10,000 Foot Developer

Many years ago I was working on a website and I had to do some image manipulation for the graphics.   The company I was working at wouldn’t let me get a copy of Photoshop or anything close to install on my computer — if you installed anything out of bounds the monitoring service on your machine took it out almost immediately.  I ended up having to use Pixel Paint and a bunch of .dll’s from the command line to make some proper graphics.  The cost was four times as much.  But worse, it was disheartening.  It soon became apparent that almost anything I had to do for their site involved undue hoop jumping.

This place has a large Culture of Can’t which is a culture that does not enable its employees to do their profession but instead steps in the way of them in the name of control — they figure that its safer to just pay for the extra work than to take a risk on people they interviewed, vetted, and hired who also have skills their company does not excel in.  These places shut down ideas and innovation, for countless reasons like job security, power hunger, or fear.

Some crazy incidents of the Culture of Can’t I’ve run into recently:

• I met a person at an Agile conference who so thought that developers were messing up their software that they bought and gave them all that famous book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”  and complained about usability problems with the software.  Upon further digging I found out that developers and QA were put on an assembly line and had to build everything to the specs and time lines agreed to by business and management.  The build teams were just trying to keep up.  The tools were locked down, and no real manifestation of usability was ever put into the specs (shadow requirements).
• A business colleague of mine wanted to do some things for his websites.   He was told flat out by his IT department that he couldn’t do those and summarily dismissed.  This is very interesting, because business is the source of most of the high level design and that earns the money that keeps the place open.  The requests were very doable, in fact.
• At a place I worked at, myself and a few team members wanted to blog about our stuff on the company’s wiki.   We were told by the architects that we couldn’t.   We looked into their blogs and basically saw that they were making blogs akin to writing books.  But none of our teams benefited from their work — we didn’t get any architecture designs, enterprise views, infrastructure support etc.   We had our suspicions.
• A high level dev manager/architect visiting from another state asked me explicitly how to hire and retain good talent.  I inquired about the culture from a few of his employees and found a lot of turnover; unreasonable schedules and an attitude towards build teams that disregarded their expertise for a command-and-control environment.

The two themes in a lot of examples seem to be either 1) cowboy developers gone wild or 2) organizational hierarchy enforcing bad design because of people afraid for their jobs and told no.    And in my experience as a contractor/consultant at a ton of corporations I’ve run into #2 most of the time; in fact, 90% of the time.  And often someone billed as a “cowboy” has simply been handed a sack of buffalo pucks and is trying to keep things in order enough to have time to eat, sleep and maybe see their family.

So in my development and management experience I’ve come to these conclusions to build a culture of innovation and success:

• Empower people.  When you hire these tech people you probably cannot do their skill.   So trust them.  People want to do good.  People are happiest and perform best when they are allowed to act of their own accord on things they enjoy working on.
• Set up a system of accountability — and that means for EVERYONE.  Including management.  Too many places have management working under the table.  People are intelligent and they know what’s going on and when they see this they will act in the manner they are treated.
• Help workers chew on some other problems besides just busy work that will engage them and create business value for your business.   You can’t have it both ways — hire creative inventive people and then “control” innovation.  Doesn’t work like that.
• Remember, there is more than one was to skin a cat.  Just because a person doesn’t do it your way doesn’t mean it isn’t correct.
• Let the people own their stuff.  Then they will also own their outcomes.
• Failure is OK.  Especially if you set up a safety framework of trial-and-error.
• Make your own work transparent, and others will follow and ideas will be generated, people will be happy, and productivity will follow.

I realize that a lot of this is a pipe dream, to immediately drop this in.  But these ideas are more than just “things to make work better” — they are competitive edges.   Huge competitive edges.   How much more productivity do you get from a colleague who likes what they do, and is empowered to execute it?   How much more business can you create with the power of your whole workforce engaged towards innovation?