[View the story "BVIO2014" on Storify]
[View the story "Today I learned 36.3.14..." on Storify]
Open plan offices are bad. Breaking my concentration is wasteful. You hired me to code, so don’t interrupt me. I keep reading statements like this and feel compelled to supply a counterpoint. It isn’t that these are lies, it is that the are immature perspectives on a complex set of circumstances that clearly only represent a certain type of coder. In fact, I’ll claim that “coder” is either junior or selfish or both: immature.
Let’s start off with some basics:
I understand open source licensing very well. I write a lot of code and have released code under myriad licenses. I understand the value of licensing software. I respect the authorship of code. I fucking hate talking about licensing and arguing over violations. Recently, I was harassed over GPLv2 licensing issues. It went entirely wrong, but it had a profoundly good impact on the project.
Business is king. Customers rule. Service is everything. Yet every organization I go into has an engineering group that can’t see outside their bubble. Perhaps they can, but they certainly choose not to.
I’m an engineer, I write code. I’ve written approaching 100k lines of C code in my life time, I’ve administered tens of thousands of systems in my career and I’ve help plan some of the largest customer-facing infrastructure ever built.
I’ve built a few successful products and looking back on their success, I think that the mantra that drove product development is what separated our products from the rest of the market: “products built from pain.” All of the products we’ve built were done so to relieve acute pain. Not pain we researched; pain we experienced. We built products and changed the world of software because our lives sucked.
Photograph by AlexRK I’ve read a lot of books lately on new ways of running organizations and different methods of motivating people and many of them focus on studies around jobs that require a tremendous amount of creativity or “thought workers.
