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Tomorrow, December 5th 2008, marks the 20th anniversary of my starting work in “the industry.”

This calls for five minutes of reminiscing.

I turned up for my first day of work as a trainee systems programmer at a big Australian bank’s EDP department. I recall being more than a little shocked at having to be at work before 8:06am each day. I was introduced to everyone I’d be working with shortly before being sent off to North Sydney to do MVS and IBM System/360 Assembler training for a few weeks.

At training I learned that the most powerful instruction in Assembly language was the no-op. The coding standard dictated that you sprinkle them throughout your code so that smarter programmers than you could patch your code, in memory, while running by overwriting your no-ops with useful code and then adding a statement to branch to the patch code over the defective instructions.

The bank had some great people. Some were consummate professionals and some were real cowboys.

Towards the end of my time at the bank I was introduced to the pointy-end of the economics of software development and process improvement.

A colleague returned from a long liquid lunch and let me in on the “big secret.”

He said only fools write good code. Code has to break for you to get called in. Being called in gives you overtime and visibility. Overtime is extra money. Being called in is heroism. Develop skill in writing bugs that are serious enough to call you in about, yet easy enough to fix soon after you get into the office. Overtime was paid for in four hour minimum units. Nobody notices people who write reliable code because they never get to perform heroic acts. Notice that the people who get promoted are those that handle high stress situations. Notice that the people handling these high stress situations are generally responsible for creating the high stress situation in the first place.

It was good motivation to find a new job.