I stumbled across another interesting article today on our inability to plan ahead, specifically to determine in advance what will make us happy later on.

One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice. Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they’ll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don’t like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day.

This is hardly a surprise to any veteran of software development. It doesn’t prove that all planning is a waste of time (of course not!) but it shows that it’s hard to guess what we’ll want next week for lunch. I am surprised we ever know what we’ll want next year in software.

Software people for years have complained that users don’t know what they want and that the requirements keep changing. Of course they do, and of course they always have. The existence of an automated system changes any practice, and changes the set of things a practitioner will desire to do next. This has been the basis for rapid development and agile pratices for some time. It underpins the whole spiral/iterative model.

Just an observation: it is deucedly hard to plan to be happy in advance. It is hard enough to be present in the moment, and to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way. We should plan, and we should prepare (hopefully better than I do) so that we’re ready for the opportunities that come for us. We might even create a few opportunities. But we shouldn’t be surprised in a world as complex and variable as ours that we can’t nail down the future exactly, in software requirements or career planning.