Bozo bit

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In his 1995 book Dynamics of Software Development (ISBN 1-55615-823-8), Jim McCarthy presented a series of rules about the political and interpersonal forces that drive software development. At the time, it's fair to say that most coders still thought of themselves as technology experts first, team members second. The technical issues facing programmers were sufficiently daunting that just getting code written was commonly considered good enough; McCarthy and other authors (Lister & DeMarco, Constantine, McConnell, Ed Sullivan (ISBN 0-7356-1184-X)) were just breaking the news that social issues trump technical ones on almost every project.

Rule #4 is "Don't Flip The Bozo Bit". Bozo the clown was a figure of fun, someone certainly not to be taken seriously. McCarthy's advice was that everyone has something to contribute--it's easy and tempting, when someone ticks you off or is mistaken (or both), to simply disregard all their input in future by setting the "bozo flag" to TRUE for that person. But by taking that lazy way out, you poison team interactions and cannot avail yourself of help from the "bozo" ever again.