The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect湿件危机：死海效应

bfwebster • April 11, 2008 • 102 Comments
bfwebster • 四月 11， 2008 • 102 Comments

[Updated (09/12/13): Fixed or removed some broken links; updated some others.]
[更新（09/12/13）：修复或删除了一些损坏的链接;更新了其他一些链接。

[Updated (06/16/08): Here’s a real-world project review memo, written several years ago, that described (among many other things) the Dead Sea effect.]
[更新（06/16/08）：这是几年前写的一份真实世界的项目审查备忘录，其中描述了死海效应（除其他外）。

[Note: some of you have asked about the Cutter IT Journal article that Ruby Raley and I wrote. It’s now online here as well.]
[注意：你们中的一些人问过我和 Ruby Raley 撰写的 Cutter IT Journal 文章。它现在也在这里在线。

There are many reasons why large organizations, public and private, struggle with information technology (IT) development. One, which I’ve already discussed here and here, deals with finding and hiring the best engineers you can. But even if you do find and hire excellent IT engineers, the real question is: can you hold onto them?
大型公共和私人组织在信息技术（IT）发展方面苦苦挣扎的原因有很多。一个，我已经在这里和这里讨论过了，涉及寻找和雇用最好的工程师。但是，即使您确实找到并雇用了优秀的IT工程师，真正的问题是：你能留住他们吗？

There is an anti-pattern that I’ve seen in large organizations which I have come to call “the Dead Sea effect”. The Dead Sea, of course, is a large body of water between Israel and Jordan, located well below sea level. The Jordan River empties into it; water leaves only by evaporation, which means that over the eons, the Dead Sea has become very salty (e.g., 8x saltier than the ocean). As such, it is generally unable to support life, except when spring floods temporarily lower the salinity.
我在大型组织中看到了一种反模式，我称之为“死海效应”。当然，死海是以色列和约旦之间的一大片水域，位于海平面以下。约旦河流入其中;水只能通过蒸发离开，这意味着在亿万年的时间里，死海变得非常咸（例如，比海洋咸 8 倍）。因此，它通常无法维持生命，除非春季洪水暂时降低盐度。

Many large corporate/government IT shops — and not a few small ones — work like the Dead Sea. New hires are brought in as management deems it necessary. Their qualifications (talent, education, professionalism, experience, skills — TEPES) will tend to vary quite a bit, depending upon current needs, employee departure, the personnel budget, and the general hiring ability of those doing the hiring. All things being equal, the general competency of the IT department should have roughly the same distribution as the incoming hires.
许多大型企业/政府 IT 商店（而不是少数小型商店）都像死海一样工作。管理层认为有必要时会引入新员工。他们的资格（人才、教育、专业精神、经验、技能——TEPES）往往会有很大差异，这取决于当前的需求、员工离职、人员预算和招聘人员的一般招聘能力。在所有条件相同的情况下，IT 部门的一般能力应该与新员工的分布大致相同。

But in my experience, that’s not what happens. Instead, what happens is that the more talented and effective IT engineers are the ones most likely to leave — to evaporate, if you will. They are the ones least likely to put up with the frequent stupidities and workplace problems that plague large organizations; they are also the ones most likely to have other opportunities that they can readily move to.
但根据我的经验，事实并非如此。相反，发生的事情是，更有才华和效率的IT工程师最有可能离开——如果你愿意的话，就会蒸发掉。他们是最不可能忍受困扰大型组织的频繁愚蠢和工作场所问题的人;他们也是最有可能拥有其他机会的人，他们可以随时转移到那里。

What tends to remain behind is the ‘residue’ — the least talented and effective IT engineers. They tend to be grateful they have a job and make fewer demands on management; even if they find the workplace unpleasant, they are the least likely to be able to find a job elsewhere. They tend to entrench themselves, becoming maintenance experts on critical systems, assuming responsibilities that no one else wants so that the organization can’t afford to let them go.
留下来的是“残余”——最没有天赋和效率的 IT 工程师。他们往往对自己有一份工作心存感激，对管理层的要求较少;即使他们觉得工作场所不愉快，他们也最不可能在其他地方找到工作。他们倾向于巩固自己，成为关键系统的维护专家，承担其他人不想要的责任，这样组织就无法让他们离开。

I’m painting with pretty broad strokes here, yet I’ve seen this same effect taking place in different companies and different IT shops. Large companies tend to lose the really talented IT engineers and hold onto the less talented ones, when they should been actively seeking to do just the opposite. And the effect tends to be self-reinforcing: the worse an IT shop becomes, the harder it is to get really talented and effective IT engineers to join it and the harder it is to retain them if they do. It can reach a point that the really good talent only comes in as entry-level personnel who don’t know any better — but once they do wise up, they’re gone.
我在这里用相当宽泛的笔触作画，但我看到同样的效果发生在不同的公司和不同的 IT 商店。大公司往往会失去真正有才华的IT工程师，而留住那些不那么有才华的IT工程师，而他们应该积极寻求做相反的事情。这种效果往往是自我强化的：IT商店变得越糟糕，就越难让真正有才华和有效的IT工程师加入它，即使他们这样做，也就越难留住他们。真正优秀的人才只能作为入门级人员进入，他们并不了解情况，但一旦他们变得明智，他们就会消失。

======= SOME RESPONSES TO COMMENTS =============
=======对评论的一些回应=============

The discussion over at Slashdot, as well as the comments below, have raised excellent issues, though some misunderstand or mischaracterize what I’m talking about above. Here’s a response to the main themes that I see coming up there.
Slashdot 上的讨论以及下面的评论提出了很好的问题，尽管有些人误解或错误地描述了我上面所说的内容。这是对我看到的主要主题的回应。

The Dead Sea effect isn’t unique to IT. True enough, though I could say the same thing about just about any project management issue regarding IT. What is unusual about IT (shared with other engineering disciplines) is the degree to which individual talent and other factors affect productivity and quality. And what is unique about IT (as opposed to, say, civil / mechanical / chemical engineers, architects, etc.) is that there is no standard (state-run) professional certification, so there is no assurance of minimum education and competency.
死海效应并非 IT 行业所独有。没错，尽管我可以对任何与 IT 相关的项目管理问题说同样的话。IT（与其他工程学科共享）的不寻常之处在于个人才能和其他因素对生产力和质量的影响程度。IT（与土木/机械/化学工程师、建筑师等相反）的独特之处在于没有标准（国营）专业认证，因此无法保证最低教育和能力。

This is obvious/common sense/trivial. So are most of the problems in IT. Fred Brooks and Jerry Weinberg pretty much nailed down all the essential issues in IT project and personnel management more than 30 years ago; yet, amazingly, the problems haven’t all gone away! There is a profound lack of professional and institutional memory in IT; almost everyone who writes about IT project/personnel management (myself included) is looking for new ways to cast or explain the core issues in a touching hope that maybe this time someone will actually listen and fix them.
这是显而易见的/常识/微不足道的。IT 中的大多数问题也是如此。Fred Brooks 和 Jerry Weinberg 在 30 多年前就几乎确定了 IT 项目和人事管理中的所有基本问题;然而，令人惊讶的是，问题并没有全部消失！IT 领域严重缺乏专业和机构记忆;几乎每个写IT项目/人事管理的人（包括我自己）都在寻找新的方法来表达或解释核心问题，希望这一次有人会真正倾听并解决它们。

The Dead Sea effect is just the Peter Principle (or a corollary thereof). No, it isn’t. The Peter Principle is that a given person rises (is promoted) to her/his level of incompetence (I’m actually old enough to remember when ‘the Peter Principle’ first came out). This has nothing to do with promotion within the IT organization; it has to do with self-selected removal from that IT organization, not due to a lack of promotion or opportunity, but just because there are greener pastures elsewhere.
死海效应只是彼得原理（或其推论）。不，不是。彼得原则是，一个人上升到（被提升）到她/他的无能程度（实际上我已经足够大了，还记得“彼得原则”刚出现的时候）。这与 IT 组织内部的晋升无关;这与自我选择从IT组织中移除有关，不是因为缺乏晋升或机会，而只是因为其他地方有更绿色的牧场。

Not all IT shops are like this. I would certainly hope so. In fact, there are IT organizations where just the opposite occurs; the quality of the IT engineers is quite high, and engineers who are mediocre or disruptive either don’t get hired or don’t last long if they are. I worked in one such IT group (Pages Software) for five years. During that time, we had only one voluntary departure (the network admin); we had two others who were dismissed due to problems, and a few others who were (painfully) cut in downsizing. (On the other hand, here are some thoughts on why people would leave an outstanding (and lucrative) IT organization like Google.)
并非所有的IT商店都是这样的。我当然希望如此。事实上，有些 IT 组织的情况恰恰相反;IT工程师的素质相当高，平庸或破坏性的工程师要么不会被录用，要么即使被录用也不会持续很长时间。我在一个这样的IT小组（Pages Software）工作了五年。在那段时间里，我们只有一次自愿离职（网络管理员）;我们还有另外两个人因问题被解雇，还有一些人（痛苦地）被裁员。（另一方面，这里有一些关于为什么人们会离开像谷歌这样杰出（且有利可图）的IT组织的想法。

Not everyone ‘left behind’ is incompetent. Again, this syndrome doesn’t apply to all IT groups, and it doesn’t apply to the same extent to all IT groups. Turnover in IT personnel is common (though it can be reduced by intelligent management), and just because good engineers have left a given IT group doesn’t mean that the rest are, in fact, residue. What I’m talking about here is a very real syndrome, typically found in large corporations and government organizations, but it’s certainly not universal.
不是每个“落后”的人都是无能的。同样，这种综合症并不适用于所有 IT 组，也不适用于所有 IT 组。IT人员的流动是很常见的（尽管可以通过智能管理来减少），仅仅因为优秀的工程师离开了给定的IT团队，并不意味着其余的人实际上是剩余的。我在这里谈论的是一种非常真实的综合症，通常存在于大公司和政府组织中，但它肯定不是普遍的。

The IT hiring process is broken. Amen. Not only is the IT hiring process broken in many organizations, the entire approach to IT is often broken. It is rife with empire-building, ‘heroic’ project management, and an ‘interchangeable code monkeys’ mindset. As mentioned in the comments section below, Ruby Raley and I wrote an article for Cutter IT Journal that stated that an approach modeled after professional sport teams could well be far more effective, but no one has yet hired me to try it out. On the other hand, I would argue that this is to a large extent the approach we took as Pages, which is why we had such a great and effective IT group with so little turnover.
IT 招聘流程被破坏。阿门。在许多组织中，不仅 IT 招聘流程被破坏，整个 IT 方法也经常被破坏。它充斥着帝国建设、“英雄式”项目管理和“可互换的代码猴子”心态。正如在下面的评论部分提到的，Ruby Raley 和我为 Cutter IT Journal 写了一篇文章，其中指出以专业运动队为蓝本的方法可能更有效，但还没有人聘请我来尝试它。另一方面，我认为这在很大程度上是我们作为 Pages 所采取的方法，这就是为什么我们有一个如此出色和有效的 IT 团队，而人员流动率如此之低。

The problem is a failure of leadership. Again, amen. I wrote an entire book about that over a decade ago (The Art of ‘Ware, M&T Books, 1995), which I’m currently revising.
问题在于领导力的失败。再一次，阿们。十多年前，我写了一本关于这方面的书（The Art of 'Ware， M&T Books， 1995），目前正在修订。

This doesn’t describe/encompass all the problems in professional IT shops. If it did, life would be much easier. Again, note that I’ve written a bit on the subject. I’m currently working on revised versions of two of my books (The Art of ‘Ware [Version 2.0] and Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering) while writing a new one (Surviving Complexity), from which this posting on the “Dead Sea effect” is a very, very tiny extract.
这并不能描述/涵盖专业 IT 商店中的所有问题。如果是这样，生活会容易得多。同样，请注意，我已经写了一些关于这个主题的文章。我目前正在编写我的两本书的修订版（The Art of 'Ware [Version 2.0] 和 Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering），同时写一本新书（Surviving Complexity），这篇关于“死海效应”的文章是其中非常非常小的摘录。

Thanks for the great comments and the feedback; I wish I could get you folks to do this for all sections of all of my books.
感谢您的精彩评论和反馈;我希望我能让你们为我所有书的所有部分都这样做。

For real-world examples of this phenomenon, just spend some time reading The Daily WTF (a site I highly recommend for all IT managers). In particular, their “Tales from the Interview” category gives some interesting insights from both sides of the hiring process.
对于这种现象的真实例子，只需花一些时间阅读 The Daily WTF（我强烈推荐给所有 IT 经理的网站）。特别是，他们的“面试故事”类别从招聘过程的双方提供了一些有趣的见解。

Also, Alex Papadimoulis, who runs The Daily WTF, has put forth his own proposal for dealing with IT turnover. I especially like his concept of the Value Apex. Be sure to read his article; here’s my response to it ..bruce..
此外，负责 The Daily WTF 的 Alex Papadimoulis 也提出了自己的 IT 人员流动建议。我特别喜欢他的“价值顶点”概念。一定要阅读他的文章;这是我对此的回应..布鲁斯。。

Filed in: Hiring, Main, Management, Surviving Complexity
提起：招聘，主要，管理，生存复杂性