Lead Sheet

In university, I played classical guitar.

The advisor of our club was a classical guitarist. He gave concerts, taught lessons, made his living off the guitar alone — a real professional. For some reason he took a liking to me. After lessons, while I was putting my instrument away, he'd tell me stories.

Here was one. He'd built his career on classical alone. One day on a job, he was asked to comp from chord changes. He'd never done it. "You don't even know that?" someone said. As a professional, that stung. He went home and drilled.

What surprised me wasn't that he didn't know. It was that he'd tell a student about his own failure like that. That's why the story stuck.

After graduation, I lost touch with him. I went into IT, ran my own company for fifteen years, and then moved to a big firm as a PM. From contract development to the enterprise world.

I was floored.

"Is this a functional requirement, or a non-functional one?" "Is this design, or implementation?" "It's a PMO request — we'll need to take it to the steering committee." Words flew around in meetings. I could guess from context. What struck me was the culture: how finely they carved things up, just to talk about them.

Where I'd come from, there was no gap between requirements, design, and implementation. Design was the developer's call, born from negotiating with reality. Documentation came after. We didn't even use the term "non-functional requirement." Performance and operations were things you hammered out with the infra people. There was no clear line between the developer's territory and theirs.

Non-functional — what?

Then the teacher's story came back.

This is how I make a living. So I have to know.

What you actually need to learn isn't the words. It's the way the world is sliced behind those words. The very idea of separating requirements into functional and non-functional didn't exist where I'd come from. The teacher probably wasn't memorizing chord notation either. There's a world where you play what's on the page, and a world where you're handed a chord and build music from it. He was forcing his way across the gap between them.

I bought my share of PMBOK and ITIL books. Lazy as I am, I skimmed them and can't remember a thing. But hearing the same words used in the same situations, over and over, the way of slicing the world that those words assumed gradually settled in me too. What were they arguing about? Where did opinions split? Who was responsible? Conversations that had been on the other side of the fog suddenly became landscape.

He passed away some time ago.

Since hearing the news, I've been meaning to visit his grave. I still haven't. Every time I remember the story of him drilling chords, I think I should.