An industry of roles, not of men

Douglas Reilly writes about coming out as a cancer survivor in the software industry. What caught my eye was Douglas' remarks on the obligations that potentially debilitating illness imposes on software developers. Make certain that source code is where it should be, document and explain any oddities, mentor a successor... generally, make sure you are not indispensable.

Good advice, of course. But as a software developer, you should be thinking about this stuff all of the time. Don't wait until you have cancer. As Douglas says, "Might the guy in the next cubicle walk out in front of a bus? Might the gal across the hall have a massive stroke?" You can argue that it's not economic to prepare for such unlikely contingencies, but there is one almost-inevitable contingency which will have pretty much the same effect: you move on to another job. Is it okay to leave your source code on Floppy #391 of 4107 hidden in a filing cabinet labelled "Beware of the Tiger," or to expect your colleagues to figure out by themselves why you embedded a Fortran interpreter into your button control? If not, why leave it to the last minute to clean up your mess? And don't give me any guff about handovers: the handover is when other people close the gap between what you thought you shared and what you actually shared. It's a bug fix for poor on-the-job communication.

I suspect that analogous comments apply to any profession where knowledge is important and bodies are not interchangeable. Perhaps in those other professions this stuff goes without saying. It's certainly a sad reflection on software development that we can't take this as a given.