The inmates are running the asylum
Imagine, at a terrifyingly aggressive rate, everything you regularly use is being equipped with computer technology. Think about your phone, cameras, cars - everything - being automated and programmed by people who in their rush to accept the many benefits of the silicon chip, have abdicated their responsibility to make these products easy to use. The Inmates are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. Business executives have let the inmates run the asylum! In his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Alan Cooper calls for revolution - we need technology to work in the same way average people think - we need to restore the sanity. He offers a provocative, insightful and entertaining explanation of how talented people continuously design bad software-based products. More importantly, he uses his own work with companies big and small to show how to harness those talents to create products that will both thrill their users and grow the bottom line.
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95mentions
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2007–2025years
54% recommend42% neutral4% critical
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What Hacker News says
- I'm reminded of the Zero One Infinity rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule)
We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons.
I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
- I always suggest reading 'inmates are running the asylum' by Alan Cooper when this topic comes up.
if product management is hosting a party, it is usually a party of people that speak about 10 different languages, and everyone needs to get along in the next 15 minutes or else.
generally, some developers can be exposed to some clients sometimes. but not all developers to all clients all the time.
- I would say it's still worth reading The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. I'm sure some of the examples are antiquated, but it's a really interesting book.
Programming Pearls too would still be worth reading
- Calling The Inmates are Running the Asylum a book 'for girls' is just weird. I suppose it is sexist, but mostly it is ... bizarre. What can he mean?
By the way, it's a good book, well worth reading if you are involved in software development.
- "What do you get when you cross a computer with a car?" "A computer!"
It's a "Riddle for the Information Age" that in Alan Cooper wrote in 1999 [1] in "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum". One of the riddles is: "what do you get when you cross a computer with an airplane?" but things have gotten much much worse since then, it needs an update with the contents of this article.
He writes: "That something like this slipped through shows that the software inside the car is not coming from the same Porsche that makes the rest of the car... Acceptable levels of quality for software engineers are far lower than those for more traditional engineering disciplines..."
We have seen this coming for 20 years now easily. iDrive happened and excuses were made.
Nobody cares about response times or human-oriented design, it seems, which is incredibly baffling in a car! Where the rest of the controls are supposed to be designed with humans in mind.
My 2022 Subaru's Harman Kardon-built head-unit will block out my entire navigation view for 3 seconds if I dare to brush the volume control with my hand. I've learned to not adjust it after that because doing so only prolongs the time that I can't see where I'm supposed to be going. Also, if I am so unlucky as to lower the volume while the navigation speaks, I end up adjusting the "voiceover volume" and not the "radio/media volume." So when I wonder: "hey why did the navigation stop talking?" I have to remember that I hit the unlucky time to use the invisbily-modal volume knob. Of course, nobody cares and they let this travesty out the door because it's just the "entertainment system."
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/d...
- I am going to teach Computer Science to a group of young students, 20-30 motivated people aged 10-25 on a volunteer basis in my village without the experience of being a teacher. The task that I set for myself is to reveal to young people all the possible areas of computer science in 10-15 lessons and then divide them into smaller groups according to their interests, after which only occasionally monitor their progress. This set of lessons is going to be much broader than CS50, with much more demonstrating of electronic stuff, but with almost no homework. Because I suppose that no programming language should be mandatory to everyone but you know, everyone should know what is a bit, what is a code, and how long is a way of light travelling for one millisecond.
What should I watch out for in these classes that are aimed at everyone? What, on the contrary, is not worth mentioning despite the temptation? How early should I show things like: systems programming, functional programming, declarative programming? How much to give discrete mathematics? At what stage should I give Lisp, C, JavaScript or Python, Wolfram Alpha? What names do I need to mention besides Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Linus Torvalds and von Neumann? And last but not least, what should I do about the fact that I have never used smartphones (iPhone/Android) and I have no interest in them, when the vast majority of my students will only have such a "computer"?
Here are few books I am going to start from, but I have a strong feeling that a lot of CS topics are missing in the list:
Charles Petzold - Code (mandatory)
Paul Graham - Hackers and Painters (mandatory for younger students)
Alan Cooper - The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (mandatory)
Steven Strogatz - The Joy Of X (mandatory for younger students)
Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month
Linus Torvalds - Just For Fun
https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ (mandatory for advanced students)
Don Knuth - TAoCP volume 1
SICP/The Land Of Lisp (?)
