For those of us who live heart-led, it’s not too hard to untangle the mess.
This figure tells a story that is no way surprising to anyone who has worked on software projects before: demand for fixes and features is rapidly outpacing the supply of development time invested, and so the issue tracker is no longer serving as any sort of meaningful project planning tool.
In all but the most well-funded, high functioning, and sustainable businesses — you can expect some degree of tension along these lines. The business side of the house may blame developers for not moving fast enough, while the developers blame the business for piling work on too quickly and not leaving time for cleanup, testing, and long-term investments. Typically, both sides have valid concerns, but they don’t do an especially good job of communicating with one another.
I’m including this excerpt because the website is also a mess. On my netbook, the page is partially obscured by a huge godawful “modal” at the bottom of the page that discourages people from visiting the site. I suppose the webmaster or someone imagines this is what passes for pressuring enticing you into staying longer on the site and absorbing their excessive advertising. The info is still easily accessed in a “crippled” browser like Links2 (or you can simply disable JavaScript).
It’s not that we ignore the materialistic foundation of Western Civilization; we understand it better than Westerners and that’s the whole point. We also reject it. We realize that a certain level of profit is necessary for business, but we aren’t willing to compromise divine moral character for the sake of profit. We believe that if God directs us to engage in some enterprise, it isn’t necessary to embrace the materialistic motive, but we go into business for the wholly different motive of serving human need. And we evaluate that need by gazing upon it from an entirely different ground of assumptions.
If you happen to hold the focus of your awareness in your heart-mind, you have no doubt noticed that the simple necessity of serving human need as the means to conforming to cosmic moral imperative is not a factor in most business planning. We are perfectly willing to let the business fail because we don’t pretend to control every factor in a profit calculation. We allow God to bless us with a profit or not, or even a catastrophic loss, at His whim because the whole point is pleasing Him — that’s how Creation operates. That countless business and entrepreneurs seem to be succeeding from their own viewpoint makes no difference; they all seem to have virtually no moral profit. They aren’t blessed by God because they don’t operate from the heart.
And they ignore or even defy the certitude of eternal accountability. You can’t live heart-led and ignore Eternity. In our case, the problem is so pervasive that God acts more on the civilization itself rather than each individual business. That scale of things takes a little longer to show His hand.
Aside from a little markup in HTML, I know nothing about coding software. Sometimes I can almost parse a little code, just enough to make very minor changes some real coder suggests when I try to compile something from source, but I could never write the stuff. All I have is some vague awareness of how it works. On the other hand, I know a great deal about management and marketing. I know enough to point out in detail just how utterly perverted and immoral it can be in practice. When it comes to software as a business, the two sides of the business are alien cultures, in that both are inherently narcissistic for different reasons. Compromise is rare. In the end, some of the greatest ideas and projects ever installed on a computer anywhere have been lost, not just abandoned, but locked up under IP laws because of the damned pigheadedness and greed. That is, software that really did serve human need in the ultimate moral sense is often gone forever.
We who live heart-led are left to shake our heads in sorrow, because we know beyond all doubt that the business world is actively hostile to the notion of genuine service of human need. They’ll use the image of human need in marketing and manipulation of human choice, but it’s nothing more than a myth for them.
God has not seen fit to put me in a position to act on my understanding; nobody is going to hire me as manager of software development. I could volunteer on Open Source projects, but even that has some strange barriers, due to the whole thing making demigods of developers. Believe me; I’ve tried. The Open Source projects I’ve checked simply cannot imagine the concept of serving the end user, so those involved have no interest in my input. But I can blather here and pray for things to get better some day.
Meanwhile, we who are heart-led are hardly surprised by the complaints raised by the author of the original article.
