I. M. Wright’s “Hard Code”: A Decade of Hard-Won Lessons from Microsoft®

Foreword to the First Edition

I was a regular reader of Eric Brechner’s columns, penned under the name I. M. Wright, when I met him for the first time. It took me a moment to be sure that I was talking to the same person, since Mr. Wright was notably opinionated, and the modest, polite, and friendly person I was talking to seemed more like Clark Kent.

My favorite columns focused on the relationship between the technical and interpersonal dynamics of people building software in teams at Microsoft. I’m often surprised, given the amount of material that has been written about the company, how much of the story remains untold.

Software engineering managers on large projects have three fundamental problems. First, program code is much too easy to change. ...