No recipe can replace a chef.
Joel has a subtle concept he wants to convey.
I have been forced to write entire essays simply because I cannot find any other way to convey to English speakers the difference between ר??ש גדול and ר??ש קטן. All I wanted to say was that methodologies encourage ר??ש קטן and I need everyone on my team to be ר??ש גדול.
To someone who has never learned Hebrew it takes me two or three books to explain that. MSF is a fraud—an attempt to consolidate all the ר??ש גדול things Microsoft programmers do in a set of rules which are supposed to work if you force ר??ש קטן bizonim to implement them. And it’s never going to work.
I’m no expert on עברית (and I know even less about IDF slang), but here’s what I get out of that:
No recipe can replace a chef.
You want a little more? OK.
ר??ש גדול is rosh gadol, literally, big head; the opposite, ר??ש קטן (rosh katan), as you might imagine, is little head. What’s lost in the translation is that the “little head” is a person who is good at following directions, but bad at questioning those directions (and, by extension, writing new ones when the situation demands it). The “big head” is a person who is curious and clever*, always searching for the right thing rather than the prescribed thing.
Back to the kitchen analogy for a minute: Your sous-chefs are loyal, rigorous, thorough, and unimaginative. A fancy framework (err, recipe) might be enough to keep them occupied, but you’re never going to create any new dishes—or even deal gracefully with shortcomings in existing recipes—without someone willing to look deeper, to question the conventional wisdom, and maybe come up with some original ideas. This is the chef, the master, the rosh gadol.
* “Curious and clever” was a favorite phrase of C. Sidney Burrus—currently the Dean of the Rice University School of Engineering—when he lectured the intro electrical engineering course, ELEC241 (when I took it in 1996). In teaching basic circuit theory, Dr. Burrus frequently demonstrated techniques that could not be applied by following a simple algorithm or by inserting values into a formula. Many puzzles, such as discovering ways to simplify a complex circuit diagram by spotting portions which could be reduced to Thévenin equivalents, required more of a student than plug-and-chug problem solving.