Superstition in software development and IT in general

Question

What are the most obvious superstitions in IT? Which superstitious beliefs where you confronted with by your coworkers, bosses, etc in your career and how did you work around them? Did you succeed in making your coworkers drop superstitious beliefs? If so, how?

There are those who will happily run in a hamster wheel for 10 years but cannot be bothered to think 5 minutes about improving their situation. What do you think makes them tick? How to bring back their idealism?

Answer 1

The most popular myth in the IT Industry is the idea that you can have a baby in a month by assigning nine women to the job.

Answer 2

• The mythical man month: More programmers make things go faster. In reality, after a certain point adding more programmers makes thing go slower.
• Differed integration makes things go faster: Or each team work on its own bit and we'll see if it works together in a QA environment. In reality it takes more time to sort out integration after weeks of dev in QA environments than immediately on local dev boxes.
• Flavor of the month language or framework (Ruby, Erlang, Scala, Whatever) will make you more productive. In reality it makes little difference.
• If we throw everything a way and start over things will stay clean. In reality the same programmers that created the first mess will create a mess again with a greenfields project.
• Pair programming produces 1/2 as much code. In reality debugging is an expensive exercise and the net effect of pair programming is negligible in terms of speed.
• Some classes can't be tested, or the payoff for automated tests are too low. In reality it is a warning sight that the design of your system is wrong.

Answer 3

A few I've seen and still see:

• Praying for things to work after a reboot or upgrade.
• Some companies can do no wrong,e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Google come to mind as companies with lots of fanboys, or that they cannot do anything right, same list applies here too.

Gems of ideas I've accepted in my working life:

• "There is more than one solution to a given problem."
• "Take your time." - Chances are that lives aren't hanging in the balance when it comes to fixing a bug.
• "Things will work out as they should." - Matrix-like line that has stuck with me for years after that movie came out that I really do like as an idea when it comes to life.

As for getting people to see things differently, this requires careful use of various principles like that of How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Everyone has their own quirks and idiosyncrasies. Be careful in trying to change someone too much as you may end up with someone swinging too far on a pendulum usually.