I’ll start with a quote from Albert Einstein as an epigraph for this review: “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.“

Middle tech: software work and the culture of good enough by Paula Bialski is an evidence-based book intended to change our thinking about how and why large software systems are built the way they are. In her introduction to the concept of “good enough-ness,” the author surmises: “I bet you would quickly return this book to wherever it came from if on the back cover a reviewer wrote, ‘This book is not bad, not excellent, but just good enough.’”

Let’s get that over with. This book does the job it was intended for. It is more than good enough. Bialski makes her case that “achieving good enoughness is an incredibly complex and interesting endeavor.” Buy it now for fresh and deep insights about the way corporate software is built and how developers get their jobs done. It will change your thinking.

The book Middle tech introduces us to the company MiddleTech, a software development enterprise that is just good enough. The book elucidates the imbrications, give and take, and shake and bake that are part and parcel of the negotiations between and among its software managers and software engineers about what is reasonable work. It is reminiscent of several of my favorite organizational survival stories: The inmates are running the asylum [1], Orbiting the giant hairball [2], and the recent movie depiction of the rise and fall of BlackBerry [3].

Working as a kind of “consultative detective” [4], Bialski draws upon evidence-based management literature to guide her organizational analysis [5]. She characterizes MiddleTech as organizational anarchy. These are organizations or decision situations characterized by problematic preferences, unclear technology, and fluid participation [6,7]. Bialski describes eight “constellations” of relationships between actors in these decision situations. These include human and nonhuman actors--self, other programmers, clients, and code.

She also shines a spotlight on the ethical dilemmas faced by the developers who choose to be just good enough [8], or those who just give up due to the cognitive friction and sludge [9]. Key insight: knowing what is reasonably good enough is learned individual and social organizational behavior (p. 171). Additionally, and unfortunately, capitalist logic (“win as much as you can”) can undermine good enough.

To learn more about the evolution of software development practices and methods see [10,11,12]. To compare and contrast the use of Scrum in enterprises see [13,14].

Be good enough.