The Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship states that they “are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft.” As a software developer, I take pride in my work and have high standards for myself, and I appreciate it when others do the same. But if those high standards turn into arrogance toward others, then maybe we’ve gone astray.

They told us back in grade school that you shouldn’t pull yourself up by putting others down, but even today that wisdom can be hard to remember. I admit that I’m guilty. If you work at a company that has any code that has been around for a few years, you’re going to find some horrible code, and it’s really easy to make fun of it. I still do it all the time, but I’m trying to stop.

Arrogance and software craftsmanship don’t mix. While the technical aspect of software development is extremely important, the human side of things is just as important. It doesn’t matter how good your code is if the software doesn’t meet the needs of the users. If you refer to people in the business as “stupid users”, how are you going to be able to understand what life is like in their shoes? If you know all of the SOLID principles but you have a bad attitude, your teammates would probably rather work with someone else.

People who don’t know what we do sometimes think of software developers as a bunch of people who sit in front of a computer all day and never interact with anyone. In my experience, that hardly ever happens, and in fact, we often get rid of cubicles in favor of more collaborative workspaces where we can communicate easier with other team members, and sometimes even have business users come sit near us so that we can have their constant feedback.

I remember a situation several months ago where I had to meet with some users to design some functionality. After the first few meetings, I had to present a potential design idea to them. Before I went into the meeting I had already thought of potential issues that the users might bring up and the rebuttals that I would give. The users expressed some concerns and I wasn’t winning them over.

I stopped after that meeting and took a step back. Maybe I was listening to the words coming out of their mouth but not actually hearing what it was that they were really saying. Maybe their concerns weren’t petty after all and they had good reason for bringing them up.

The next time we met, I tried to go in and just listen. I mean really listen, like let them talk without thinking about what I’m going to say next. I tried looking them in the eye and processing every word that they say, the feelings they were expressing, and the reasons why they believed that way. Then when they were done talking, then I would think about how I’m going to respond. And this time I finally saw what they were talking about. It really hit home when one of the users (who was excited about me finally getting it), said excitedly, “That’s what we’ve been saying for the last month!”

I’m glad that I finally got it right, but I’m disappointed that it took me so long to get there.

In my mind, in order to really consider yourself a craftsman (or craftswoman), we need to not only value technical expertise but skilled human interaction and communication skills, and that starts with having an empathetic attitude toward others instead of finding ways to put them down.

We all have numerous activities and people competing for our time. More than anywhere else, this seems to play out at work.

If you’ve ever had a day full of meetings, you know what I’m talking about. It feels like you go to work for the entire day so that other people can get stuff done while you feel like you accomplish nothing.

A day half full of meetings isn’t much better, especially when the meetings are scattered throughout the day. Sure, you technically have half of your day to get work done, but it’s constantly broken up by meetings.

We came to a point on our project where this was getting really bad, especially for developers. We would often spend half of our days in meetings, and as a result we wouldn’t have any long stretches of time to focus on writing code. We had to do something about it.

So we did. We blocked off 2pm until whenever you left each day for no meetings. We acknowledge that meetings are necessary, but we need to set aside time for ourselves so that we can get the things done that we have promised that we would get done. This is an actual calendar invite in Outlook, so the time shows up as busy to anyone trying to schedule a meeting.

We also blocked off 10am-11am every day to have meetings. When we need to schedule a meeting, we try to fit them in between 10-11. We have our standup at 10, so we’re already stopping for that anyway, so it’s a good time to talk.

The Results

This system has been awesome. I often have meetings from 10-11, and sometimes longer, but if the 10-11 slot is full, people will schedule meetings in the time slots around it. As a result, I’m often done with meetings for the day by lunchtime. I have close to the same amount of meetings as I did before, but now I get them all over with at once. Now I have the whole afternoon to get work done. This has done wonders for our sanity.

Since we don’t have many time slots for meetings, this forces people to not schedule frivolous meetings. You know the ones I’m talking about, where someone schedules a half-hour meeting for what ends up being a 10 minute conversation. Now we just have a 10 minute conversation after the standup.

There is a real cost to context switching. It takes some time to get in the zone, regardless of whether you’re writing code, writing requirements, or testing. Every time that you have to stop what you’re doing to do something else, you need to spend time to get back into what you were doing.

In the end, it boils down to being in control of your schedule so that you have time to do the things that are most important. I encourage you to set up whatever boundaries you need in your day in order to help you succeed.

Much has been said recently about companies like Github, Valve, and other places that create these open corporate cultures of empowerment where employees can do pretty much whatever they want. This manifests itself in many different ways, from allowing employees to work where they want when they want to allowing them to even decide what they want to work on and not limiting their time off. A great example of this is Valve’s new employee handbook. Stop reading this post and go read the handbook, it’s worth the read.

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Hey, welcome back. How do you feel after reading something like that? It gets you a little excited, doesn’t it? Personally, I love the idea of getting to move my desk wherever I need to, or being able to decide what I want to work on. In a place like that, there’s no limit to what you are able to accomplish. You are only limited by your own abilities and time.

Let’s be honest though, most of corporate America can’t be as free wheeling as a video game company. When I go to work, I’m doing work for people who tell me what project to work on, and they get to decide what projects are most important to them. That’s the nature of the company that I’m working for, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I care more about the principles behind these empowerment cultures. The main theme that I see is that they hire awesome employees and then let them be awesome. How many times do you hear about developers who feel like that can’t be as successful because their team lead or manager won’t let them use a certain technology or framework or technique? Maybe those people feel like their control is doing good (and maybe it is), but the trade-off is that they are stifling their top performers. In that case, the side effects might be worse than the perceived decrease in risk.

Control

Since most companies don’t have an empowerment culture, there must be a reason.

It is really hard for people in control to give up control. Say you’re a manager, and your lead developer comes to you and says that he wants to use MongoDB instead of SQL Server on his new project. Immediately you think of reasons why it’s not a good idea (Our infrastructure team doesn’t know how to host it properly! Our DBAs don’t know how to use it! What about reporting?). Those are all important questions that need to be answered, of course, we don’t want to be reckless. Ultimately it comes down to a choice – you can choose the safe option (SQL Server), or the more unknown (MongoDB) which might have some new challenges that you need to work through, but also might provide developer productivity increases, better application performance, and increased morale of the team.

If you don’t let top performers be top performers, why do you have them? If you stifle them, you are losing out on one of the main reasons you have them in the first place! If it lasts long enough, they will leave and try to find another place where they might be able to use their skills.

Trust

It takes a lot of guts for a manager to give up control. If that manager were to let his developer go ahead with MongoDB, that would take a lot of trust. He’s basically putting the project at risk (maybe not really, but in his mind) and placing a lot of trust in his development team. And you know what, it might fail.

But let’s be honest, if we can’t trust our development team, why do we have them? Why don’t you just get rid of them and have the managers and architects do the work? Are they really the only ones who can be trusted to make big decisions, and even small decisions?

Fear

Employees that live in a culture of control often live in fear. These cultures often try to remove risk because failure is seen in such a negative light. As a result, you can’t try new technologies (because it might fail), you have to use the approved enterprise development frameworks (so that we use something that we know has worked last year), and heaven forbid you say the “A” word and want to implement agile practices (because the project managers don’t have as much control). This may keep some projects from failing, but it pretty much guarantees that every project will be sufficiently average.

Do you want to work in a place like this? I don’t.

Freedom

In a culture of empowerment, you have the freedom to try new things. And since some of those things won’t work, you also have the freedom to fail. When it does work, we all win, and when it doesn’t work, we learn something so that we are better next time. But everyone wins when it comes to that feeling that you get when you go to work believing that you can change things for the better and that you can make a difference. Now I truly have responsibility, because I’m responsible for the success of something and I will be held accountable for my decisions. But this just motivates me to do better.

That freedom is what really gets people excited. When you don’t feel like you have anything holding you back, your mind is free to dream of anything, including those crazy ideas that might actually work. This is incredibly motivating, because now we’re only limited by our team’s abilities and time.

Side effects

There are certain types of people who tend to prefer empowerment cultures. The ones who don’t like it are the ones who want to play political games, have a bad attitude, and are afraid to try new things because they are afraid they might fail. The ones who like it are the innovators, the people who embrace change, the motivated, the top performers. These people don’t just value a salary, they value autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Every company tries hard to recruit these people, but few realize the importance of the empowerment culture.