Hacker Remix

Why can't programmers be more like ants? Or a lesson in stigmergy (2015)

57 points by yamrzou 7 days ago | 34 comments

SketchySeaBeast 5 days ago

Sites down, but do ants have standups every day just to tell the team what they are doing? Are they forced to attend scrum ceremonies? Do they have a scrum master insisting they set an arbitrary "sprint goal" every two weeks that everyone, including the scrum master, is going to forget about but management will frown at when they realize we didn't work towards? Oh, I'd love to be able to produce like an ant.

ktallett 5 days ago

Do ant colonies have a scrum master who have no clue how realistic goals are or not but decide to set them anyway? Do ant colonies avoid listening to those with actual knowledge and skillsets that goes against their unrealistic expectations?

SketchySeaBeast 5 days ago

Yeah, we can't leverage stigmergy because there are actors outside of the code always shifting priorities and applying pressure to system that, in this article's reckoning, should grow in an obvious and natural fashion.

robertlagrant 5 days ago

The ants know what to do and we don't.

patrulek 5 days ago

> Why Can't Programmers Be More Like Ants?

Because ants dont have business units. Most of us, programmers, are slaves to the business and we have to do what they want from us, not what we want or think is optimal to do. And the requirements can change often. How fast those changes would be notified by others in decentralized "ants approach"? Would the business survive with this approach?

igor47 4 days ago

Changing business requirements are akin to the food that ants find in optimal time. I think leveraging distributed intelligence to solve business problems is strictly better, despite what rock star CEOs in thrall to the cult of their own genius would have you believe.

I think the reason this system doesn't work is not that engineers don't want to solve business problems. It is instead that most organizations are pulled in conflicting directions by the need to solve simultaneously their business's ostensible problem, while also satisfying the wealth/power/prestige goals of certain individuals. In times like these, you can't just let the engineer colony wiggle towards an optimal solution.

Lest you think this take too conventional...It might be worth considering whether a jump in abstraction level might anyway converge to the same ant -like approach. The engineers are more like the legs of an ant, centrally controlled by its nervous system. The ant is the organization, and at that abstraction level it still does find an optimal path towards higher level goals, in the service of which the PM or the CEO is as much as ant. I don't really believe this, but I think some people sincerely do and it's certainly worth considering

olau 5 days ago

I'm personally attracted to this way of thinking. I did write a post about it many years ago, probably triggered by this article:

https://ole-laursen.blogspot.com/2016/01/stimergy.html

Part of the mindset is that when you see a co-worker end up in the wrong place with some new code, you ask yourself, can I do something to our code base to lower the probability of it happening again?

MrLeap 5 days ago

Probably related to a common desire to be creative and operate with a degree of autonomy.

netdevphoenix 5 days ago

This pretty much. Ants are basically powerless on their own