I wrote a hub earlier on the importance of story telling in persuasion ans selling. I also wrote about going for walks to get ideas on what to write. As I was walking yesterday I remembered a story I had read in about 1984 in the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering) magazine Software Engineering.

This is that story brought up to date and made my own. It is important to make teaching stories your own. I use them all the time in my seminars.

There was once two software engineers. One was a novice, straight out of university and the other was a veteran of many years. They were both given identical projects at two different corporations.

The veteran looked at the project and said it was going to be very difficult to do the project, it was complicated and he would need a big team and first they would have to have design committees, consultants to help, user requirement teams, and a few other services before he could start.

So he was promoted to the manager since this was a large project. Six months later all the different committees had produced different reports. The reports were read, presented, filed, and parts of the project were outsourced to India and parts were to be done in house.

The hired two project managers, one for USA, one for India. Of course now that our veteran software engineer had a few mangers under him, he was promoted to Director. The project started with a preliminary completion date of a year.

The year went by in an eye blink. There were quite a few problems. The Indian and US parts of the software did not communicate with each other well. There was also linguistic problems (it was difficult to understand the Indian accents and also they spoke British English and the US American English). So they hired a Check outfit to write a translation package to allow full communication between the various parts of the system. They also delayed the completion date by three months and gave a raise to the Director (he now had more responsibility – three teams in three countries).

Three months came and went and they delayed another six month and then the first alpha buggy version of the system was released with great fanfare. Another year through beta, and eventually four years after the project was given it was delivered as a “working” system with plenty of features (bugs). Sure it did not do all that was originally asked for, the user interface was far from perfect (or even good for that mater), but it was kind of working and there was a large maintenance team who would struggle for the next twenty years to keep the system going.

The upshot: They promoted the veteran software engineer to the Vice President of operations. Later on he may have ended as the president of a large Detroit corporation (OK this is only a fable – very true in meaning not a historical story).

He said I will try to do it and for the next three months he was seen playing video games in his cubicle. Every now and then he would stop and write a few notes in a notebook and then go back to the game.

After three month of this (his boss nearly sacked him but the company rules were that no one could be sacked in the first three months) the novice changed his mode of operations. He started coding for about sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. He would at times go home, have a shower and return back to his cubicle. His cubicle was full of empty pizza boxes, jolt cans, double espresso and so on.

After three weeks he presented the first version of the software to the users. He had in fact improved on the specification but wanted feedback from the end users. The end users gave him the feedback. There were a few bugs here and there. The novice software engineer, quickly debugged these and before six months were up the project was successfully completed.

The upshot: The novice was just able to keep his job (his boss never forgave him for playing video games for three months). The boss knew the project must have been very easy to do if such a wet behind the ears punk good do it. Within another two years a young software engineer left and started his own company in his garage (with his best friend) and soon had his IPO, was worth billions and in fact later bought that first company just for fun. He now lives in Newport Beach and drives a Bentley.

To read more teaching stories go to Nasrudin Stories.