How Seriousness Kills Discovery in Software (Research &) Development
A Plea for Playfulness, a Frank Appeal for the Importance of Farting Around
A short story on the theme of “farting around”, with thanks to Kurt Vonnegut.
The first thing everyone noticed about the Ministry of Software was the silence.
Not the productive silence of concentration, nor the reverent hush of a cathedral, but a brittle, anxious quiet—the sort produced when nobody is quite sure whether breathing is still permitted. This silence had been engineered deliberately. It was documented. It had a policy owner. It was reviewed quarterly.
It was the silence of seriousness.
The Ministry occupied a building of immense seriousness. From the outside it resembled a filing cabinet designed by someone who had once heard a rumour about Brutalism and taken it personally. Inside, corridors stretched in directions that suggested intent but delivered only inevitability. Every door bore a plaque describing its function in perfect confidence and complete irrelevance.
At the heart of the Ministry lived The System.
No one could quite agree what The System did. Its documentation ran to several million pages, none of which contradicted each other directly, preferring instead to disagree through tone and innuendo. The System was said to be mission critical, although no one could identify the mission without using the phrase “strategic alignment” at least seven times.
The System was stable. This was its greatest virtue and its gravest sin.
The Committee on Discovery Prevention
According to that mission alignment, Discovery was, the Ministry had concluded, dangerous.
This conclusion had been reached by the Committee on Discovery Prevention, after a six-month investigation into why unexpected things kept happening. The final report—On the Elimination of Surprise—noted that most problems began with someone saying:
“I wonder what would happen if…”
This phrase was therefore reclassified as a Category Three Risk Utterance.
The Committee reasoned as follows:
Serious organisations have plans
Plans assume knowledge
Discovery implies ignorance
Ignorance is unprofessional
The logic was flawless, circular, and self-sealing. Henceforth, all work must proceed according to the Plan. The Plan was a living document, provided it did not change. Living in the sense that scientists can argue over whether a rock is living. Experimentation was permitted only if the outcome was known in advance and favourable.
This was referred to as safe experimentation.
That Engineer Who Asked a Question
Somewhere deep in the building, in a cubicle that had once been intended for contemplation but now functioned primarily as a coat rack, sat an engineer named Elias.
Elias had made a mistake. He had noticed something.
Specifically, he had noticed that whenever traffic increased on Wednesdays, The System behaved as though it were being personally insulted. Latency spiked. Logs became poetic. Dashboards blinked in patterns suggestive of mild panic.
Elias did what engineers had once done in ancient times. He opened a notebook—not a ticket, not a slide deck—and wrote:
Hypothesis: Wednesdays are lying to us.
This was his second mistake. His third mistake was mentioning it out loud.
The Architecture Review
The Architecture Review Board convened immediately.
They gathered around a long table designed to discourage dissent through ergonomic intimidation. At the head sat the Chair, whose primary qualification was the ability to look concerned while saying nothing.
Elias explained his observation.
“I’d like to run a small experiment,” he said. “Just to see—”
The Chair raised a hand.
“Is this experiment in the Plan?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know it’s necessary?”
“Well, I don’t. That’s why—”
“So you admit uncertainty.”
“Yes.”
There was murmuring. Someone wrote UNCERTAINTY in capital letters just big enough in their notebook for everyone to see and fear it.
The Chair leaned forward.
“We do not experiment to find out,” he said gently. “We experiment to confirm.”
Elias nodded, because nodding was much safer than speaking.
The Library of Known Answers
Beneath the Ministry lay the Library.
The Library was infinite, or at least indexed as though it were. Its shelves contained every approved explanation for every approved phenomenon. Each book cross-referenced ten others, forming a labyrinth in which one could wander indefinitely without encountering doubt.
The librarians were stern but kind. Wardens who believed sincerely in the rehabilitation value of certainty.
Elias searched for Wednesday. He found:
On Temporal Load Variability (Approved)
The Myth of Emergent Behaviour (Revised Edition)
Why the System Is Not Wrong
None mentioned logs screaming. He closed the books and did something reckless.
He thought.
A Brief Digression on Seriousness
Seriousness, it should be noted, is not the same thing as discipline.
Discipline asks: What have we learned? Seriousness asks: How does this look?
Discipline invites scrutiny. Seriousness invites silence.
Discipline is open and brave. Seriousness is frightened and the slave of “Optics”.
The Ministry had confused the two years ago, possibly during a reorganisation, or possibly earlier, when someone first mistook confidence for clarity. Once this happens, seriousness becomes self-protecting. Any challenge is reframed as immaturity. Any curiosity becomes rebellion. Any joke is sedition.
And above all: play becomes unprofessional.
The Experiment That Wasn’t Allowed
Elias proposed an experiment so small it was almost a joke.
“I want to replay Wednesday traffic in isolation,” he said. “No impact. Just observe.”
The request was escalated. The escalation triggered a review. The review triggered a concern. The concern triggered a risk assessment. The risk assessment concluded that replaying traffic might reveal behaviour not previously documented.
This was deemed unacceptable.
Instead, a meeting was scheduled to discuss The Requirements for Wednesdays.
The Meeting About the Meeting
The meeting did not go well.
PowerPoint slides advanced solemnly, each one heavier than the last. Diagrams depicted The System as a series of boxes labelled Intent, Control, and Assurance. Arrows flowed confidently between them.
Nothing moved. Someone asked whether The System could be surprised. The room laughed, politely.
“Surprise,” the Chair said, “is a sign of insufficient planning.”
Elias wondered whether gravity had been planned.
The Night Shift
Late one night, when seriousness went home to rest, Elias did something unforgivable. He farted around.
He spun up a shadow environment. He replayed Wednesday. He watched. The System panicked.
Not catastrophically—just enough to confess. Queues backed up. A retry loop behaved like a trapped animal. A timeout assumed the worst.
It was beautiful. It was horrifying. It was true.
Elias documented everything. Graphs. Logs. Questions. Doubts.
He slept better than he had in months.
The Aftermath
The discovery caused a problem. The problem caused a meeting. The meeting caused a narrative. The narrative concluded that Elias had violated procedure.
“Yes,” he said. “But we learned something.”
The Chair sighed.
“Learning,” he said, “must be managed.”
They fixed the system—carefully, cautiously, incompletely. The Wednesday problem lessened but did not disappear. The discovery was absorbed, sanitised, and filed.
The experiment was never mentioned again.
An Unofficial Epilogue
Years later, long after Elias had left the Ministry to work somewhere less impressive and more alive, The System failed spectacularly on a Wednesday.
The postmortem was immaculate.
No one mentioned curiosity. No one mentioned play. No one mentioned that the warning signs had once been visible to anyone foolish enough to look.
But somewhere, deep in the archives, a notebook remained. In the margin, in handwriting too human to be approved, were the words:
Seriousness didn’t save us.
Playing might have.
A Plea for Playfulness and a Frank Appeal for Farting Around
Discovery is not killed by incompetence. It is killed by cultures that mistake certainty for maturity.
Software engineering does not progress through solemnity. It progresses through disciplined irreverence.
And if anyone tells you that you don’t have time to fart around—
—check the logs on a Wednesday.