Rudder > Motor

Slightly heretical thought for a self-conscious world: Assuming that irreparable damage isn't done, of course, what you break doesn't matter even half so much as how effectively you can fix it.

Speaking purely for myself, it's easy for we programmer types to believe that we live in a separate universe--yea and verily even "hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar underneath Funk & Wagnall's porch since noon" for my pre-GenY compatriots--from that of investment (cough!) "bankers," sticky accelerators and the species of idiot that drills a hole a mile-plus undersea w/o much thought as to how to put the cork back into the bottle.

Nevertheless, it's true. For instance, I managed to thoroughly crash a database server--mercifully over the three-day weekend--with a query that slowly ate CPU cycles until the only way to kill it was to change my network password, thus severing my workstation's connection from the server...along with everything else. By the same token, when I tried to run the traditional Monday report (on Tuesday, after reclaiming my login), I discovered that an upgrade on the very same server had broken it.

In both cases, we dealt with things pretty phlegmatically. Understand that by "we," I ninety-plus-percent mean our preternaturally awesome--and unflappable--SysAdmin. The same person who, knowing that I'd been cut off from the corporate email system, tracked me down on Facebook to let me know what was up. Who also happens to sit kitty-corner from me in the pod. The other ten percent came from the former SysAdmin, since promoted to minor-Deityness of reporting. Who is a cubicle wall plus two cubicles away. Which is pretty much the point. Not that I mean to detract one whit from such legendary awesomeness, mind you. Nuh-uh. It's just that the closer (physically and hierarchically) you keep the folks who fry the bacon to the folks who can pull it from the fire when things go awry in the frying-pan, the better off you are as an organization.

And I'm probably being far too Utopian here, but maybe--only just maybe--such working cheek-by-jowl would lead to a world where you'd see less of taking billions of bailout dollars with one hand and million-dollar bonuses with the other. Less whining about getting one's figurative life back after nearly a dozen (human) lives have been quite literally lost. Less denialism when irrefutable data to the contrary sits twenty feet away from one's desk.

Yep, definitely Utopian. Unless we--with dollars and votes and career-choices--insist that private and public organizations optimize for rudder, rather than motor (and--to extend metaphor--even more than the cargo-capacity of the boat itself).