A few weeks ago, an interesting discussion arises on twitter (in french, sorry for my foreign readers).
In a nutshell, it all started from a (french) post by Arnaud Lemaire about why he hates developers contest, where he explained that this kind of behaviour is infantile. Thomas Pierrain explains why he agrees, and it triggers a long thread with many french crafters about:
– Is the IT industry mature or not?
– What is our responsibility as developers?
– What is the responsibility of the company we are working for?
– Can we change an organisation to improve practices? Should we?
Of course, I don’t pretend to provide any answers to these fundamentals questions, but as usual twitter is not the good medium for long discussion (even if in this case the thread was really kind and friendly). I would like to summarize my comments here, in english to be more inclusive because I guess these topics could be interesting for many software crafters across the world.
Is the IT industry mature or not?
I won’t comment much this point because I already explained here why I think it’s not. I understand that everybody has not the same feeling about it, and it’s fine. In any case I think we can agree on the fact that there is a long living software crisis, which at least shows that we can still improve by an order of magnitude.
What is our responsibility as developers?
Our responsibility is to be professional, which means that we must be aware of the good practices in our industry, and up to date with them. There are technical good practices (unit testing, continuous integration…) and soft skills good practices (good communication, reach the business experts, empathy with users…). Most of us are aware of the former, few of us are aware of the latter. When you do apply both, you are no longer a simple blue-collar technician. You become a business involved people, you release your soft powers. You’ll more likely be part of the important decisions. I think it’s what Thomas means in this (french) keynote when he talks about “changing your developer posture”: take your full responsibility to reach your full power.
What is the responsibility of the company we are working for?
Of course it is also a bit controversial. What if the company I’m working for does not allow me to reach the business experts directly? What if I can’t see any users? What if they don’t even allow pair programming, or unit testing, or continuous integration? That is the point where the company does have a responsibility. And the first answer is: try to change it with a local change of the practices.
Can we change an organisation to improve practices? Should we?
In the twitter discussion, many people testified about the fact that you can’t change an organisation as a developer, because you’ll need managers support for that. I do agree, and I don’t care at the same time. I’m a huge fan of Gandhi on this matter: “Be the change you want to see in the world”. Why would you change a full organisation? It was here before you, it will stay after you, and it would be pretentious to suppose that you know better than them for their whole company. But, as a professional software developer, you do know how to manage the software you are working on. This is where you can (and must) have an impact: locally. If your team, and potentially a few teams around are convinced about these practices, it should be enough to live with. And it’s not such a big deal if the rest of the company is not aware of these practices. A local impact is about improving the software quality through technical practices, and your co-workers’ life through soft skills.
Last question
It now raises a last question: what if the company resists change? What if they explicitly refuse technical and soft skills good practices? In that case my advice is really simple: leave. The world is full of companies looking for competent and passionate people. Leave and work for them, or even better: work for yourself as an entrepreneur, to create a place where other passionate people will be happy to work.