouble to cast a knowledgeable, cold, hard eye on the arguments, experience and facts concerning their chosen methods and tools. They've made their choices so they can be with whatever software social group they identify with and/or aspire to. It's all about relationships and status. If you're ambitious, you may want to be with the "cool kids," members of an elect social group, yes, in software. And it works! If it didn't "work" (elevate their software group status), they wouldn't do it.
We like to think of people who wear fashion-forward clothes as being empty-headed, shallow people. Surely, programmers aren't that! But to the extent that they adapt fashion-forward software, that's exactly what they're doing -- only worse! They're lying to themselves, deceiving others, and making believe they're pushing some trendy software thing because it's advanced technology, yielding results superior to the obsolete stuff that used to be the standard.
Just like with clothes, software fashions evolve. Fads start and may become hot. The fad may evolve into a fashion as it spreads, with people who haven't adopted it taking notice. The fashion may further evolve into standard practice, with eyebrows being raised for anyone who dares to question it. More often, the fashion simply fades away.
It's rare for any fad or fashion to be explicitly repudiated -- oh, that was a terrible idea, people are turning away from it for good reason and here's why. No one says that! In the "advanced clothing" area, everyone knows that fashion is "just fashion." In software, fashions aren't considered "fashions;" they are considered "advances," emerging modern techniques that are objectively better than what came before, like a new drug or operation that has emerged from clinical trials and now saves lives that used to be lost! Saying that a widely adopted software fashion was never proven, was always a bad idea, but got widely used and promoted anyway would expose the game. So when software fashions die, they fade slowly away and simply stop getting used and talked about.
After a fashion fades away, it's generally forgotten by nearly everyone, usually except for a band of true believers. Some of the more intellectually heavy-weight fashions retreat to academia, where they live on, always with "exciting futures."
Some of these flourished-but-died fashions rise to live renewed lives. In one pattern, the fashion was so broadly accepted but such a failure (though rarely discussed as such) that when it becomes fashionable again, it has a new name. No one ever refers to last time, why the older fashion didn't work out, and why this slightly altered version of the same thing will. In another pattern, the fashion baldly re-emerges with exactly the same name, and nearly the same blazing-bright future as the last time. Sometimes there are even some successes. But it remains a fashion and therefore has disappointing results to anyone who cares to look, which is essentially no one -- such is the social power of fashion!
Not all fashions die. Some fashions have such powerful support that they become locked in as part of modern mainstream practice, sometimes even becoming part of so-called Computer Science, or at least IT Management. I don't fully understand how and why this happens, but I know that in part, the fashions that become standards address some widely felt need in the people involved in software. When this happens, there is often a series of waves of renewal or reform -- while the reformers refuse to acknowledge fundamental problems with the fashion-enshrined-as-best-practice, they latch onto some minor tweak or addition and promote it, usually with a new name, as the best way to get results with standard-practice X.
What are these software fashions exactly?
I have already talked about a few important toxic software fashions. I have gone into huge detail for a couple of them, with multiple blog posts and even books. I'm gradually starting to understand this bizarre phenomenon in terms of powerful social fashions with bad results, masquerading as "advances." I'm seeing the resistance to seeing the Emperor's New Clothes for what they are because of the self-delusional conception of software as a science/math-based STEM field, rather than as the pre-scientific collective group-think that it largely is.
I have already challenged a couple of the modern hot fashions, for example my series of posts on AI/ML -- a classic example of a once-hot fashion that has died away and been re-born multiple times. This particular fashion is distinguished from some of the others because there are some truly excellent algorithms at the heart of it that can be applied to great benefit -- and this has been true for decades! But because of widespread fashion-itus, the money and effort spent on them is mostly wasted.
In future posts and at least one future book (in process), I will continue to dive into and expose specific software fashions for what they are. I do this in part to strengthen the resolve of those special people and groups (some of them ones we've invested in) with the understanding that the "wrong" or "uncool" things they're doing give them a fundamental business/technical advantage, and they should stick to their guns and ride their truly effective methods to success, to the benefit of all concerned.
Further reading:
Resistance to treating scurvy compared to software disease treatments.
The story of how I discovered the fashion vs. what-really-works issue.
Deconstructing project management.
The story of fashions-becoming-standard-practice.
Big Data fashion. Big Data bubble.
Evidence-based software methods don't exist.
The recurring fashion of data definition location.
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