by bitwize | 2025-12-01 23:32:37+00:00
I highly, highly recommend a reread of Tim Bryce's 20-year-old essay "Theory P: A Philosophy of Managing Programmers": https://web.archive.org/web/20160407111718fw_/http://phmains...

Mr. Bryce died of cancer a couple years back, and the web site he had up hosting all his materials has since bit-rotted away, so I'm giving you a Wayback link.

Anyhoo, back when it came out, it fomented much discussion and anger among programmers, including here on Hackernews:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=990185

The problem is, Tim Bryce was absolutely, 100% correct. He stood by those words until his dying breath, and he related how programmers would be angry or offended, but management at the companies that employed programmers found the essay to be accurate.

You have to put the "Theory P" essay in broader context. Tim was a management consultant and salesperson for his father Milt, who developed the first software methodology for general commercial use in 1971: PRIDE (Profitable Information by Design). At the time, Milt already had about 20 years of experience in the software field, starting in the UNIVAC days. He was there since the very beginning of commercial computing. Milt discovered that one of the things we learned about LLMs applies to human programmers as well: unless you give them careful guidance, structured and detailed specifications, rigorous standards for how the code should be written, and hold them accountable to those specifications and standards, programmers will go off and develop the wrong thing, wasting the organization's time and money. Unless the programmers know what to build, they're worse than useless. Theory P is more about correcting the overvaluation of programmers from an organizational standpoint; in 2005, organizations particularly in the United States were still under the sway of the myth of the "genius programmer" who could solve the company's problems and make them lots of money if you just left them alone to hack code. This is explicitly not the case; building information systems needs standards, specifications, and process control just like any factory assembly line. (We are still struggling to learn the lessons Milt figured out in 1971. If you have heard of a data dictionary, or a "software bill of materials", those were concepts introduced by PRIDE. They are just two elements to a complete IRM solution.)

In light of this, PRIDE is incredibly comprehensive. The purpose of a methodology is to define WHO is to perform WHAT task, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, and HOW, and most modern "methodologies" fail in that regard; PRIDE defines these essentials organization wide, for everyone involved with an information system (including its users). PRIDE is actually an information systems methodology, not just a software methodology; under PRIDE, writing code is just one of the last technical steps of implementing an information system, which includes software and computers but is not coterminous with them. Business information systems also encompass telecommunications links, pieces of paper such as forms and correspondence, and the most important element: people, and the information they need or provide.

So the hard part of building an information system for an organization, so the Bryces found out, is not programming but systems analysis and design. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, PRIDE is a Big Design Up Front methodology, which makes programmers tetchy—done properly, a PRIDE project spends about 60% of its time in systems analysis and design and only about 15% actually coding. There is some, but not a lot, of room for iteration, but by the time the first line of code has been written the major decisions for how the software—or rather, information system—should function have been made, and not by a programmer. That information is encoded in the extensive documents and flowcharts that have been prepared by the systems analysts and approved by management.

Now enter AI. Tim Bryce also wrote about the maturity of an organization's information systems (https://web.archive.org/web/20160407164521fw_/http://phmains...) in terms of the Before Times, when organizations mainly used paper and ink, to the introduction of the computer in which organizations took a "tool-oriented approach": figuring out what the computer could do and applying it to various tasks without concern for when and how it is properly applied at the organizational level. Mature organizations, by contrast, take a "management-oriented approach", in which the information needs of the business are defined and codified by management, and computers and software are written specifically to address those needs. The problem is that programmers, not systems people, have dominated the information-systems departments of organizations since about the late 1960s, meaning that many of these are stuck in a "tool-oriented approach"! With AI, that last step, the final 15%—actually translating the specifications for the information system into code—can be automated. Most programmers are now obsolete. Nobody cares if you have fun coding; the good times for coders, when they were overvalued to the point of being made linchpins for billion+ dollar businesses, are now over. The relevant skill now becomes understanding what you want to build and laying it out for the AI in sufficient detail—exactly the role of the systems analyst in PRIDE! So, programmers who do not take a "management-oriented approach" and are unwilling to develop the high-level systems thinking and people skills it takes to work at an organizational level and communicate with users and management are going to have a very, very bad time indeed! Unless you have fun designing systems and seeing them rolled out to production, your job is going to be extremely unfun, if not eliminated entirely!

And that would be just fine with Tim Bryce. He hated programmers, and said as much. I'm kind of curious what he would say if he had lived just a few years more into the current era.