Software and history of China: political events (middle)

Software and history of China: political events (middle)

[Mental Studio] blog

In the last article [11], I will discuss the "Wang Anshi Fa" incident and discuss how to exercise caution when conducting "Fa" in software companies. In particular, we must first understand the existing problems, targeted, and pay attention to improvements on a stable basis.

This article will continue to discuss another aspect of Wang Anshi's reform of law. This is what I have mentioned in my article "software and history of China: Big history of History" [10: political struggles in software companies. This article will mainly discuss the struggle between levels and the resulting harm, and finally discuss how to maintain a moderate degree of competition.

 

Let's continue to discuss Wang Anshi's reform of law and look at the consequences of the political struggle.

We know that from the beginning of his reform, Wang Anshi "not only attracted public anger, but all vested interests rushed wildly." [2]. Although Sima Guang is the spiritual leader of the opposition, his personal and moral conduct left us unwilling to believe that he opposed the new law out of private complaints or other power interests. Therefore, we can only interpret it as a result of his understanding of history and his adherence to the Confucian tradition. "Although WANG Anshi belongs to the Confucian school, he has lifted the constraint that Confucianism has given him." [2]. This constraint is "surangu ".

It is generally believed that Confucianism originated from Confucius, but the concept of Confucianism is earlier than this. At that time, the so-called "Ru" refers to the person who "makes a living by teaching books, still relies on the wedding and funeral ceremonies, and other ceremonies to make a living" [3. [3]. Confucius is such a "Ru", so he is committed to "giving his gifts" in the era of "collapse and joy ". Here, the "ritual" is the ancient ritual Law "Zhou li" developed by Zhou Gong in the legend. after Confucius revised it, it became the "ritual" in the classical four books and five classics of Confucianism. Therefore, "surangu" has always been one of the core ideas of Confucianism.

"In an agricultural country, people always respect the past, so these Confucianism are always the most influential" [3]. Since the West Han dynasty, according to Dong Zhongshu's proposal, the Confucianism has become the political guiding ideology of the country's absolute main force in the Song Dynasty, and has even developed to a rigid level. The following events can be used to illustrate this problem.

Six Years Before Wang Anshi changed his law, Song renzong Zhao benefited from his death, and his nephew Zhao zongshi (Zhao Zheng) followed by Song Yingzong [4]. How can I name Yingzong as his biological father?
It becomes a problem. Prime Minister Han Qi and Deputy Prime Minister Ouyang Xiu both believed that the father should be called, while the Confucian stubborn Minister headed by Sima Guang believed that the father should be called the uncle according to the Confucian patriarchal system. This is the famous "discussion" [2]. In the west of the Song Empire, the army of the Great Song dynasty was beaten by a small Xixia country, and lost, there are thousands of dead people. These scholars comforted themselves with the "spiritual victory" method. In their eyes, maintaining the Confucian patriarchal system is far more important than safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

In this political context, Wang Anshi is committed to the elimination of old innovations, which is in a fierce conflict with the traditional Confucianism. In addition, Wang Anshi's reform of law also violated the vested interests of the Civil Service Group, and the struggle was inevitable.

In fact, in the 26 years Before Wang Anshi's reform, Fan Zhongyan, the Prime Minister, tried to carry out a reform. However, his reform scope is far smaller than Wang Anshi, and he has been highly opposed, finally, I had to resign and restore the old system [2]. I can't believe that this is the one who wrote "The world goes first. On the other hand, we can see that in that era, it was almost impossible to combat a deep-seated system with the power of individuals or a few people.

Wang Anshi did not believe this evil, and began to change the law with the support of shenzong. However, due to his limited strength, it is impossible to put all the vested interests against the new law, the doctor class, and the stubborn Confucian scholars
Civilians can only drop them to a place at most. At the same time, in order to help implement the new law, he had to rashly use a large number of new people, which inevitably introduced some bad people, including those who became Yuan Feng.
Party's backbone is also the party's main party, such as Zhang Dun and Cai Jing. In the end, the entire reform situation has become: Apart from Wang Anshi, many of the above are profiteters with their own private interests. Many of the executors in the following regions are opponents of the new law. Coupled with natural disasters, reform failure has become inevitable.

This is the first consequence of Wang Anshi's fight against the opposition: leading his new law to the end of failure.

As early as the beginning of Wang Anshi's law change, Sima Guang sent a letter to Wang Anshi three times, urging him to reconsider the matter of the law change. However, Wang Anshi responded with the famous answer to SI Ma's letter of discussion. After shenzong's death
Ma Guang presided over the Yuan upgrade and abolished all contents of the new law, including the content that has been proved effective by practice such as the exemption law. When Su Dongpo suggested a different treatment to him, he was rejected by Sima Guang.
Absolutely.

This is the second consequence of Sima Guang's struggle with Wang Anshi: although the new law fails, it still has some results. Unfortunately, Sima Guang abandoned it.

After Wang Anshi and Sima Guang died successively, the yuan, Yuan, and Yuan Dynasties were switching to govern, and the struggle continued persistently. In addition, the two factions quickly turn from the beginning of the ideological and moral contention to the power dispute. With the competition for power, the political air rapidly deteriorates and the political morality constantly degrades. Finally, the entire empire was stuck in this evil, and it was a great move towards an irreparable collapse [1].

This is the third consequence of subsequent struggles: repeated struggles have resulted in huge national friction and eventually led to the destruction of the Northern Song Empire.

 

This is also common in today's software industry.

Although we all know that struggle is not good, as long as someone exists, struggle is everywhere. Everyone has their own ideas. When these ideas are in conflict, they will naturally struggle. In addition, human jealousy and conflicts of interest may also lead to a fight. Moreover, being brave and good at fighting has been in China for thousands of years. This is also a bad habit in Chinese culture. Once the people in the organization fall into the quagmire of struggle, they will easily lose their senses and will not be able to look at the problems rationally. One example is that Sima Guang abandoned all the results of the new law.

Another example is the late Tang that occurred around 200. Li Deyu represents the family of scholars and doctors and the representatives of the civilian family of scholars, the battle between the parties, extended for 26 years, making the decline
Micro Datang empire accelerated to the end. In the meantime, one thing can be easily explained: the ox Monk was originally a straight-forward patriotic man, but when his rival Li Deyu was in the historical history of the westcheon festival, he recovered the Weizhou occupied by the tufan and "sent troops to the Town Guard, because of Chen's interest in attacking. When talking about it, it is not advisable to lose the contract to say that it is a new alliance with tufan. Naideyu sent a message to huimou (tufan demotion), who was also from Weizhou, and zamap (tufan leader) suffered abuse ." [5] "It is said that the Emperor is not straight because he has been arrogant about the problem ." [6] after the event, we all thought that it was not for the national interest, but for the purpose of cracking down on the credit of Li Deyu. As a result, we not only brought the recovered Viju back, the soldiers who have fallen to the Tang dynasty will be abused and killed. Bai Yang commented: some checks, such as Li Deyu's ability, and the morality of the monks and monks, are all respectable. However, as long as one party is involved, it immediately loses its rationality [2].

Software development and management is not a technical issue, but a matter of sociology [7], as stated in man piece.

In a software company, when a new manager comes with a new management philosophy, it is the beginning of a large-scale struggle and turmoil. For Chinese people inspired by Confucian culture,
Usually there is resistance to changes, so there is a struggle between the new and old factions. Then the change fails, and the old school becomes in power again to restore the old system. After that, it is repeated replacement until a new stable state or
Yes. I once worked in a software company, and I had repeated such things in just two years, similar to Wang Anshi's law change. I dare not say this is in any soft
But in China with a Confucian cultural background, such a situation should be quite normal.

 

So what should we do to prevent the evil effects of such a fight?

First, as mentioned in the previous article [11], any form of reform must be on the premise of stability. In particular, it is necessary to avoid a "totally negative" type of big change, this is a very common cause of large-scale struggle.
See the reason. Second, in daily management work, we should promptly reconcile conflicts, mitigate conflicts, coordinate the interests of all parties, prevent the formation of a struggle environment, and control the struggle to an appropriate extent and extent, to minimize
The purpose of the loss.

However, preventing the formation of a struggle environment will face some resistance. In software companies, there are usually one or another environments of struggle, especially in software companies with unreasonable management structures.

For example, in the absence of product management departments to control product functional requirements, the requirements of the R & D department are directly from the Marketing Department, when the sales department makes a hasty commitment to the customer for performance
When the demand is met, there will certainly be a conflict with the R & D department. Because there are technical conflicts in some functional requirements, it is impossible to achieve them, or the implementation cost is very high. There are also R & D departments that do not have Project Management
There is a possibility of conflict between the development team and the test team. Especially under the management of mechanized managers who only link bugs with performance, this contradiction is even more prominent.

Then there is the relationship between struggle and competition. Moderate competition in an organization helps maintain the vitality of the Organization, but excessive competition will become a political struggle. The article clearly states that excessive competition will damage the team [7]. Especially in this case, there is a possibility of artificial struggle. For example, preventing the formation of "private parties" is a common reason to undermine the team, so there will be people who will make a struggle under the guise of maintaining competition.

Therefore, in an organization, it is generally necessary for someone to coordinate the work, resolve unnecessary conflicts, and control the struggle within the scope of reasonable competition. Software companies are no exception. As mentioned in the previous article [11 ],
The soft product team structure is composed of six phases. The project management stage is the coordination of various aspects in the product team. In Microsoft, project managers account for 1/5 of total developers.
[8], we can see how much Microsoft attaches importance to this work.

Why do I need a project manager? Xiong Minghua, who has been a project manager in Microsoft for many years, said this [8]:

• Developers can concentrate on development without being troubled by management trivia;
• The development team should have a good vision of leadership;
• Communication and coordination are required between different roles in the project team;
• Some people need to connect and balance the differences between engineering development and business operations;
• The development team should have dedicated personnel for management and coordination to communicate with the outside world.

It can be seen that there are four coordination needs in the above five requirements. Including internal and external coordination. It can be imagined that if such an important position is missing, there may be many disputes inside and outside the product team, and the corresponding consequences will gradually become apparent in the dispute. In order to coordinate the relations between various parties, Xiong Minghua said that he even saw a book "" on a Microsoft Project Manager's desk.

In addition to setting up the project management personnel in the team to handle the coordination, the project management personnel also need to be provided in the system. On the one hand, it refers to "equal communication" mentioned in the previous article [11 ". On the other hand, it is "isolated ".

For equal communication, we can use Chen honggang's discussion on test independence [9] as an example. The testing department is not affiliated with the Development Department, but equal to the Development Department. The project manager is in conflict with each other.
-- For example, when a tester finds a bug, the developer deems it unimportant and does not fix it. -- The problem must be weighed based on user requirements or technical difficulty. Only by changing the subordination of the test,
Ensure the independence of the Test Department to ensure the objectivity of the test results.

For isolation, I still use my previous company as an example. For some time, the company was dominated by the Sales Department. At that time, the Sales Department was able to promise various requirements from the customer, and then go back to the company to open
Proposed by the sender. Due to the lack of good isolation between the development team and the internal and external relationships, the work was eventually disordered, and many features were repeated (the requirement of one salesperson from one customer was the same, and the other
The requirements for the same function from another customer are completely different ).

Only by ensuring the above two aspects can the communication and coordination roles of project management personnel be effectively put into play.

However, project management can only provide coordination and assistance to grassroots team members. In software companies, the struggle between senior management personnel is a greater threat. This school is centered on executives and forms a school
The struggle between the Party and the Communist Party of China will be very broad and will be repeated and sustained for a long time. This is like the battle of peer parties in the Late Tang Dynasty or the fight between the two parties in the last year of the Northern Song Dynasty.
Finally, the dynasty was buried.

One of the important reasons for such a high-level faction struggle in software companies is that the opinions of top managers are fluctuating. For example, the most common type of struggle in a software company is the opposition between the marketing department and the technical department. When the boss himself has a technical background, it is easy to see that its position is fluctuating between technology and the market.

So how can we reduce or avoid such a fight? The most important thing is to maintain policy consistency as much as possible,
Avoid being capricious, because being capricious is worse than going black. Sometimes we will find that a self-help manager is often more successful than a manager who can accept others' opinions modestly. This is because we are just starting from
Although it is possible to go in the wrong direction, at least half of the chance is to succeed. However, if it is unstable, it is likely that the company will end in the turmoil.

For the Chinese software industry, failing to realize the dangers of the struggle is not the most terrible problem. The most terrible problem is that some people consciously use the struggle to achieve their own goals. This requires the company's top managers to maintain sufficient vigilance. This article will be further discussed in the next part.

In short, competition is a good thing, but be careful.

 

(To be continued)

References
[1] Li Yaping's historical political events in the Empire
[2] Bai Yang's Chinese Shi gang
[3] Feng Youlan's brief history of Chinese Philosophy
[4] [yuan] detaching and other "Song Shi"
[5] [post-promotion] Liu Yu and other books of the Old Tang Dynasty
[6] [song] Ouyang Xiu, Song Yu, and other books of the New Tang Dynasty
[7] T. DeMarco & T. Lister man piece
[8] Xiong Minghua project management (Chapter 6 of science and art of software development)
[9] Chen honggang software testing BASICS (chapter 9 of science and art of software development)
[10] software and history of China: A Historical View
[11] software and history of China: past political events (part I)

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