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September 24, 2003
Managing Software Engineers
http://ccm.redhat.com/asj/managing-software-engineers/
via Joel on Software
Some favorite quotes
People worked insanely hard to make their projects successful and their clients happy
Good people like to work with other good people. This is true in every field but much more acute in software engineering. Why? Consider two management consultants working on different projects but within the same organization. If Consultant A does a bad job it harms Consultant B's reputation to some extent but does not require Consultant B to take any action. Whereas in most tech companies if Programmer A does a bad job it usually means that Programmer B will eventually be forced to use the bad code, read the bad code, and then fix the bad code.
Great programmers get a lot of positive reinforcement from their work itself. They write some code and immediately can see it dance.
These precisely organized large organizations where each person had his role, however small, were supposed to overtake the American approach where small teams of craftsmen worked in a comparatively disorganized manner. The factory approach sometimes produces acceptable corporate IT solutions but for innovation and successful product development, the craft approach has been overwhelmingly vindicated.
Posted by mikel at September 24, 2003 12:42 PM
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