Young master Zjing had let the senior monk Wangohan choose
his own technology stack for the project he was building.
“For from what I have observed in the valley,” she
explained, “managing developers is like herding cattle: if
you want the animal to move forward, the worst place to
stand is in its path.”
Throughout the first month Zjing was confident of the wisdom
of her approach, for Wangohan was happier than she had ever
seen him. He arrived early and eager each morning, seldom
leaving his cubicle except for sleep. He had even been
observed chatting amiably with the monk Landhwa, whom he
despised.
But in the past few weeks Wangohan’s demeanor had changed.
He still arrived early and stayed late, but now he spoke to
no one. During teleconferences he appeared so sallow and
pale that Zjing had to check the color balance of her
monitor.
When she finally asked the monk what troubled him, Wangohan
replied only that he had encountered some unanticipated
difficulties, but (he assured her) have no fear: he had
Googled this, downloaded that, sent messages to these and
got answers from those, and all would be right as rain soon
enough. Before Zjing could ask for specifics, or even a few
proper nouns, Wangohan terminated the call.
I must investigate, thought Zjing.
She began with Wangohan’s code, and discovered that
everything about it was unfamiliar—even the implementation
language was one which the Temple did not use. Wading
through the alien syntax, she learned that the user
interface was coded with an AJAX-JSON-XPath framework well
beyond the capabilities of the Temple’s junior developers;
the templating language made Perl4 look civilized and
quaint; and the persistence layer was a NoSQL database so
experimental that the release number began with two zeroes
and ended in the words ‘alpha’ and ‘SNAPSHOT’.
I have investigated, thought Zjing. And now I must lie down.
The next day, after being pressed, Wangohan confessed that
he could not get the various technologies to work as
desired. Strange exceptions were appearing. Sometimes the
application hung, sometimes it ran out of memory. Having no
one in the Temple to turn to, he had resorted to message
boards, mailing lists, untried patches, and wild guesses.
Zjing excused herself, left her little hut, and spent the
rest of the morning leaning on a low fence overlooking a
pasture, thinking.
Eventually some cattle appeared on the other side of the
fence, shuffling in her direction. Then a dozen more, and a
dozen behind them.
“Farmer!” she called out to the man walking behind the herd.
“How do you lead so many cattle to the sweetest clover,
losing not one?”
“Wú,” shouted the farmer. “I do no such thing, for bulls and
cows know nothing about following—only about avoiding. See
how they edge away as I approach! Sometimes I walk to their
right to keep them from the forest, sometimes I walk to
their left to keep them from the ditch, and sometimes I walk
behind to keep them from turning around. I am always moving,
yet calm; seeing all, and always seen. In this way I keep my
cattle together, although not so crowded that they become
anxious and take flight. For the first rule of herding is
that you must produce a herd, and a herd is a nebulous
thing, midway between order and chaos.”
Hearing these words, Zjing was enlightened.
* Translator Andre Bogus offers the following poem:
