how_to_get_programmers_to_do_anything_you_want_by_scott_berkun
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+ | From [[http:// | ||
+ | ====== How To Get Programmers to do Anything You Want ====== | ||
+ | By Scott Berkun | ||
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+ | When you've managed smart people long enough you wonder, sooner or later, what exactly you have to do to get them to do what you want. Often the term cat herding is used to describe what it's like to try and manage programmers and engineers, since, like cats, they are willful, independent and willing to use their weaponry, whether it's claws or brains, to prevent things they don't want to happen from happening. | ||
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+ | Over two decades I've seen or tried just about every experiment for making programmers do what managers want. The cliché of bribing them with free meals and video games doesn' | ||
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+ | Ideas used as gimmicks like 20% time, casual Fridays, or switching to the trendy management method of the month, whether it's Agile, SCRUM, SixSigma or whatever acronym comes next, always fade in value. | ||
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+ | The real answer for how to get programmers to do whatever you want is the answer no manager wants to hear. It's an old answer and it's deceptively simple, but since it's hard to achieve most people go their entire careers only seeing it done a handful of times if they see it done at all. Most people in powerful positions are so lost in their own egos and the granted powers their job title gives them than they never figure out the simple equation at the core of the problem. The way you get a programmer to do anything you want is you earn their trust. | ||
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+ | Trust? When I tell most people trust is the answer their faces scrunch up in disappointment, | ||
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+ | The disappointment around trust being the answer centers on the fact that trust must be earned, and earning it takes time. It's not something you can buy or accelerate. Having a degree, a job title or a shelf full of impressive books doesn' | ||
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+ | But no matter how much trust you have somehow earned, if what you ask people to do is completely stupid, of course they' | ||
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+ | Part of the trust that's granted to you is in your thought process, and the questions you've already asked about your own ideas before bringing them to someone else. And perhaps most important of all for working with smart people, your willingness to listen to their input, and improve, or drop, your requests based on their critiques, says more to them about how worthy you are of trust than anything else. Trust is reciprocal: if you never offer it, you'll never get it, certainly not from confident creatures with brains (or claws). |
how_to_get_programmers_to_do_anything_you_want_by_scott_berkun.txt · Last modified: 2013/10/13 16:34 by tkbletsc