(2018-12-31) Jerry Weinberg Interview Cast

Michael Bolton: Jerry Weinberg Interview (from 2008). Michael: Recently you launched a new Web site, and your banner is “Helping smart people be happy.” Why did you choose that? Jerry: Most of the people in the computing professions are pretty smart, at least as measured by tests and the kind of technical work they accomplish. But so many of them haven’t learned how to use their smarts on themselves. They can create wonderful systems, but when they use their brains to think about themselves, they often think themselves into depression.

I was like that, for a long time, until I began to figure out what I was doing to myself. I set myself the task of learning how to be happy, and as I began to succeed, I realized that one of the things that makes me happy is working with other happy people. So, selfishly, I decided I would devote myself to helping my colleagues and students learn to share my happiness. Like most things I do, it’s completely selfish—but has side effects that others may enjoy.

Michael: Why not “Helping happy people be smart?” Jerry: If you’re happy, you don’t need to be smart. Smart isn’t the only road to happiness.

Testing holds a special place in my vision of the future of the computing profession as a whole. Why? Because testing is the first place where we generally get an independent and realistic view of what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong when we build new systems. We do get this view from Support (another area that’s considered low-class), but by the time information arrives from Support, the people who put the errors in a product are often long gone and immune to learning from their mistakes