The Lost Art Of Whiteboard Hieroglyphics
The writing is on the wall, but now it’s at home and not in the office.
Some view the meagre office whiteboard as a kind of anachronism in the modern Grand Game of Software Engineering, a relic of the past, if you will.
An outdated engineering boffin’s scratchpad, where only simplistic and limited ideas used to be formed by aged hand waving slide rule equipped aficionados, but unfortunately now rapidly outmanoeuvred by the more modern, online, sophisticated “collaboration” tools of today.
Or, so managers would have you believe as they keeping pushing for ever more process over people¹, millions more bits of coloured paper (all alike), and the endless eye-watering kickbacks received from agile “consultancies” all rubbing their little hands in eager anticipation.
Management is, as ever, completely misguided, wrong, or deliberately trying to alter the past the suit their present day corporate Borg-like narrative — a bit like the editors in the notorious Ministry of Truth².
Those faint, rubbed-out echoes of now lost past designs offer a tantalising glimpse into how the progressive classes (i.e. us) used to actually have the time to think, to innovate, to create, to communicate clearly with their peers in a high information content fashion, and actually work in an optimally…
