21 October 2011

Chicken and Egg

In all this dry and serious technical world, the call for human aspects gains more and more attention. If it is really the case that human beeings have to create all these products born out from mathematics, logic and rationality then for sure we have to look at the poor human beeings in this process. How will they feel, will they like what they do, will they be happy ?

Lets switch to a chicken farm. The fate of the chicken is to produce eggs, a thing which seems naturally for them. Chicken dump eggs. So it may be that the chicken is happy about every egg because it is the sense of its life, and it sees this sense of life. And if the egg is there the chicken bothers about the egg, until this tiny little white thing changes to a young yellow chicken. Reached that, the chicken feels good, yes ?

Now, in the nasty modern chicken farms, where the chicken are doomed to sit very close together, nearly impossible to move or to see anything other then steel and other chickens, it is hard to imagine that the chicken will be happy. It cannot see its egg, because in the moment it is released from the body the egg is taken away. The chicken has no contact with its sense of life, and there are not the conditions to produce high class eggs: different food, fresh air, sunlight, movement and normal interaction with all other chickens.

The creative mind may have the idea to produce the best eggs ever by the most luckiest chicken ever. What lucky chicken, they can walk in an english garden, the earth worms are hand selected and at least 5 inches long, room temperature is very convenient, like a warm sunny day in spring about tea time. Also the chicken has not to lay any egg if it chooses to do so. In this lucky fate any egg which we get must be the best egg ever, nor ?

What I want to say is this: the key word is balance. Is all about the product, but also about the humans and the processes (including technology) to build that product. But no factor is more important than the other. Sometimes, I have the impression that in some discussions the human factor is overstressed. All factors are interwoven with the processes and laws, which have to be considered. Neither is software development to set up like a chicken factory, nor like the paradise for self fulfillment of software developers. The balance has to be hold.