Deconstructing Common Sayings I: "A Good Craftsman Never Blames His Tools"

There is an old saying: "A Good Craftsman Never Blames His Tools". As any old saying, it is often twisted and reinterpreted to mean whatever suits whoever uses it. But let's not jump to conclusions yet. Instead, let's explore different approaches:

Inversion: "A Bad Craftsman Blames His Tools"

Which can be tweaked to: "If you blame your tools, then you are a bad craftsman". This is often used by managers to push bad tools to engineers by shaming the complaining engineers.

Skill assumption: "A Good Craftsman Is So Good He Can Produce Good Work With Bad Tools"

This assumes a talented craftsman will be good with any toolset you give him. Possibly even without any toolset (he has hands, you know)! Which is often used to push bad tools to engineers, because if they have any pride they will take the challenge and produce great work!

Tool assumption: "A Good Craftsman Is Good Because He Has The Best Tools, Therefore He Has No Reason To Blame"

Which can be twisted to "skill is irrelevant, because there are tools to compensate for it". Which is often used by salesmen to push bad broken tools to clueless managers that try to fix a problem by throwing ludicrous amounts of underqualified amateurs to it. I guess these managers believe in the hivemind.

Skills with Tools: "A Good Craftsman Is Good Because He Searches For The Best Tools"

My favourite. A good craftsman doesn't blame his tools. He replaces faulty tools with working ones. He constructs better tools. Used by engineers to defend themselves against bad tools pushed by outsiders.

As you can see, what you read above is strongly biased from the point of view of a developer. Uuuh, salesmen are evil, and so are managers! Bad, bad people!

And they ignore you, and claim you are biased because you are a developer, and they are managers therefore they have a better point of view and you are wrong.

What they don't tell you is that they have chosen these tools for you because of economical reasons (the cheapest on the market), political reasons (so they have more control over you) or HR reasons (so they can hire from a bigger pool of candidates). They never choose the tools based on technical reasons, because that would be thinking like a developer.

What they also tell you is that they have never used and will never use the tools they force upon you, and that you will be the one doing the work with the tools they have chosen. The tools that will be grossly inadequate for the job (often for any kind of job). But the managers and the salesmen will be happy. After all, the managers provided the best tools to the developers, therefore are doing their work. The salesmen filled their quota, therefore are doing their work. On the other hand, those pesky developers... Why can't they just use the tools and do their job?

So if you are a manager, and you choose tools for your developers for any reason other than technical, this is what will happen in your workplace:

• First, some of the engineers will complain.
• Then you will reprimand these developers, because, after all people all over the world are using these tools to construct solutions, therefore the tools are right and you are wrong.
• Then these developers will burn out.
• Then, the good ones will say "Screw this, I have other options". And then they will leave.
• On the other hand, the bad ones ones will say "Screw this, but I have no other options". And then they will stay.

So, if you want to lower the average quality of your enterprise, there is no better way to do that than forcing bad tools upon your developers. Soon you will figure out who are the good ones: the ones that leave your enterprise.