[patrulek]

> Why Can't Programmers Be More Like Ants?

Because ants dont have business units. Most of us, programmers, are slaves to the business and we have to do what they want from us, not what we want or think is optimal to do. And the requirements can change often. How fast those changes would be notified by others in decentralized "ants approach"? Would the business survive with this approach?

[igor47]

Changing business requirements are akin to the food that ants find in optimal time. I think leveraging distributed intelligence to solve business problems is strictly better, despite what rock star CEOs in thrall to the cult of their own genius would have you believe.

I think the reason this system doesn't work is not that engineers don't want to solve business problems. It is instead that most organizations are pulled in conflicting directions by the need to solve simultaneously their business's ostensible problem, while also satisfying the wealth/power/prestige goals of certain individuals. In times like these, you can't just let the engineer colony wiggle towards an optimal solution.

Lest you think this take too conventional...It might be worth considering whether a jump in abstraction level might anyway converge to the same ant -like approach. The engineers are more like the legs of an ant, centrally controlled by its nervous system. The ant is the organization, and at that abstraction level it still does find an optimal path towards higher level goals, in the service of which the PM or the CEO is as much as ant. I don't really believe this, but I think some people sincerely do and it's certainly worth considering