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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Which fictional story (book, movie, etc.) is the best allegory for software development?

Not something specifically about software, but a tale that gets to the heart of what we do.

Top comments (61)

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Based purely on title, then Neverending Story. Plus, many days feel like this - whether you're the horse or the person trying to pull the horse out of the bog...

quicksand

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Megan Speir

Was going to be my suggestion as well πŸ˜‚.

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Dave MG • Edited

a tale that gets to the heart of what we do.

Well, if you accept some of the inanities of interacting with project managers and product owners as things that fall into this category, I've got one for ya:

Catch-22.

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Thomas H Jones II

Book, 1970 movie adaptation or the recent Amazon Streaming adaptation? All three are absurd, but the 1970s adaptation is less grim than either the book or the Amazon version.

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garzo profile image
Dave MG • Edited

Ouch. That's a great question actually. I'm not sure if I'd call the recent Amazon adaptation necessarily grim, but it was definitely weighty especially towards the end.

But great question because I was having this exact debate with a coworker, I honestly don't know which adaptation I love more, they've both got a certain brilliance about them.

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

To me, the 1970 movie was too short to adequately make the transition from "merely absurd" to "grim". You don't have quite have that "litany of absurdities" feeling (especially if you binge the series) from the movie that you do in the streaming version.

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Isa Levine

For me, right now, it's Avatar: The Last Airbender (the full cartoon).

Searching for that first job, and knowing how much more I still have to learn in my coding career, definitely feels like Aang preparing (but never being prepared enough) to fight the Fire Lord.



Also, allegories about resourcefulness, relying on your community, coming up with novel solutions, drawing from wisdom of your predecessors, etc. etc. etc. (And maybe office dogs are Appa?)



:)

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Ashley McPeek

When code stops working... the cabbage guy.

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jawwad22

my codebageeees =P

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Tom VanAntwerp

For us poor sods who don't work at cushy startups with foosball tables and free lunch, Office Space is still dead on. (Despite the movie being about software developers, I'm claiming it's not "specifically about software" as much as it's about the culture around office life in America.)

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Thomas H Jones II

Or Dilbert...

it hurts

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Rinaldo Rex

Replace "Cloud" with AI/ML/DL/Blockchain and you have the modern business people.

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Thomas H Jones II

Even better: modern business people that don't quite understand that "correlation" and "causation" are two very different things ...and that, while AI and ML can be damned good at finding the former, they sorely struggle with the latter.

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jeikabu

Spoiler alert:

For foofy startups, Office Space is still dead on.

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Thomas H Jones II

I've spent most of my career in consulting. I've gotten to work at a lot of organizations of varying sizes and across many industries. Every place is broken – you just have to find th brokenness that's easiest to deal with (one of the benefits of shorter-term consulting is you only have to tolerate a given brand of brokenness for a limited period of time and, when you're just about to lose your mind with the current brand, you can console yourself with "it's only more days/weeks/months"

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Ben Halpern

Mike Judge is a national treasure

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Chris Achard

This is cheating, but "How to Fight a Hydra" by Josh Kaufman was written explicitly to be an allegory that is meant to describe "how to do hard things" (of which writing software definitely applies!)

It's meant to mimic the feel of a story from really old works (like the Odyssey, etc) but is significantly shorter, and much more to the point. I highly recommend it!

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Matt Eland

It's okay. I just listened to it on Audible a week or two ago. I expected to get a bit more out of it, but it's an interesting and quick read.

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Chris Achard

This is a book where I also think the audio book experience is probably different than the "in hand" reading experience as well. The way the book is laid out and split up adds to the experience I think, so that may be why it was an underwhelming audio book :)

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Gage • Edited

Not a book or movie, but this Game: Tummple! a man places a brick on a tower and it falls over

Building upon the same thing over and over till it collapses.

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Vicki Langer

What game is this?

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justgage profile image
Gage
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William Ahrons

The Terminator, someone trying to save the future while there is someone trying to destroy the present.

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David Wickes

The Myth of Sisyphus

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ryanAllMad

I mean, that's what I was going to say. It probably applies to almost all jobs too. 🀣

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Rafael Ahrons

Evangelion!!

There's some giant monsters comming to destroy everthing that we have, we don't know from where they came, but knows that we must fight them with everything we have (which are MECHAS).

It's just a movie about some monsters fighting kids with poor mental health caused of overhelming work strees using MECHAS.

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Thomas Eckert

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig. It talks about the nature of "Quality", the beauty of craft, and the relationship between people and technology.

It's covered more in this context in the Greater than Code podcast episode: 123: BOOK CLUB! Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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ryanAllMad

Russian Doll could also be a good one.

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Ben Lovy

Hackers. If your day-to-day doesn't resemble Crash Override's, you're doing something egregiously wrong.

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Thomas H Jones II

...and you have a hard time not laughing at it.

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Fred Richards

Groundhog Day. 😁

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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Steven Pressfield, the War on Art

stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war...

It's a wonderful book on the inner struggle that face writers at the time they have to actually sit down and write things on the keyboard.

We developers also have to sit down, write things with a keyboard and deal with tons of frustration, so this gets to the heart of what we do.

A developer could have written the same story.

But honestly, writers usually write much better than us.

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Jacob Herrington (he/him)

The Room.

I think this answer is self-explanatory.