Coming home from the office one night I found my son, at that time a third-year computer science student, madly coding something on his computer. I looked over his shoulder and said, "You know, cutting and pasting is not the best way to write code." He muttered something like, "Yeah, thank you for teaching me basics." I continued, quite logically, "If you are familiar with these basics, why are you violating them?" He turned to me and said, "Dad! I have an urgent assignment to deliver. I am doing my best to meet my deadline. And YOU are not helping!" I quickly thought of several reply options... And then-I shut up. It suddenly appeared to me: "Isn't this a lesson that I can learn from my kid?"

Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating poor quality of code. Cutting and pasting is a poor practice that may represent sufficient grounds for dismissal. But... where is the line between perfection and reality? This question remains unanswered, and the argument continues. So, when faced with my son's tirade, I shut up because at that exact time I was trying to find the answers to similar questions.

The Situation, Outside View: A Mess
At that time I was a CIO of a company with revenues growing at a staggering rate of 30 to 40 percent a year. As every CIO knows, supporting such growth is quite a challenge. We did our job well in IT operations, and the CEO told me once: "Thank you for making sure that the wheels didn't come off." But the operations challenge was dwarfed by the problem the development team was faced with precisely because of our success!

For a variety of reasons, our competitors were in disarray at that time. The product we had recently built from scratch was head and shoulders above anything else on the market, and was enjoying enormous success. Suddenly the company found itself sitting on a virtual goldmine. The market was just waiting to be conquered. The money was everywhere. We just had to have the right software to pick it. And we needed this software fast-before the competition woke up and before our back-end systems blew under the growing load from the customer-facing applications. Naturally, sales went ballistic, and the list of projects grew to keep my developers busy for the next five years. Isn't that great?

Yeah, except no one wanted to wait five years. Or even one. Senior execs started to push their projects through any crack they could find, so IT governance mechanisms got overloaded and practically failed. I was asked to hire more developers-many, many more. I bought a few copies of The Mythical Man-Month for my peers and argued that hiring more developers would only slow down the delivery, but in vain. Even the CEO could not help me: He too experienced brutal pressure from every side. It was a mess.