Your IT Culture: Is It Inclusive?”
I work at a place now that was having one of their own highly publicized tech conferences open to developers outside of the company. There was tech lectures, and food, and coding contests. Some of it was recruiting, and some of it was jst to be in the “tech game” – creating a company profile in the world. I think its a good idea.
The FTE developers talked about it and some were volunteering, we received a lot of emails about it, and the managers would mention it often and be respectful asking if we’d like to attend. All in all, I thought this pretty damn cool and I blew a Saturday morning to take in a few lectures and just make face.
Contrast this.
Another place where I worked on a gig a while back had a tech event much like this, but even HIGHER profile. The technologies included mobile which is a monstrous topic these days. Their even had national web ads.
But inside the shop we heard nothing about it. I heard about the event through another tech group outside the company. No emails, and management said nothing at the meetings about it to their developers. Finally, a few days before I mentioned something to a fellow coder and he said “yes me, she, and the manager are going together.” Knowing the manager I knew he and she weren’t favorites, and I found it curious and sad. This director said nothing to any of us, in fact, did not seem interested in even discussing it when I mentioned it later that day. Turnout from the company tech staff was low, very low.
Missed opportunites.
Building team coherence, knowledge, and education is the job of the management and company. We as grunts do our part but we can’t be the cheerleaders — that takes time and skill too. I found the second company to go out of their way to be non-inclusive. You could see the effects in both companies of their team policies and the tech events were good vetting tools in the laboratory.
In the “good” company we have a great code base. Tons of tests, communication, ideas. Less stress. Its fun to work at and we are productive as hell.
At the “bad’ company the code base was poor — tons of MVC’s in the UI layer for instance, poor communication, distrust, no test base (means fast checkins and breakage).
This discussion goes all the way up to the top of the type of culture generated by management for a coder to work in. It does matter, because many skills besides understanding Hash Maps and Event Dispatchers comes into play when writing code.
I highly, highly suggest that a team shares tech knowledge for events in a respectful manner to each other; it really helps build the quality of your code. And that means cheaper, better code that works and keeps customers.