Validation comes in many flavors...
Jul. 29th, 2009 10:13 amSteve Dubner (Freakonomics) says some very nice things about Paul Graham's Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, and give him much-needed publicity in the New York Times: Read This If You Hate Meetings.
Normally, I wouldn't be so vociferous about someone else's article to post it twice, but this is so critical it needs to be repeated: in a world of fractured, continuous partial attention, those of us who are members of the creative class (and make no mistake, software development is not engineering, it is craftsmanship) need to get this across to the people who manage the business side of things.
Every day, management is becoming more distracted, more driven by events, and yet feels more accomplished than ever. Yet in order to accomplish anything, their engineers, their craftsmen, must be left alone in their shops for hours, even days, to do whatever it is that they do. Even when you're pair programming, you and your partner need three hours of uninterrupted time while the task at hand is loaded into their heads and exists in that brief, two-man noösphere, where ideas and words act like multipliers and filters, eventually producing works that are functional and crafted.
Any business where both sides cannot talk to each other about their needs as managers and developers is doomed. I've worked for companies that understood this, and for ones that did not. Sadly, the ones that don't understand this seem to be much more commonplace.
Normally, I wouldn't be so vociferous about someone else's article to post it twice, but this is so critical it needs to be repeated: in a world of fractured, continuous partial attention, those of us who are members of the creative class (and make no mistake, software development is not engineering, it is craftsmanship) need to get this across to the people who manage the business side of things.
Every day, management is becoming more distracted, more driven by events, and yet feels more accomplished than ever. Yet in order to accomplish anything, their engineers, their craftsmen, must be left alone in their shops for hours, even days, to do whatever it is that they do. Even when you're pair programming, you and your partner need three hours of uninterrupted time while the task at hand is loaded into their heads and exists in that brief, two-man noösphere, where ideas and words act like multipliers and filters, eventually producing works that are functional and crafted.
Any business where both sides cannot talk to each other about their needs as managers and developers is doomed. I've worked for companies that understood this, and for ones that did not. Sadly, the ones that don't understand this seem to be much more commonplace.
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