Silent Rebel

ได้นิตยสาร WIRED ฉบับเดือนสิงหาคมมาจากร้านหนังสือมือสอง มีบทสัมภาษณ์ของ Fred Brooks (เจ้าของ Brooks' law) อยู่หน้ากว่าๆ มีหลายคำตอบที่น่าสนใจ

ที่มาของหนังสือ The Mythical Man-Month (เพิ่งรู้จักสงสัยต้องไปหาอ่านซะหน่อย ที่ผ่านมารู้จักแต่ Brooks' law)

Wired: What provoked you to write The Mythical Man-Month?

Brooks: As I was leaving IBM, Thomas Watson Jr. asked me, “You’ve run the hardware part of the IBM 360, and you’ve run the software part; what’s the difference between running the two?” I told him that was too hard a question for an instant answer but that I would think about it. My answer was The Mythical Man-Month.

พูดถึงการออกแบบได้น่าสนใจว่าสุดท้ายก็ขึ้นกับ designer ไม่ใช่กระบวนการ

Wired: In your experience, what’s the best process for design?

Brooks: Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.

Wired: But surely The Design of Design is about creating better processes for great designers?

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

แอปเปิลได้คะแนนไปเต็มๆ

Wired: You’re a Mac user. What have you learned from the design of Apple products?

Brooks: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.

แม้แต่ปู่ Brooks ยังบอกว่าตัวเองนั้น "short-sighted" ในการทำนายว่าจะเกิดอะไรขึ้นในอนาคตของวงการซอฟต์แวร์

Wired: You’ve been involved in software for over 50 years. Can you imagine what software will be like 50 years from now?

Brooks: Nope. All of my past predictions have been, shall we say, short-sighted. For instance, I once argued that every member of a team should be able to see the code of every other member, but it turns out that encapsulation works much better.