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September 20, 2005
Corporate Culture
There's a bunch of noise in the cube land today, as groups are being shifted around, cubes being (re)constructed, and in generally disrupting concentration completely. What's worse, my iPod is running low on battery power suddenly so the reality filters only work partially today. With that in mind, I've a moment or 5 to actually author up a bunch of tidbits I've been wanting to post for awhile now.
I've spent some time searching around and reading a bunch of online articles, and have been really surprised by this one from Business Week (link originally from News.com). I'm not really interested in the doom and gloom of the article, mainly because we've all heard that company XYZ is going to fail only to see it... not fail. Frankly it seems everyone right now is predicting Google's dominance over Microsoft.
The more interesting bits come from the article on software development and resource retention. Given my current dislike of my work situation, I found myself examining some key points on what exactly happens to employee morale. Joel often discusses what he believes makes a company a great place to work. Having worked in some companies I've felt were great and some not so great, I too have my own ideas.
Software development is one of those rare areas where it's hard to measure the experience of candidates and efforts put forth in a project. The end user rarely ever considers the amount of thought put into designing, understanding, creating, modifying, maintaining, and cleaning up a project's code-base. Many developers understand this from the start and seek alternative means for recognition, and more importantly a way to re-assure themselves that what they do "matters".
How does one keep software developers happy?
First, projects. This area breaks down to a few subcategories that become complicated when you realize they really aren't subcategories but rather extensions of themselves. Let's call these subcategories the 'new project goodies' and the 'wonder puzzle challenge'.
Throughout the schooling era of many programmers, we're taught that we will always have a new project to start with a never written before code-base. This is where the 'new project goodies' are often solidified. Rarely are programmers given a project with a whole mess of code and told to add feature XYZ, or discover why a user can crash the application with bizarre configuration MNO. And rightly so. Such tasks really don't teach the basic concept of the curriculum, without which you could not (without difficulty) accomplish the tasks needed in corporate environments. With the push of open source, this is becoming less and less, but I'd also argue that most open source projects are the Wrong Way (TM) to be introduced to code maintaince. The BWonline article has one quote that nicely sums up this area of concern:
And that leads to an even more worrisome problem: discontent among its software programmers. Instead of coming up with the next great technology, Microsoft programmers have to cater to its monopolies. But top-flight engineers want to tackle the next great challenge. "They want to create new worlds, not defend old ones," says a former senior executive at Microsoft. "They want to storm the Bastille, not live in Versailles."
What this quote misses is the second half of the project catagory, the 'wonder puzzle challenge' developers. These are the programmers that essentially enjoy the puzzles and challenges of figuring out what's going on under the hood. I call this code archeology, which gets some odd responses from people. Often it's not even a case of the puzzle's themselves that interest a developer. I've been more than interested in a project a handful of times due to what I see the project as a whole trying to do. When your project reaches a certain level of interest, people start to notice and you will get good developers who are interested in maintaining. Not because they like the puzzles, but because they sense a feedback to their efforts. The above quote shows the shortsightedness of the former exec. It's not that they all want new projects, but how much innovation can go into fixing a word processor? The office suite of tools have long since lost their luster and appeal for not just developers, but the public in general.
Posted by Dan at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)