The Moment I Realized I Had Become a Senior Developer

The following story dates back from a couple of years ago. A colleague of mine was experiencing a problem with a system we were working on. Most of the time, things were right, but from time to time, the system gave the wrong answer to a query. A quick investigation revealed that the method to calculate the result was right, but sometimes the wrong result seemed to come out anyway. The strange thing was that when the system replied with the wrong answer, it was in fact the correct answer for another query sent to the system. My colleague really didn't understand what was going on, so she called me to investigate the problem.

The little detail that the system returned the correct answer to another query, was in fact a important clue to solve the mystery. After browsing through the code for a few minutes, I found out that one of the attributes in a class was marked static. As a result, the system returned the result for the last query that entered the system, even if you asked for the result of a previous query. And that was the kind of bug I was expecting from the beginning: to me, the problem had the smell of static confusion all over it, even though I couldn't say exactly why.

My colleague was impressed, and literally asked me how I could know such a thing. The only answer I could come up with was that many years of creating many bugs had given me much experience in finding out why something was wrong. I guess that's the essence of being a senior developer too...

So Once Again Somebody Is Predicting the Death of Microsoft

Former vice president of the company Dick Brass wrote in an op-ed titled “Microsoft's Creative Destruction” in The New York Times yesterday why he thinks Microsoft hasn't much of a future. His analysis is that the company isn't on the innovating edge anymore, and is therefore failing. He attributes this failure to the internal competition in the company, which kills innovation whenever it comes from another department, and concludes that unless the company changes its internal company culture, it will lead the same faith as G.M.

I don't think Microsoft is going to disappear any time soon, even though I put in some effort in 2009 to get it out of my house and wouldn't shed a tear on its death. Microsoft is just too big to disappear over night – but not in the same sense as how some banks were too big to fail. Just imagine what would happen if Microsoft would shut down all its R&D activities, stop any further development of its Office product, not work on a new version of the Windows operating system to replace Windows 7, etc… Even if something like that would happen, people will still want to buy computers using Windows, because that's what they're used to. Similarly, people will continue to use and buy Office, both at home and in the office, because that's what they're used to. Moreover, they have lots of documents that were created in its formats, and don't want to bother to convert them to another format. And many new software products based on the .Net framework will still be developed for many years to come.

We now know that the Titanic could sink after all. But we also know that the sinking process took almost three hours, not just a few minutes or seconds. Therefore, I expect that Microsoft will still be around by the end of this year, and the next years. Maybe it won't be a monopolist any more, but at the very least it will still be one of the dominant players in the software business, whether you like it or not.