Wednesday, May 13, 2009
I am an art dealer
Yesterday I attended the third Venice Sessions event. It is an event promoted by Telecom Italia and held at their Future Centre in Venice. Spectacular location. The invitation by Telecom Italia to attend the event was the main reason for my last European trip, although as usual I packed the trip with a million of other things...The topic was "Technology and modern art". Very interesting, because if there is something Italians are famous for, that is art (ok, ok, for the Garfields out there... pizza is a close second). In particular when you are talking about that topic inside that building inside that city... Art is everywhere, even overwhelming at times.
At first, I was a bit puzzled. Why was I there? Why did they invite me? I sell software for mobile phones, I had little in common with most of the speakers, beside personal interest. When the museum people were talking about paintings, exhibitions, modern art, I was just listening in awe. They were speaking a language I barely understood. I felt way out of my league.
And then, along the day, someone started talking about creativity.
Boom, lights on.
I always talk about Italy as the perfect spot for high tech innovation, software in particular. My usual argument is that software is pure creativity, a fine product of the brain. That Italians are masters of creativity, from paintings to sculptures to fashion to design to clothing to furniture to food. That software is just another representation of creativity, that is in the country DNA (in kilos). It is what made Italy a success worldwide, for centuries. Italians are meant to build great software.
I then realized, with the microphone in my hand, that software is actually a form of modern art. I realized that software developers are modern artists.
I always insisted to call my guys software designers, instead of developers, because they deserve to be considered at the same level of clothes designers, or architects: people that are known to be cool. Software design has not been considered cool in Italy. But it should, because it is a form of art. Artists are cool. And software developers are artists.
And now that makes me an art dealer, I guess.
Looks what happens when you listen to smart people in a beautiful place: you walk in as a software salesman, you walk out with a sense a coolness.
Posted by Fabrizio at 17:24
2 Comments:
meedabyte said...
Fabrizio,
unfortunately nor Software design neither Art are anyhow valued in Italy at today.
Anyway software must be efficient as a solution for problems, so most of software assets have little in common with art.
On the other hand I agree that both art and software are, sometimes, an almost uncontrollable, expression on creativity.
Just reflections.
Simone - http://meedabyte.wordpress.com
Comment Posted at 03:11
Antonio Leonforte said...
Nice post.
Designing good software (particularly large software systems) requires creativity (and lots of) but also engineering (that is, the sistematic and consistent application of methods and techniques) in order to achieve results.
So you need genius, creativity and some courage, but also accuracy, consistency and patience. It is a art requiring a wide set of skills and personal attidudes.
I've always been in love with this art, so I don't really care of being "still" a developer in my forties, because there's always plenty of opportunities to learn more and improve.
So coming to your point, Fabrizio, why indian girls want to marry a software engineers and italian girls don't?
One of the reasons why writing software is generally considered a tedious and disqualifying job, here in Italy, is that a number of large consulting companies in the last ten / fifteen years have filled the need for software skills with under-qualified people taken from the street and "rented" with body-rental contracts to large and inefficient organizations led by incompetent managers.
When a dev team has not single competent senior designer and senior programmers with a solid professional background, creating software for a young graduate can be very painful: you are not in control, and you spend 90% of your time finding bugs and fixing them "just to make the whole thing go", thus making the overall architecture even more fragile and not maintainable.
On the other hand, most software customers have incompetent managers who are not capable to appreciate software quality, who pull down margins for software developers in order to show off how good they are in negotiations, without considering the const of maintaining bad software in the long term, because at that time they will be away, creating problems at another company (MBAs are very clever in this game).
Another problem with body-rental is that most large companies use it (mostly illegally) in order to avoid subcontracting to smaller (and more efficient / skilled) companies. They prefer to rent people rather than subcontracting, because this way they do not leave control and domain knowledge to subcontractors.
Unfortunately, by renting their best talent and putting them phisically out of the offices, small companies cannot grow and develop a corporate culture. They are literally snuffed out by larger companies. And when you develop large enterprise software, you just cannot go to your customer by yourself because you are too small.
By the way, small companies is where you usually find people really passionate about developing software, they are the breeding ground of talent in the ICT sector as in many others.
I wrote "usually" because here in italy we also have lots of "software" companies created with only one purpose in mind: renting programmers at extremely low fares. These "consulting" companies are where young software engineers generally go work for initially (no wonder they steer clear of software as soon as they can).
Taking kickbacks from suppliers (a practice very common at the purchase department of many italian corporations) has contributed in making the above mentioned fake "consulting" companies even predominant over small "real" software companies really talented and passionate about developing high quality software.
The result: a software developer in Italy is now regarded (and often paid) as an unqualified building worker. Talented people have no incentive in working in software, and steer their careers to management and finance.
That's how big software companies have pretty destroyed the enterprise software development market here in Italy. In my opinion and experience, of course.
P.S. Please don't tell me that software development is something that will be increasingly offshored to developing countries over the next years, because (look at the statistics) this is simply not true and for a very good reason: efficient software dev is most of the times the result of a very tight interaction of a relatively small team of talented people. By off-shoring it is hard to select talent, and it is impossible to interact tightly with it. Offshoring can help in some situations, but it's not going to replace the need of software engineers in Italy as in the US anytime soon. Once again, in my opinion.
