“What? You want me to tell you what to do, like some big boss?” Jim McCarthy, software management guru, Microsoft alum, and master-sergeant at the McCarthy TeamworX Software Development BootCamp, stares coolly at October’s batch of inductees.

It’s a Sunday evening, less than an hour into the five-day course, and the class is floundering. They’ve come a considerable distance six recruits from a Minneapolis medical software firm, two from a Connecticut business software company, and one Bay Area games programmer and paid $5,000 apiece to learn to do what few in this industry can do consistently: ship quality software on time.

But everything about the camp seems to be jarringly at odds with the high-tech, high-stakes, high-intensity world of software — starting with the rustic setting, a Lutheran retreat center just east of Seattle. There are no computers. No T1 lines. Not even overhead presentations. Worst of all, when the students finally learn what they’ll be doing for the next five days — an unusual software project too proprietary to reveal here — the assignment seems neither anything they know how to do nor what they signed up for.

“Could we get some more detail?” pleads Chris Holton, a blond, 28-year-old marketing director from Minneapolis. “I’m confused,” confesses Sean Vikoren, a 32-year-old games programmer, his angular face showing both skepticism and irritation. “It seems to me that you’ve set us up, then cruelly chucked us into the abyss.”

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