Why Developers Get Fired
itmanagement.earthweb.com
itmanagement.earthweb.com
Each of the three reasons he lists can be traced back to manipulation of one's political image: you fail to take the absolute most cynical view that everyone's failures from above will come crashing down on you, and cover your ass accordingly; you fail to wave your achievements around, because you believe someone is actively paying attention or gives a crap about anything you're doing; or you fail to appropriately hide your boredom and lack of motivation by plodding on at the same rate as everyone else like the good cog that you are.
None of these have anything to do with actually doing anything. You could be accomplishing next to nothing, and still be able to hit all of these points; you could be working miracles in code, and manage to flunk all three and get thrown out on your ass. They are all the departmental equivalent of spin control, and are the sign of a broken department and quite possibly a broken company. It is a sign that people have stopped caring about doing things in favor of appearing as though they are doing things. This sort of thing is a slow death of a thousand cuts to an organization, and will result in people getting fired anyway, when the lack of revenues from people not getting anything done force staffing cuts anyway.
I understand that a lot of companies are run like this; I don't need to be reminded about how the real world works, and especially not with the usual condescension. I'm not trying to convince myself or anyone else that the corporate world is not stacked this way; what I am doing is yelling in the same way Dan Pink did about motivation by incentive that this sort of ass-covering doesn't work. It results in an organization that will steadily decay from the inside, and will ultimately end up shafting the same people who thought they could save themselves by just hunkering down and playing the political game. All these people bought was a little more time cower in fear, and convince themselves this will all blow over if they just behave. It doesn't work, and people need to stop convincing themselves, for the sake of themselves, their coworkers, and the organizations they purport to work for, that it does.
Life is too short, peoples' time and effort is too valuable, to put up with asinine wealth tarpits like this. No one, not even the person cowering, is benefited in the long-term in any way by this sort of attitude.
Ugh, I need to go take a walk to unwind.
Need to Brag - Work for a company that does code reviews/inspection. It's a) great for the quality of the code and b) great for assigning merit to the people who've earned it, do that.
At my previous job, code reviews were required foreverything more complicated than a CSS tweak: change the DOM significantly, and a UI dev has to Ok it. Change a piece of JS, and the UI definitely needs to ok it. Change a piece of the mid-tier, and you can bet your ass that it's vetted before it's comitted - often by additional developers that don't even work on the mid tier.
Granted, this was a corporate b2b app for a fairly large company. Everything needed to be vetted, and sometimes it splled delays (hey, can you do my code review so I can test on staging? Ok, in 15 minutes then..).
At my current position on a small team, we do optional weekly code reviews: do something interesting or that you want feedback on, bring it up in the weekly.
How do you make pre-commit vetting of code quality scale, especially on a low headcount, high velocity team?
Without impacting the weekly velocity numbers that people not involved in said code reviews are used to seeing?
Make sure to hire only top notch. Vetting goes faster when everybody knows what they are doing (yes, this is sort of a "duh!").
Without impacting the weekly velocity numbers that people not involved in said code reviews are used to seeing?
No idea what "weekly velocity" is or who is making that number up in your company but I suggest to start measuring in months and quarters for a tangible idea of effectiveness. Forest, Trees.
So, a bit like these velocity points in Pivotal Tracker, only... even more detached from reality?
I'll let you in on why measuring mostly anything related to code in weeks is wrong: It promotes short-term thinking and code debt, not unlike what we have seen in the banking blowup.
Yes, there are classes of tasks that can be solved in a week-timeframe. But those are not normally the ones that make or break your project.
For a small, contrived example: You can hire a low-skilled worker to provision new servers. You can then measure how many servers that person gets done per week.
Or you can hire a high-skilled worker to build infrastructure for provisioning servers with a mouseclick. This will take months. But once finished you have saved yourself an ongoing full-time salary and can assign the high-skilled worker to other tasks.
Good luck determining that high-skilled workers "weekly velocity", though...
Use distributed version control, and work on your next patch while waiting on review of your first. Even if you can't use it officially, you can use it locally: http://spyced.blogspot.com/2009/06/patch-oriented-developmen...
In the long-term, you are right. However, you are much better off sucking it up for a couple of months while looking for your next job. You avoid the been-fired stigma, and you have much better negotiating power with your next employer.
Negativity gets people fired more than anything else. If it's true, it inevitably reflects on the managers. If not, well, the complainer is blaming others for what are probably his own problems. In both cases, it impacts the entire team, which is where the real damage happens.
Also, if you're generating a bunch of good code and solving hard problems, people are going to notice you.
If you're working for a small company where the CEO sifts through source control to see what's changing, producing good code will certainly suffice, but if you work in a large company with a multi-tiered management structure, keeping quiet only pushes the responsibility to promote your work to someone else - and you can't always rely on that happening.
In the cases where you can't rely on that happening, then that means no one else gives a damn about what you are doing. This would be very odd in a multi-tiered organization, since often times development projects are decreed onto the programming staff by strategic direction committees. If no one cares, the project is make-work; warning. Either it is going to contribute next to no value to the organization, or no one has a clue what value it is going to contribute. Either way, you'll be hard pressed to convince everyone who needs to be convinced what you are doing is that valuable.
To borrow a PG idea, to everyone above you in the management hierarchy, you are represented -- as an aggregate of the rest of your group -- by either your lead or manager. A lot of the interaction between your group and the rest of the company will be done by them. They need to be your advocate; if they're not doing that, then your entire group is getting shafted, and need to find a better advocate.
What matters is the value that your work delivers to the business. If you write software that consistently delivers value and has significantly positive impact, it should speak for you. If you work on unimportant projects with little or no benefit or impact to the company, it will not help you, and you should also wonder why you're wasting your time on it anyways. Certainly when it comes time for the business to execute cost-cutting measures like in times like these, they will wonder why.
Then there's politics which can render all of the above moot. It's unfortunate, but that's how humanity rolls. If you work in a large company and wonder how some totally useless and unimportant projects that cost the business money hand over fist manage to survive even during tough times like these, well, now you know why.
On the other hand if your job is writing software for a widget company than it better be vital part of every widget. You don't want to be the guy that is made redundant because what they assumed was good work contributed nothing to the overall business.
A company managed this way is a company that will have little left but a sales and marketing force eventually, because the executive staff will have pruned everyone else as being redundant. Arguably, this could happen even in a shrinkwrapped software company, where the software isn't just a vital part of the business, it is the only part.
Hire someone incompetent, or see someone incompetent get hired above you, you may find you'll be made "redundant" even if you are the last developer hacking on the product. It is employment at the will of your employer, and nothing says they can't terminate you due to their own incompetence.