Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

It's a great feeling when you read about someone you know doing amazing things - Congrats Mr. Suliman!

Read about the cool things him and some friends are doing with Integrated Voice Recognition systems in the Star - Wits student engineers' idea burns bright in Microsoft's Firefly.

Apart from this being an achievement in itself, it is also proof that when
engineering students always say they are working crazy hours on
their projects, they are! (Imran, we are still not convinced by you!)

I usually warn about ideas getting "bigerised" at the organisations I'm involved in. It's a sure way to derail a great idea. Of course, the concept is not my own - so I present another cool story from from Michael Hiltzik’s “Dealers of Lightening – Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age", where I first read about "biggerism" a few years ago:

The Berkley Computer Corporation (BCC) pioneers were about to become victims of the “second-system effect”. The theory of the second systems was formulated by an IBM executive named Frederick Brooks, whose career supervising large-scale software teams taught him that designers of computer systems tend to build into their second projects all the pet features that tight finances or short deadlines forced them to leave out of their first. The result is an overgrown, inefficient monstrosity that rarely works as expected. As he put it in his pithy masterpiece, The Mythical Man-Month: “The second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs.” The BCC machine could have sprung full-blown from the pages of Brook’s text. As Lampson recalled, the designers of the economical and practical SDS 940 regarded their next machine as an opportunity to “look at all the things you could make much more wonderful, and plan to make them all more wonderful by creating a system that could handle a lot more users and much larger programs and was much faster and used computing resources much more efficiently and was better and more wonderful in every possible way. “It was not a very realistic enterprise,” he acknowledged. “But at the time is seemed great, the proper next step, as second systems often do.”… Some of the workers, including Thacker, could tell early on that the project was getting out of hand. The engineer’s engineer possessed the unique trait of aiming for less, not more, in his systems. “This was so unusual for an engineer,” recalled Charles Simonyi, a young immigrant from communist Hungary who assisted Thacker, watching as he chain-smoked through the night designing the machine’s logic, “He had this word for what was happening. He called it ‘biggerism’. I heard this word from him and my English was not that good and I always thought it sounded slightly obscene, because he’d say, you know, ‘This project has been biggered.’”

This lesson goes beyond systems - it applies to any activity which requires a bit of planning.

Here’s a great story from the Computer Science Lab (CSL) at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) that a recent bout of e-mail made me remember. They had a weekly meeting known as “Dealer”. Basically,

a single researcher would propose an idea or project, then stand alone to defend it against dissection by his peers… “If someone tried to push their personality rather than their argument, they’d find that it wouldn’t work.”

But the argument had best be carefully thought out. Anyone trying to slip an unsound concept past this group was sure to be stopped short by an explosive “Bull$#&t!” from Thacker or “Nonsense!” from the beetled-browed ARPANET verteran Severo Ornstien. Then would follow a cascade of angry denunciations: “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” “That’ll never work!” “That’s the stupidiest idea I’ve ever heard!” Lampson might add a warp-speed chapter and verse deconstruction of the speaker’s sorry reasoning. If the chastened dealer was lucky (and still standing), the discussion might finally turn to how he might improve on his poor first effort….

...It was felt that if you were wrong you were done no favor in being told you were right, or half-right, or had made a decent try. “There was nothing personal about it,” said Ornstein. “We didn’t want to be coddled or have our time wasted.”

From Michael Hiltzik’s “Dealers of Lightening – Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age”

Just to put it into context, Business 2.0 described PARC by saying “Think of all the brilliant tricks that have made today’s computers so useful and such a breeze to use… It seems hard to believe now, but every one of these gizmos was dreamt up by a Xerox scientist or engineer, some a decade before they came to market..”. They must have been doing something right.

I found this gem hidden in a Paul Graham essay. He writes

I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.