Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #19 Paying a Handsome Price For A Swift Steed (千金買死馬）

Top talents will come with genuine sincerity.

Image credit: https://www.sohu.com/a/235580031_715873

This article is one of the “Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals” series.

Story

In ancient times, a king had a great love for swift steeds (in Chinese, a horse can run 500km per day, a rare find). He announced that he was willing to pay a thousand gold coins for a swift steed. However, he still couldn’t get one after 3 years of waiting.

A servant promised to find a swift horse for the king.

After three months, the servant finally found a swift steed, but it was dead. He paid five hundred gold coins for the horse’s bones (another version: head) and brought it back to the King.

The King was furious. “I want a live swift steed!” he thundered. “Why on earth did you waste my five hundred gold coins on a dead one?”

“If people know that you’re willing to pay a handsome price even for a dead swift steed,” replied the servant, “they will believe that you really love swift steeds. Very soon, they will flock to you with their swift steeds.”

Indeed, before the year was over, the King had acquired three swift steeds.

Background

(the origin: real history) An official told this story to King Yanzhao, who expressed his desire to build a strong kingdom. The king followed the advice, promoted this official, and treated him as an advisor with high respect. The message spread quickly, and many talents (including the three most famous ones at that time) came from other kingdoms. Because of that, the small kingdom grew quickly and became one of the seven most powerful kingdoms.

Meaning

A true leader is good at discovering true talents and respecting them.

Examples in Software Development

I have met a handful CXOs who expressed their desire to implement “Release Early, Release Often”. Many of them realized the key to achieving that is test automation. However, few were willing to invest their time in real actions.

Many years ago, I worked at a government department as a contractor. When the CIO left the department, an architect told me: “This CIO really wanted test automation implemented”.

When this CIO joined the department(before my time there), he was ambitious to reform the old IT processes. He somehow got the key: test automation. However, he made a mistake in following the Gartner report, which recommended IBM Rational Functional Tester as the test automation tool (in that year). Therefore, he engaged IBM consultants. Long stories short, IBM salespeople convinced the CIO to purchase the whole IBM Rational suite, the whole process (not just automated testing).

Not surprisingly, it turned out to be a disaster. I clearly remembered one town hall meeting. During the question time after CIO’s speech, someone asked, “What about the IBM Rational suite?” The audience laughed. It was pretty embarrassing for CIO. The CIO said diplomatically: “In software, not everything is guaranteed to work. When we decided on the IBM Rational, we planned a trial of 2 years…. ”