|
Author | Christopher Duncan | Title | The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics For An Imperfect World | Publisher | APress | Published | Jan 2002 | ISBN | 1590590082 | Price | US 29.95 | Pages | 240 |
|
A Brief Introduction
If you picked this particular book up off the shelves, it’s likely that you either make
a living as a programmer or plan to do so in the future. Of course, you could just
be shopping for something that’s precisely the right thickness to prop up your
rickety coffee table, but we’ll play the odds for the moment and assume that you
spend more time in front of a debugger than you do a television.
The first questions we typically have when looking for technical books relate
to platform and language. What kind of computer? What flavor of operating system?
Which particular set of languages and technologies must we know to benefit
from this book? For The Career Programmer, it just doesn’t matter. Whether we
make our living under the flag of Mac or Microsoft, mainframe or mini, our ultimate
goals and desires are the same: all we really want to do is make good money,
spend our days writing the next killer app, and get our pizza delivered in thirty
minutes or less.
However, for those who possess the ability to turn screens full of cryptic statements
into state-of-the-art software systems, there’s only one slight complication.
In order to get paid for doing what we love, we find ourselves working deep in the
heart of Corporate America. Nothing we were taught in school prepared us for the
illogical, inconsistent, and sometimes downright silly business practices that are
the norm in software development shops both large and small.
For instance, deadlines are declared in an almost arbitrary fashion, with no
real consideration of what’s involved. We’re expected to produce specific functionality
from vague and ever-changing requirements. We’re given little to no time for
proper analysis and design, and, when we ask management about hiring professional
testers and setting up a QA process—well, I’ve seen deer in my headlights
look less stunned. Internal politics are rampant, threatening everything from our
current project to our staplers, which for some bizarre reason seem to be a precious
commodity in the cubicle world. In short, from a software developer’s point
of view, the environment makes no sense. Unfortunately, no matter how unrealistic
the deadline, we’re expected to work day and night to make it happen, only to
have the product shipped with less than fifteen minutes of testing. Care to guess
who’s going to get yelled at the first time it blows up in the field? I can assure you,
the deer have leapt safely out of the glare of the headlights and there’s nobody
here but us programmers.
Anyone who hasn’t worked in our field will by now have labeled me quite
the cynic, but I suspect you were shaking your head while reading the last paragraph
and remembering the insanities of your own company’s releases. As
passionately as we want to do good work, it seems that we’re checked at every
turn by corporate bureaucracy and management that can barely spell the word
computer, let alone manage a software development process. Of course, we learn
all of this the hard way. All of the books on the bookstore shelves teach us how
to program, not how to fend off the lunacy of the business world so that we can
actually program and deliver excellence.
That’s why I wrote this book. I’ve spent the better part of the past ten years as a
mercenary. For the uninitiated, that’s a contract programmer, and it means that
I’ve seen a lot of shops. Over the years, I’ve learned some tricks to help take control
of my programming life again, along with how to further my career in general. (I do
like to eat well.) For a long time now, I’ve been working exactly the kinds of jobs
that I like, doing the techie stuff that I enjoy, concentrating on the coding, and
actually delivering on schedule, not to mention getting paid well in the process.
Much of what I know as a programmer I’ve learned from other guys who were
nice enough to share their experience, and so this is my way of giving a little back.
No matter where you fit into your project, you can learn some tricks from this
book to help simplify your life and get you back to concentrating on the code.
That’s the best thing I can think of to give to a programmer.
Assumptions about the Reader
I assume that you already know how to program and that you either currently
make your living programming in the business world or soon will be. The platform
or language you work with doesn’t matter. This is a book about overcoming
the obstacles we encounter as programmers in the real world, and these obstacles
are the same regardless of what type of software you write. It probably goes without
saying, but I also assume that you rail against any and all limitations that you
encounter on the job and that you find anything that interferes with your ability
to deliver high-quality software extremely frustrating. That’s where I hope to help.
Who Should Read This
The issues addressed here affect developers at all levels. If you work as a project
manager or team lead, you’re already a veteran of many battles with management
and are always looking for new ways to talk sense into these guys. If you’re a front-line
programmer, you’re the one who ultimately has to pay the price for bad
decisions further up the food chain, whether it’s from the Suits in the front office
or your own project manager. The tactics and techniques work at both levels. If
you’re not happy with the way things are run and want to change your job so that
you can focus more on software development and less on damage control from
dubious decisions, this book is for you.
A Note to Women Who Code
Not everyone who stays up for three straight nights chasing a bug is male. Many
women also make a living as professional developers. When the fingers hit the
keyboard, it doesn’t matter if the nails are polished or not. The compiler doesn’t
care and neither do I; good code is good code and none of the topics I cover are
gender specific. However, the English language simply does not have an easy
way to address both genders in a conversational manner. While I applaud the
sincere intentions of those who insert a “his/her” or “he/she” into everything
they write out of consideration for equality, in practice it can make the text a bit
tedious to read.
I’m no Nobel laureate. I’m just a programmer, and I write like I talk. Although
the issues we’ll cover are serious ones, my priority is to keep this a light, conversational,
and easy read. I’m more interested in helping people overcome the many
obstacles to good software that Corporate America continually throws our way
than I am in being considered a scholarly author. Therefore, to keep it simple, I
made a conscious decision to speak to a single gender for the sheer literary convenience
of doing so. Because the programming community is overwhelmingly
populated by the male of the species, you’ll see references to “he” and “him”
rather than an attempt to speak to both genders in every sentence. If this is perceived
as a lack of political correctness, I hope that the easier flow of words and
the matters upon which they touch will compensate. This is a book for programmers.
The specifications of your particular body are irrelevant.
What’s Not Addressed
This is not a language or technology book. No matter what programming technique
you want to master, plenty of books are available to teach you. This book is
about overcoming the obstacles you face on the job that ultimately result in
release disasters, stressed-out development experiences, software death marches,
and bad software that could have been good. It’s not a treatise from the ivory
tower of academia. It’s a field manual for the software developer grunts who
relentlessly toil away in the thick of it, day after day.
What This Book Brings to the Party
If you worked in a perfect world, you’d have plenty of time for gathering requirements,
for analysis and design, and for implementation and testing. You’d also be
in charge of what went into the product, the overall design, and which technologies
were used, and you’d release it when you were darned well ready.
Management would not interfere, and you wouldn’t have to contend with any
office politics. Everyone would listen and do things exactly as you suggested.
Small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri would be, well, you know.
If you live in such a world, go ahead and use this book for that wobbly coffee
table. Oh, yeah, and save me a seat. I’d love to have a job there.
For the rest of us, this book is a collection of very simple and practical observations
and techniques for putting us in as much control of the development
process as the real world is going to allow. A number of hurdles must be cleared
when shipping a good product, and some of these can be handled by modifying
the approach we take to design, estimating, and other matters of process.
Other issues result from bureaucracy and politics. No design methodology in
the world is going to help you there. The higher-ups tend to ignore the opinions of
programmers partly because we’ve never learned to speak their language or communicate
in a way that is meaningful to them. Consequently, our thoughts and
suggestions—the very things that could save our projects from disaster—are
ignored even though we’re the specialists. Before we can show them how we’d like
to do things, we must first acquire the skills necessary to make them hear us. In
short, we need to learn how to manage our management so that we can get back
to doing the job that we love.
You don’t need an MBA to figure this stuff out. You just need to pay attention
to how things work and modify your approach to one that is realistic and effective
in your environment. The bottom line is simple: whether we agree or disagree,
more often than not we’re simply told to get the job done in the time we’re given,
or else. Consequently, the approaches that work when we have the luxury of time
fail utterly when we have the ability to implement only a quarter of the process.
In such moments, we need simple and practical approaches that get the product
delivered.
In the chapters that follow, I’ll be addressing these issues with the assumption
that you don’t have time for the perfect solution. That’s why I refer to them as
guerilla tactics. They’re direct, effective, and they’re not always pretty. These tricks
are all taken from real jobs with real pressures. When you have to deliver, or else,
neatness just doesn’t count. Getting the job done is all that matters.
A Quick Peek at the Chapters
Here’s a look at the rest of the book. Part I explains the problems prevalent in our
jobs, and Part II speaks to the issues and their solutions.
Part I:Software Development in an Imperfect World
Chapter 1: Welcome to Corporate America
After landing their first job, many programmers are shocked by the reality of
life in the corporate world. Your initial dream of sitting undisturbed each day,
kicking out clever little apps, is continually disturbed by unrealistic deadlines,
unreasonable decisions, bureaucracy, politics, and crisis after crisis.
Any of these could reduce your current software project to a pile of smoking
rubble reminiscent of the latest Godzilla movie. They don’t teach this sort of
thing in school, and even seasoned developers have difficulty knowing how
to cope with elements that seem beyond their control.
Chapter 2: Business is War.Meet the Enemy.
To successfully deliver the next killer app, you must fight many battles, the
easiest of which is with your debugger. Whether you’re a systems architect,
project manager, team lead, or full-time coder, your ability to do your job and
enjoy your pizza without indigestion is going to be continually assaulted by a
host of business-induced problems. The first step in building up your defenses
is simply knowing your enemy. Consequently, we’ll highlight the problems
that most software development teams commonly encounter.
Chapter 3: Good Coding Skills Are Not Enough
In gazing at the enemy, it’s tempting for many programmers to simply shrug
off management problems as not being a part of a programmer’s job description.
However, this will be of little consolation to you when you’re plucking
the arrows out of your posterior. Software development is a team endeavor. If
you don’t work at your level to help combat the problems that threaten your
project, you’ll all go down together. If you don’t do anything but code, here’s
why you still need additional skills to survive.
Part II:Guerilla Tactics for Front-Line Programmers
Chapter 4: Preventing Arbitrary Deadlines
It’s three o’clock in the morning, your system just crashed again, your debugger
shrugs its shoulders and asks for a coffee break, your eyes are so bloodshot
that they look like a roadmap of midtown Manhattan, and the product
must ship tomorrow if you wish to continue your employment. How did you
get into this mess? At this point, there’s not much you can do about it beyond
persistence, excessive caffeine consumption, and simply hoping for a lucky
break. The time to prevent this disaster was much earlier in the game.
Where’s a good time machine when you need one?
Chapter 5: Getting Your Requirements Etched in Stone
Scope creep is not the title of a bad science fiction movie involving mutant
gunsights from outer space; rather, it’s one of the foremost reasons that software
projects are not delivered on time and within budget. If your features
seem to continually evolve as the project progresses, or you find yourself trying
to provide well-defined functionality from vague specifications, here’s
how to nail your requirements down firmly, right at the beginning. If they
wiggle, use another nail.
Chapter 6: Effective Design under Fire
The only problem with many design methodologies is that it takes a significant
time investment to work through the entire process. Unfortunately, out
here on the front lines, we typically have a hard time convincing management
that we need a little time away from the compiler for sleep, let alone for
months and months of abstract drawings that they don’t understand.
Consequently, at such times we must break the rules and roll our own design
approach, using the best of all that we’ve encountered in the time we’re given
to work with. It ain’t pretty, but it works.
Chapter 7: Practical Estimating Techniques
Arguably the hardest thing to do in our business (beyond finding pizza
toppings that everyone agrees upon) is producing an accurate time estimate
for any nontrivial amount of code. Furthermore, many unrealistic deadlines
arise due to overlooking tasks other than coding that also eat up chunks of
time. In the end, if the estimates aren’t real, it’s the programmers who pay the
price at deadline time. Here’s a simple approach to help ensure that your
next timeline is an achievable one.
Chapter 8: Fighting for Quality Assurance
No programmer worth his weight in cappuccino ever wants to ship a buggy
product. It’s bad for the ego, bad for the résumé, and bad on the nerves when
your telephone rings in the middle of the night. Amazingly, however, the
overwhelming majority of businesses who develop software do not hire quality
assurance professionals or otherwise institute any sort of rigorous software
testing procedures. This calls for a combination of fighting for change
and exercising self-defense wherever possible.
Chapter 9: Keeping the Project under Control
Keeping a software development team running like a well-oiled machine
takes work from people at every level. Code standards, version control, technical
documentation, organization, discipline, and good communications are
but a few of the skills required to keep a project on track. It matters little that
you’ve prevailed in your political battles if your project simply implodes due
to poor structural integrity. From programmer to project manager, here’s how
to keep things running smoothly.
Chapter 10: Managing Your Management
If management is to have realistic expectations and a firm foundation upon
which they can plan their business strategies, a little retraining is in order. If
it were true that those higher up the corporate food chain were immune to
the concerns of rank-and-file programmers, the battle would be lost before it
began. However, what we’re dealing with here is not an abstract concept but
is instead real, flesh-and-blood people. Consequently, they can be convinced,
directed, inspired, and motivated to do the right things. You simply need to
speak a language that they understand. And, of course, let them think that it
was their idea all along.
Chapter 11: Corporate Self-Defense
In companies large and small, internal politics can be the most frustrating
and disruptive force that you encounter. People with agendas that are quite
different from your own can disrupt, take over, or even completely destroy
your project. Many programmers have neither the skill nor the desire to
engage in political games; however, just as in the martial arts, many methods
of self-defense are available that require little more than attention and
redirection—and knowing when to duck. The alternative is to become a
professional target.
Chapter 12: Controlling Your Destiny
No matter how permanent you’ve been told your position is, software developers
have about as much job security as a drummer in Spinal Tap. Whether
you move to different projects at the same job, change companies as a
contractor, or hang out a shingle and go into business yourself, there are
no guarantees. If you want to keep paying the rent by making the compiler
dance, it’s up to you to look after your career. No one else will. This means
keeping yourself marketable, knowing how to negotiate, and always staying
prepared by looking to the future.
Chapter 3: Good Coding Skills Are Not Enough
But I just wanna be a programmer! Why do I need all of these non-coding skills?
Can’t I just sit in my cubicle and concentrate on programming?
Sure you can. In fact, the overwhelming majority of programmers worldwide
do just that. Of course, the overwhelming majority of programmers worldwide
also have an extremely common set of complaints about their jobs. The simple
reality of the matter is that your job is probably not anywhere near as good as it
could be, and neither is your software. We’ve already identified a large number of
culprits that appear to be responsible for the problems we encounter, but,
when it all comes down to the bottom line, it’s your fault. Ouch. Can I say that?
Well, perhaps, if only because I’m safe for the moment from the sting of a
whiteboard eraser.
How can all of the shortcomings in your software development shop--so
many of which are typically caused by managerial decisions that exhibit about as
much common sense as a lima bean--be your fault? Simple. If you sit on your
hands and do nothing, then you’re part of the problem when you could be part of
the solution. Wait, that sounded a bit like one of those trendy catch phrases.
Maybe I’ve been hanging out in Corporate America too long.
If I’m suggesting that you take a more active role in dealing with the issues
you face as developers, I suppose it’s not that different from asking you to storm a
machine gun nest. Of course, all those years of dealing with maintenance programmers
has undoubtedly prepared you better for such a task. Still, to be
practical about it, anyone taking risks should have a reason for doing so. In other
words, what’s in it for you?
What’s in It for Me?
Probably one of the biggest hassles in any fulltime programmer’s career is
sacrificing your life to countless hours of unproductive--and very often unpaid--
overtime. It’s bad enough that you’re given a situation where you can’t get the job
done working forty hours a week. The way most businesses are run, the end result
may well be yet another release disaster even if you put in eighty hours a week.
That’s not exactly a rewarding experience, particularly if you have to give up your
life for it. When we fire up the editor, what we’re reaching for is the next killer app.
We are artists as much as anything else. To put blood, sweat, and tears into a project
(okay, maybe not the former if you don’t have to interact with the maintenance
programmer) only to have management ship it in a half-baked state can be downright
infuriating, and that’s with a full night of sleep. I have no desire to work day
and night as it is. Doing so on a project destined for failure adds insult to injury.
Along those lines, one of the things that are in it for you as an artist is the ability
to ship a betterquality product. Whether your name is in the About box or not,
your signature is on every piece of software you ship. We all tend to take a great
deal of pride in our accomplishments, so who wants to be associated with anything
other than a spectacular success? Do I work for money or for ego? Both. (In
that order, for the record, but definitely both.) If you want to be involved in
projects that make you proud, you have to do your part to help them survive
in the wild.
Actually, I’ve always had a pretty bad attitude towards companies that take
advantage of programmers and expect them to dedicate their every waking
minute to the job. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a musician all my life and have
seen how nightclubs and other aspects of the music industry tend to pay almost
nothing. They get away with this because they know we love music so much that
we’d probably play for free and are usually happy to take whatever we can get. A
low-paying gig on the weekend is more fun than no gig. Because of this, bar gigs
pay today almost exactly what they paid twenty years ago. Really. It’s an unfair and
predatory practice but is so common that it’s become the accepted norm. If you
push for more equitable pay, you’re simply told that they’re not doing anything
different than every other venue in town. That’s typically true, but it doesn’t
make it right.
Many software development companies employ this exact approach in dealing
with programmers, and for the exact same reasons. We got into this business
because we were passionate about programming. We tend to do it at home in the
evenings and on weekends just for fun. With the same predatory attitude, these
sweatshops take advantage of our love for development and make continual overtime
an accepted norm.
I have a friend who is a programmer working in such an environment. In fairness,
I must say that he was told up front in the interview that, due to the stock
options giving the employees a sense of ownership in the company, they hired
only those people who were willing to dedicate above-average hours to the job.
Nonetheless, he’s been killing himself the past few weeks working late hours. I
made some of the usual jokes with him regarding end-of-the-project crunch time
and asked when the release date was. His answer floored me, even though it’s
nothing new. He said there was no deadline; it was simply a corporate culture. If
you weren’t putting in all the extra hours, you just weren’t working hard enough.
When there’s an honest-to-goodness crisis, you can count on me each time,
every time. I’ll be the guy with the sleeping bag next to my desk. Obviously, my
friend sees it as worthwhile, and he’s a pretty sharp guy for whom I have a lot of
respect. However, this sort of open-ended abuse of programmers constitutes a gig
that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
Consequently, for years now I have employed a somewhat unorthodox tactic
for avoiding sweatshops. I live in a major city, and there always seems to be plenty
of work out there for my particular skill set. Consequently, when I go out for interviews,
I do so with the desire of landing a job that I really want. By the time I
actually get down to the normal face-to-face interaction with the company, we’ve
already done a lot of the dance and it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m potentially
a good fit. They wouldn’t bother to interview me otherwise. So, we go through all
the normal motions where we each do our best to convince the other that we’re
something that life is just not complete without.
When it’s just about all said and done and things look good, I ask about the
kind of hours that they’re working on average and if overtime is a frequent flyer in
their world. I’ve found that a good many managers don’t want to be honest with
you about this because they figure it would be harder to get people to sign on.
They’re certainly correct. So, just to make sure that I’m not being suckered into a
sweatshop environment, after they’ve assured me that they don’t work much overtime
I happily agree with the philosophy, telling them that I have enough going on
in my life that I like to get my job done in forty hours a week. I then tell them that
as a seasoned developer it’s my personal conviction that, if you’re unwilling to pull
the occasional all-nighter at crunch time, you should get out of the business.
However, I feel that any company that has a crisis every week and that requires
constant overtime is a company with extremely stupid management, and I have
no desire to work for such morons.
The truth is that, if the conversation has indicated to me that I’m not the only
programmer in the room who curses like a sailor, I use much stronger language
than "extremely stupid" because I really want to make a point. Having done so,
one of two things usually results. Either they were telling me the truth in the first
place about little overtime, in which case we’ve agreed on yet another topic, or
they’re lying to me. If the latter, I have just terminally insulted them and there is
no way in heaven or earth that they will hire me. Which is exactly my intent. When
times are tough, you take whatever gig you have to in order to survive. However,
under normal circumstances, there’s plenty of work in our business, and life’s too
short to work for abusive companies.
Does all of that sound patently unprofessional to you? Perhaps it is. Nonetheless,
ask me how many sweatshops I’ve worked in. Now, I spend my nights and
weekends living my life while others toil away hour after hour, pushing themselves
closer and closer to burnout. I’m a decent programmer, but many folks in
this business are much, much better than I. And yet, I get paid as well as the next
guy and I work forty-hour weeks. Why? Because I realize that, to have a gratifying
career, good coding skills aren’t enough.
The ability to consistently meet your deadlines is indeed another benefit that
we can gain by looking beyond our technical abilities. Above and beyond the obvious
fact that, if you’re hitting your goals in a well organized fashion, you’re not
killing yourself with pointless overtime. Being successful and productive tends to
lower your stress level and makes you less likely to be harassed by management.
We get up each morning and spend a very significant portion of our days working
for a living. If that experience is unpleasant, then simple math tells us that a very
significant portion of our lives is unpleasant. Who wants to live like that?
Of course, if you regain control of your programming life, you can spend more
time coding and less time putting out fires. I realize that, technically speaking,
coding is coding, but that doesn’t mean that I enjoy it all equally. My personal
preference is to sit undisturbed writing new code on a project that sparks my
interest and enthusiasm. I can assure you, I’ve spent many, many hours coding in
scenarios that were nowhere near my preference. So have you. I could have gone
to school and learned to do a great many things for a living. I became a programmer
because it was a way to pay the rent that was actually fun. If I’m not having
fun, I feel cheated. Consequently, I care a great deal about any aspect of my job
that could interfere with the enjoyment of my work, for when I’m enjoying what
I’m doing I’m giving it heart, body, and soul. That’s good for me, that’s good for the
project, and that’s good for the company. I believe strongly in win-win scenarios.
Naturally, one of the things we want to do is work on the cool projects instead
of the stuff nobody wants to touch. Who cares if you’re using the programming
language and environment of your choice if the task you’ve been given is dull,
tedious, and probably destined to never see a real, live user anyway? The cool
projects, as you have no doubt observed, tend to go to the people who make
an effective effort to get them. That sexy new project has to go to someone.
Why not you?
I once worked a contract with a friend doing development on a data entry
product that had an extremely complex list of input validations that were different
for each state in the country and for each new customer’s needs. The approach
that they were taking when we got there was to create a new dynamic link library
for each customer/state modification. This struck us as a little cumbersome. We
then found that their method of doing this was copying the entire source code
base for one library, pasting it to a new directory, going into the code and manually
changing anything that needed alteration. Above and beyond the volumes of
duplicate code, they even approached the positioning of images by changing
magic numbers in the call to display the image, compiling, viewing the image,
taking a guess at how much it needed to move, and repeating the process.
My friend, being a serious veteran programmer, observed the obvious that
what this really called for was a custom screen editor and code generator, coupled
with common code libraries. Of course, we could have solved this problem in
other ways that didn’t require a code generator, but in talking to the other developers
we encountered massive resistance to the idea. They felt that, if there wasn’t
a lot of code floating around, their job security might be threatened. We both take
a dim view of such poor ethics but were realistic enough to know that we were
swimming upstream in trying to fight it.
We approached the project manager, who was himself a programmer and a
good guy. He was newly arrived to this project and not responsible for the mess of
his predecessor. He enthusiastically embraced our idea and told us to get to it. In
the end, while the rest of the team slogged away copying and pasting code (my
friend also observed that .cpp clearly stood for Copy-and-Paste Programming), we
were off creating a cool new app using the latest version of the operating system,
all the new UI gadgets, and anything else that we wanted to play with that we felt
would make a better tool.
When it was complete, work that took several programmers three months to
accomplish was done in a week or two by a single developer. After we had moved
on to new contracts, we heard that the project manager was promoted. When a
new manager came in, the developers got together, scrapped the system we built,
and returned to the old ways of copy-and-paste programming. Who cares? We
didn’t. I’ve long since spent that money. It’s my responsibility to conduct myself in
an ethical fashion and do quality work; what the company does with it is its own
affair. The point is that, although everyone else was working on dull, boring, and
tedious tasks, my friend and I were having a blast kicking out a cool app and earning
the high regard of the project manager. Why? Because we both pursued talents
beyond the technical.
The last reason I list in terms of what’s in it for you is no doubt one of the
most important. The ability to make better money has a lot to do with non-coding
skills. You do work for money, don’t you? I suppose I could have pursued different
avenues of programming that might make me a buck or two more, but I like what
I do. That’s a big deal, and without it I think I’d just go back to playing guitar in
smoky bars. Life’s too short to spend it doing something you hate, no matter how
much it pays. Nonetheless, I’ve been broke many times in my life (many of which
had a curious relationship to the amount of time I spent playing in smoky bars),
and I don’t care for the experience. Money ain’t a bad thing, and, if you want me to
write code for you, money is required. How much? Every last penny that I can
negotiate, of course. The goal is not just to do what we love for a living, but to get
paid extremely well in the process. To accomplish both, you’re going to need more
than just your technical prowess. If you can code in technical utopia and also have
enough money to keep yourself stocked up on the latest bleeding-edge gadgets,
isn’t that worth a little extra effort?
Who Needs These Skills?
How do these various skills fit into the structure of the development team? You
may be thinking that much of what we’ve discussed thus far is of limited use to a
production coder and applies more to those who pursue a management career
path. Actually, it’s never really that simple. I’ve never met a programmer whose
job could be neatly packaged into one tidy little category. In the real world,
throughout the course of the project we end up wearing different hats at different
times, even if the job description when we signed on was supposed to be nothing
but a coder.
Whether your part of the project is large or small, the same requirements
apply if you’re to successfully deliver your software. Chances are good that you
have some additional responsibilities beyond making sure that your code compiles
without warnings and doesn’t cause smoke to pour out the back of the box.
(It’s true, though, that I once came back to my desk in the middle of a debugging
session to find a fire extinguisher in front of my keyboard. I can assure you that
there were no hardware problems. Honest.) If that’s the case, you’re going to need
skills beyond the technical. However, even if you’re fortunate enough to do
absolutely nothing but code week after week, you still have other responsibilities.
At a minimum, for your project manager to be successful in shielding you from
the insanities of the corporate world, he’s going to need your support.
You’re also going to be involved in meetings. If you never go to meetings, drop
me an email and let me know who the human resources person is at your company.
In any event, you’re going to find that you spend much of your work-week
doing things that don’t require compiling, debugging, or uttering the occasional
programmer’s expletive.
The size of your team may shift the types of skills you need, but whether it’s
large or small you’ve got to be able to cope with the business world in one manner
or another. Small teams with a lot of individual autonomy require individuals with
good organizational and navigational skills. If you’re working in an environment
where you’re given a task and are then left alone to make it happen, you actually
end up doing a lot of project management whether you realize it or not. (You can
think of it as just being organized and focused in your work if the "project manager"
part makes you twitch.) Whatever you call it, however, you have many of the
same duties. You still need to be able to define your requirements clearly, perform
adequate design, and arrive at an achievable timeline with milestones arranged
along the way, just to name a few. Your compiler won’t help you with any of this.
When working on larger projects with multiple teams, you’ll often encounter
as much corporate fumbling from within your team as you do from without. You
will likely have a dedicated project manager and perhaps a structure of technical
leads as well, along with a hefty complement of programmers. Political considerations
will be much more a factor in this environment, as will issues such as how
well meetings are run, the competency of your project manager in partitioning
tasks, how much interference you get from middle and upper management, and
many of the other things we’ve touched on thus far. Remember, you’re at the bottom
of the software development food chain. Very little happens higher up that
doesn’t have an effect on you, one way or another.
You may also find yourself working in the capacity of technical lead from time
to time. Although it’s a testament to the confidence that others have in your technical
and organizational skills, this can be a thankless job with great potential for
burnout. A technical lead is often nothing more than a project manager with limited
scope who carries a full coding load. In other words, not only do you get to do
all the work you normally do as a developer, much of it technical and therefore
enjoyable, you also get to handle the managerial tasks that are relevant to your
team. If it sounds like you just inherited a considerable amount of overtime,
you’re probably not far from the truth. The trick to working this position with any
degree of success, which includes avoiding burnout, is to realize that you can’t be
a manager at any level, not even the team lead, and get a full day’s worth of coding
in. Depending on how large your team is and how much organizational work
you’ll have to perform, you should take your normal level of coding assignments
and knock off a quarter or perhaps even half. Unfortunately, technical leads are
not always given the power to make such decisions, which is why it’s often a real
burnout inducer.
Of course, if you have a one-programmer project (and that happens a lot in
the business world), you’re the project manager, team lead, and coder all rolled
into one. If you thought that technical leads had a workload, you’ll just love this
one. Of course, there are some significant benefits to being a one-programmer
team. With no other team members to distract you or call you into endless meetings,
you might actually get some coding done. However, never forget that there
are always going to be managers above you. What they’re called is irrelevant. Any
way you shake it, they’re managers and that involves all the normal issues of politics,
bureaucracy, their effectiveness in dealing with their own management, and
all the rest. Additionally, just because you’re the only programmer doesn’t mean
that it’s wise to short-circuit the requirements gathering, design, or estimation
phases. The rules don’t change based on the size of the project, although experience
tells us that, if you’re a one-programmer team, the chances are good you
work in one of those places where they expect to see code flying off your fingertips
nonstop. Trying to get a process in place is even harder when you’re the only
one there.
Taking Control of Your Time
To be successful--and, even more importantly, to be recognized as such by those
you work for--you have to get the job done. This sounds too obvious to mention,
but sometimes it’s easy to overlook the obvious. It’s important to keep in mind
that business people pay you because they want you to produce something. If you
really want to be good at your job, there’s more to delivering the goods than coding.
You have to keep in mind the end goal of the system you’re developing and
what it’s supposed to accomplish, and do everything within your power and the
scope of your position to see it through to completion. You may or may not be recognized
for your extra efforts. You may not even want to be recognized, for a
variety of reasons. Nonetheless, your ultimate reward will be in delivering quality
software, on time and within budget, without overtime, without stress, and without
any other nonsense you can avoid. Make this happen, and you put yourself in
a better position for the next project that comes up. Everyone loves a winner.
At every level of development, one of the constants is the need for effective
time management if you wish to meet your deadlines. Approaching software
development in a scattered and disorganized manner is going to significantly
diminish your results and increase the amount of time it takes you to get them.
Along with that comes a higher level of stress as you’ve never really quite got a
handle on what’s going on. This tends to leave you feeling rather breathless and
with the nagging suspicion that you’re always running behind. It’s probably a correct
assessment.
I once knew a project manager that actually oversaw several development
efforts. This person always seemed to have several balls in the air at any time. His
office looked like a whirlwind of file folders, stacks of paper, and various boxes of
uninstalled software, and there were probably a couple of chew toys from his dog
in there somewhere as well. He constantly had a harried look about him as if he
were somewhere on the border between not being able to cope with it all and the
sheer terror that someone else was going to come yell at him. All of his projects
were behind, and he spent half his time dealing with customers who were upset
about it. This, of course, didn’t help free up any time for him to solve the problems.
In short, this was one of the most disorganized managers I’ve seen. Little
wonder that his projects were a mess. In fact, what thread of cohesion that actually
did run through his various teams was the result of the personal initiative of
his developers, who wisely saw that they would get no support from their manager
and consequently took matters into their own hands whenever possible. The
interesting thing about this guy is that, not only was he overbooked as it was, he
never hesitated to take on a new project whenever he could get his hands on one.
Could he have handled this kind of workload efficiently? Probably not in fortyhour
weeks, but it didn’t have to be the disaster that it was. It all comes down to
organization. He didn’t know how to keep his own ducks in a row, had no skills at
planning or running a meeting, and interacted with his developers only in a crisis-driven
mode, dashing out in a panic to tell them of the latest fire that they had to
work late to put out.
With better time management skills, he could have taken control of the various
projects, avoided being yanked from one crisis to the next, and perhaps even
have delegated a little. Such things would have settled his projects down tremendously.
What’s that you say? It’s not your problem because you don’t want to be a
project manager? You’re just a programmer? Well, who do you think he had working
for him? If your manager is a mess, and many of them are, you’re going to
need all the skills you can get purely for self-defense.
Enhancing Design
System design is another area in which it’s handy to have some facility in something
other than compilers. It is certainly not a given that a good coder is naturally
a good software designer as well. Although obviously related, they are two completely
separate disciplines. However, you don’t have to know how to code to work
in an architectural capacity, and you don’t have to have design skills to write
source code. However, you do need to have a grip on the design side of things
before you start writing that source code. If you just shoot from the hip and don’t
think your way through things on a small scale the same as you would for larger
tasks, you’re likely to encounter difficulties either halfway through what you’re
coding or the first time someone else has to interface to your code. We typically
think of design in terms of mapping out the entire software system, but, when you
get down to it, you should always think before you code. Even if management is
inclined to believe that you’re daydreaming rather than working.
One of the many reasons you need some facility with design is that, to meet
your deadlines, you’re going to have to have some skills in estimating as well. It’s
true that an estimate is of little importance if you’re given the date before you’re
given the assignment, but sometimes you’ll have a manager who asks you how
long a task will take and actually pays attention to what you say. If you can’t cook
up a good estimate, you’re not only setting yourself up for failure, you’re doing it
to your manager as well. I’ve found that in general it’s a bad thing to make the person
who is responsible for your paychecks look stupid to their own boss. People
are funny that way.
Improving Interaction
One of the significant benefits to possessing more than merely technical skills
comes when you learn to improve your interaction with others. Sometimes it’s
courtesy, sometimes it’s being able to deliver the goods, and sometimes it’s just
plain old politics, but it’s always a beneficial thing that comes back to you. When
you come in to the office each morning, you don’t deal with a highly specialized
class of sentient office furniture. You deal with people. Okay, I did once know
someone who spent an inordinate amount of time talking to his furniture but I
gave him the benefit of the doubt and chalked it off to sleep deprivation. If you
keep in mind that you’re dealing with real, live, flesh-and-blood people instead of
nameless, faceless coworkers, you’re going to have a much better time of it in the
business world. The better your people skills, the better your chances of getting
what you want, whether it’s a new computer, a new project, or more money. If you
can also learn to be bilingual and speak the language of business people, there’s
no end to the enhancements your programming career can experience.
For those of us who take our programming seriously, sometimes just the ability
to bring better software to life is reward enough. Interpersonal skills help
tremendously in this area as well. If you have great new ideas on how your software
should be designed or how a particular chunk should be coded, you still
have to be able to sell it to others if you want to make it a reality. Proposing new
ideas successfully requires more than flowcharts and whiteboards. Decisions are
often made not because the facts overwhelmingly pointed to a particular solution
but rather due to the charisma of the individual making the presentation, whether
it was a formal meeting or just a persuasive conversation in the hallway. Don’t feel
as if you’re really overflowing with charisma? You’d be surprised how much of that
can be an acquired skill. We weren’t all born movie stars. Many times, attention to
the details of how things work in the business world and learning a few navigational
tricks are all the tools you need to gain the respect and admiration of your
peers and management. Many programmers feel that they’ll never have much
luck in the persuasion department because they weren’t born natural orators.
However, if you learn to speak the language of your audience, understand the
things that motivate them, and position yourself appropriately, you’ll be surprised
how often you win. We’ll be going into these things in more detail later, but I’ll
touch once more on a recurring theme here: you can’t win if you don’t try.
Probably the bane of programmers and cubicle dwellers everywhere is the
dreaded meeting. Some weeks it feels as if all you’ve done is travel from one meeting
to the next. Sometimes it’s true. Ironically enough, many of those meetings
will be rants from higherups who wonder why the heck we’re so far behind on
our schedule. You’re probably not in charge of most of the meetings you attend
and therefore have to suffer through someone else’s poor skills at organizing and
running such gatherings. There’s only so much you can do in that scenario, but
you can help expedite the process at least a little. Further, if you decide to get serious
about your skills in meetings, others will notice and a small groundswell may
result. A meeting run by an inept manager can be put back on track, shortened,
and made more productive when just a few of the attendees understand some of
the basics and are assertive enough to help the process along. If you’re actually
responsible for reducing the number or duration of meetings at your company,
you’ll probably become a folk hero among your peers. (Who knows? They may
even name a conference room in your honor.)
Getting What You Want
Something that’s not really as obvious as it seems is knowing what you want out of
life. The truth is that a very large number of people in this world just don’t know
exactly what they want. Just as it’s impossible to meet all the expectations when
developing a piece of software with poor or fuzzy requirements, so too is it true in
life. That includes your career. If you don’t know very specifically what you want,
you’ll have difficulty achieving it and probably wouldn’t recognize it if you did.
My observations have led me to believe that a large majority of programmers
got into this business much as I did: I started programming for fun, got hooked,
and decided that it would be a cool way to make a living. I then went out and got a
job. What exactly was I looking for in a programming career? In retrospect, I had
absolutely no idea. I just wanted to get paid to write code.
Having put a number of miles behind me by now, I have a much better idea of
what I want for two reasons. First, I’ve had enough experience to see what’s out
there, what I like, and what I passionately wish to avoid. Secondly, and I think
even more importantly, is the fact that at one point I sat up and realized I was
working with fuzzy requirements and decided to do something about it. I actually
spent time and gave serious, detailed thought to just exactly what I wanted in my
programming career. I then set out to accomplish it.
Naturally, it’s much easier to get what you want when you know what it is, and
I have had a very enjoyable career thus far. I’ve spent time doing the types of
things I wanted to do and have been paid well for it. This is not because I’m any
kind of superstar, one-in-a-million programmer. It’s simply because I detailed my
goals and desires and then set out to accomplish them in exactly the same way
that I would approach turning a requirements document into a good design and
ultimately an implemented product. That involves little more than taking one step
at a time, always with an eye to the future. Of course, from time to time, I revisit
my desires and tweak the spec where necessary, as what I want tends to change. I
also spend a fair amount of time reviewing where I am, where I’ve been, and how
things are going so far in my efforts to meet these goals. That helps me to make
the necessary course corrections.
Many of us tend to spend our lives on automatic pilot to one degree or
another. I’m sure if you took a little time to yourself and gave it some thought, you
could come up with a pretty decent list of things you’d like to change about your
current job and perhaps your career or life in general. That’s a step I’d encourage
you to take. Be specific. Be very specific. What you’re defining is the perfect world.
Don’t leave anything out, even if you think it unlikely to accomplish. Once you’ve
done this, you’ll have a decent requirements document from which to work.
The next step is to come up with a decent design doc. Take a look at where
you are in your career and start brainstorming, just as you would in a design
meeting, about how you might get there. Unlike as in software design, in this exercise
it’s acceptable to leave some questions unanswered. You may not see the
solution at the moment, but new input or opportunities could come out of the
clear blue sky at any point in the future to help you chart a course for that particular
goal. Keep it on the requirements list. For all the other items, you’ll end up with
at least a beginning strategy and plan of action. Although this doesn’t agree with
all of the true software design methodologies, in the real world design tends to get
tweaked as we go, benefiting from what we learn and steering around problems as
we encounter them. So too will your design doc that you create for your programming
career be modified as time goes on. I’ve heard it said that no battle plan
survives contact with the enemy. Allow for that flexibility.
Once you’ve got a good design (which in any business is simply a detailed
road map for how to get where you wish to be), it’s time to give some attention to
implementation. You now know, in great detail, exactly what the perfect programmer’s
life is, at least for you. You have a strategy in place to make this a reality. The
next logical step is to start taking the necessary steps to realize your desires.
When you have both your requirements and design docs sitting in front of
you, you’ll quickly realize that to meet your goals you’re going to need a few more
tricks up your sleeve than just knowing how to avoid compiler and runtime errors.
That’s where we’re headed next. You already know how to code. You’re good at it,
or you wouldn’t have a job. Now it’s time to hone your skills in all of those other
areas so you can effectively combat the insanities of Corporate America and
achieve your objectives. With any luck at all, the result will be more coding, more
fun, and fewer encounters with nervous little dogs. The last time I saw him, the
watchman’s partner was sporting a camouflage collar and jacket and was having
a whispered conversation with the maintenance programmer about inventory
control.