The story ends well because the project was actually simpler than what it looked at first.
Unfortunately, more than often, things happen to be a lot harder than expected
What happens when, after 2 months of scribbling and playing space invaders, Charles realizes the project actually requires 3500 lines of code?
He wants the project to succeed but now he doesn't have enough time, and he fears to ask for help because he knows he is labeled as a lazy and arrogant guy.
So he works long hours to fix the situation, then he burns out.
Source? This is somehow happened to me. Several times.
This story can be true, people like Charles and simple projects exist, but these are exceptions, not the rule.
It's easy for a beginner to believe he is that guy and then experience a death march [1]
Things can go wrong for Alan, but he has a team to support him and his managers know he is working at something complicated.
I'd like to be Charles one day, but for now I'm Alan.
The way I see it: Charles made the problem look simple by spending a few months thinking about the whole program, while Alan made the same problem look complicated by writing a bunch of code and always looking busy.
While I agree that Charles is the exception, I don't believe meritocracy is a valid solution; I'll always bet on Charles:
If the project was actually a "3500 lines of code" problem, then Charles might have taken longer to think about it, but it's my experience that Alan never would have finished.
If this story had happened in real life, and the problem had been more complicated than anticipated, and Charlie had realized this, it would be likely to fail, because he did not have enough leverage toward the upper management to get the resources required to succeed, so in that case the project would be likely to fail, or at least be severely delayed.
However, Alan was making the problem more complicated by introducing a lot of accidental complexity, and I have often seen that this is done even when the problem is more complicated than anticipated. Such a project could easily create enough work for 10-15 people in the hypothetical scenario in the article if the project had enough necessary complexity to be a four person project.
It is very hard to distinguish between what is necessary and accidental complexity, and that is precisely the point of the article. Prestige is very often bound to how many subordinates you have rather than how well you solve a particular task, so making your project artificially complex can be a strategy for climbing toward upper management. This may of cause be a conscious or unconscious from the employee/manager in question.
Indeed, it's very important to match the structure to the problem.
I've seen real-world situations where the Charlie approach was clearly wrong - a maverick programmer that wrote a module on his own, only some light testing with end users, no peer-review, not even source control. The program was finished in record time (a month or so), looked good, apparently did what was required, users and management were delighted, he got a huge raise. "Charlie" went on holidays... and then disaster struck. He hadn't considered the impact on other systems, and a bug delayed the montly accouning closing process, costing thousands of man-hours correcting the errors. Other programmers had to go to his terminal to see the code... and found a huge hardcoded, unstructured mess.
OTOH, in the same company, they hired a Java Senior Architect "Alan" to lead a module, just a little more complex that what "Charlie" had done. "Alan" spent the first few months meeting with all possible stakeholders, writing process diagrams, selecting a 4-person team, then spent a few more months building a "perfect" software architecture, an entire ORM layer over the systems he had to connect to. Then they chose a complicated Javascript framework for the frontend which none had experience with. After a year and a half (over a year over budget), they finally launched a first version... which wasn't what users needed. A year and a half later (3 years total), they finally have a working system.
While he didn't get the credit "Charlie" got, everyone thinks "Alan" is some kind of guru and that he understands "hard" problems, and he's going to be given the lead (again) on an even larger project, which the company is betting several millions on.
> ... and Charlie had realized this, it would be likely to fail, because he did not have enough leverage toward the upper management to get the resources required to succeed
Not to mention, the company will be paying Alan and his team much more than they’re paying Charles.
It’s my suspicion that people will give more weight to people they’re paying more, simply because they’re perceived as more valuable - independent of any other hard data. So despite having already spent more money on Alan, they’d be likely to continue doing so, due to the perception of hard work and the perceived value to the company.
I read an study testing an idea similar to yours, but with wine. They organized a study in the guise of a wine tasting event where there were 3 bottles of wine, but 2 bottles were marked up (one from $5 -> $50 and another from $10 -> $90). Even though people didn't know they were tasting the same wine, they said the the more expensive one tasted better. The other half of the study was with the prices removed, people couldn't guess the more expensive wine. The conclusion from the study was that "Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine."
What happens when, after 2 months of scribbling and playing space invaders, Charles realizes the project actually requires 3500 lines of code? He wants the project to succeed but now he doesn't have enough time, and he fears to ask for help because he knows he is labeled as a lazy and arrogant guy.
So he works long hours to fix the situation, then he burns out.
Source? This is somehow happened to me. Several times.
This story can be true, people like Charles and simple projects exist, but these are exceptions, not the rule. It's easy for a beginner to believe he is that guy and then experience a death march [1] Things can go wrong for Alan, but he has a team to support him and his managers know he is working at something complicated.
I'd like to be Charles one day, but for now I'm Alan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_managemen...