Dear Mr petdance,

We are sorry to inform you that your application to join Optimization Club has been declined.

In accordance with the spirit of openness enshrined in our charter, the following is a list of reasons for which membership may be declined. All or some maybe be applicable to your application. No further correspondence with regard to the reasoning will be considered.

• The range and or depth of your fields of practical experience is too narrow.
• Your answers to our questionnaire show signs of plagiarism.
• Your answers to our questionnaire show a lack of understanding of our charters primary aims.
• You may seem to fail to realise, that the opposite of 'optimised' is 'inefficient'.

  That inefficient means resources are being wasted. And wasted resources are wasted money.

• You may seem not have realised that being IO-bound is not an excuse for not tuning the CPU-costs of your processing.

  Even if those wasted cycles can not be readily utilised by other processes within the system; they do at the very least consume power unnecessarily; this generating excess heat; which in turn requires more power to dissipate.

  And energy costs are becoming a major proportion of IT costs.

• You may have ascribed to the view that programmer's time is more valuable than processor time.

  This viewpoint completely neglects that the programmer's time is paid for once; but the time user's and customer's spend waiting for code to complete, is repeated over and over. And they pay the bills.

  Favouring programmer time over customer time is an intellectually, morally and financially bankrupt ideology.

• You may have shown a tendency to assume that your priorities have priority over those of the business you are writing code for.

  Whilst testing is important; suggesting that it takes priority over business needs and market deadlines is the tail wagging the dog.

  There is not reason for the development role without there being a business justification for its product.

  There is no point in delivering the perfectly tested product, if by the time it reaches the marketplace, the demand has gone elsewhere.

  Nor will a bloated or slow product sustain itself in the market place in thge face of better optimised competition.

• You may have misunderstood the role of testing.

  Testing is a means to an end, not and end in its own right. Testing is a cost centre not a profit centre.

  When the processes of testing incur costs greater than the aggregate costs of an in-the-field failures it might prevent, it becomes an irrecoverable drain on resource.

• You may have demonstrated a narrow field of view with respect to development methodology and or testing tools.

  Mandated monocultures preclude deriving benefits from alternative approaches and mechanisms.

For and on behalf of The Optimization Club.

Mostly humour. But as with all the best humour, there is a strong foundation of reality.