Software development requires servant leaders • Hacker News Board

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#191

Post by fenwick67 » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

repolfx wrote: post #112

phakding wrote: post #32

Why does software industry keep coming up with this sort of thing all the time? I worked as structural engineer before becoming software engineer and we never had to invent different kind of leadership and procedures or change office floor plans or hire outsider non-engineers as our (scrum) masters, or talk about the client as stake holders etc. Sorry about hurting your agile feelings!

Because structural engineers work primarily with other structural engineers, or maybe (real) architects at best. You were insulated from the ultimate 'customer' by at least one layer of profession, maybe more. You were also doing work that was safety critical which meant you had the final call and final veto, always, because you could say "that won't be safe" which is a debate-ending move. Software engineers get to d…

It sounds like you're saying it's different because there's inherently more customer interaction with software, but I think that's not really it.

Take for instance a car company. The mechanical engineers designing camshafts won't have a scrum team, but the people working on engine software probably do.

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#192

Post by RobertRoberts » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 10:35 PM UTC

Floegipoky wrote: post #186

RobertRoberts wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good leaders don't need labels, only false/deceptive ones do. While I appreciate the absurdity of your counter argument I really doubt that corporate management is intending to be vague/confusing for the sake of instigating discussion or thoughtfulness in the title of mid-management. Ever heard of a CEO being called a "servant leader"? If so, who gave him that title? Again, my personal experience is abusive leaders u…

>> I really doubt that corporate management is intending to be vague/confusing for the sake of instigating discussion or thoughtfulness in the title of mid-management. I wish I had a source to quote you, my google-fu is failing me now but there's a school of thought that, in a mature organization, the primary role of the executive leadership team is to manage corporate culture. If the leadership team is trying to fos…

>...in a mature organization, the primary role of the executive leadership team is to manage corporate culture.

With deceit, propaganda and manipulation tactics?

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#193

Post by RobertRoberts » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 10:41 PM UTC

Floegipoky wrote: post #185

RobertRoberts wrote: post #123

I can't stand the phrase "servant leader". You can have a "good leader" without any other adjectives. The word "servant" is a loaded word in a way. And, has anyone heard of a "servant" that works just under the "servant leader"? Kind of a meta-slight against any group to be blessed with a "servant leader" instead of just a good one. Edit: Consider flipping the phrase, "Leader Servant". Now hopefully the silliness and…

I disagree that the phrase is meaningless. This leadership philosophy is very different from traditional Western ideals of leadership, though tbh I don't think the article did a very good job describing it. I first learned about it from the best leader I've ever worked for, David Cancel (CPO at the time). I absolutely considered myself blessed to have the good fortune to work for someone whose primary focus was makin…

>This leadership philosophy is very different from traditional Western ideals of leadership...

The crux of the issue. You can't label a western leader with an eastern ideology and thus "make it so", that's called lying.

Actions speak louder than words, and labels aren't needed to prove reality.

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#194

Post by wool_gather » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 10:42 PM UTC

citation_please wrote: post #55

wool_gather wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it makes it easier to have all three roles embodied in one person, but these are very, very different skill sets. In asking for one person who's good at all of them, you're talking about a seriously exceptional human being. There just aren't enough to go around.

I'm not saying reduce the body count, I'm saying don't specialize. If you have three managers, have them do everything, don't fire two of them and give the third one the work of the other two. If you still disagree then I think we have different intuitions about the difficulty of wearing different hats in management positions. This is somehow analogous to the split on full-stack vs. specialized development. Interesti…

I don't think I disagree, but I'm confused by your clarification. You mean that all three managers should perform all roles; some sort of managerial council?

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#195

Post by yarper » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 10:47 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #181

humanrebar wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is incredibly open ended. Maybe even more open ended than writing in English because software can be written in several languages or even in brand new ones. The lack of natural structure in the work means communication and collaboration among the development team(s) is all that more important.

Structural engineering, or any other kind of real engineering (which includes every time of engineering except software "engineering") can also be reduced down to pure math. It's complicated math, and not everybody can comprehend it, but what engineers do boils down to lots and lots of equations. The only place this really applied in software is in efficiency calculations: is approach _x_ faster than approach _y_? In…

Software engineering can be reduced to math too, for example functional programming is a lambda calculus derivative. I think it's basically just that we're so close to programming that it's hard to see it for what it is, just a bunch of rules and equations.

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#196

Post by yarper » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

jbell0385 wrote: post #134

hopsoft wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve setup a false dichotomy. Servant leadership can & should be decisive.

Sure maybe there's a "right way" to be a servant leader. I'm telling you how it's often executed in practice...which is poorly.

I think that's describing no leadership rather than a variety of it, but yeah most leaders suck, especially in software

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#197

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 10:50 PM UTC

jonstokes wrote: post #57

This is the sort of article that makes me imagine a dialogue between a senior software engineer and a newb developer that goes something like this: Newb: Hey man, I think for this project I'll write my own SQL datastore from scratch. I've looked at a bunch of them and my project, which is basically an inventory management system, is such a special snowflake that it needs its own datastore. Senior: That would be insan…

[deleted]

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#198

Post by combatentropy » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

jonstokes wrote: post #57

This is the sort of article that makes me imagine a dialogue between a senior software engineer and a newb developer that goes something like this: Newb: Hey man, I think for this project I'll write my own SQL datastore from scratch. I've looked at a bunch of them and my project, which is basically an inventory management system, is such a special snowflake that it needs its own datastore. Senior: That would be insan…

To a newb just using Postgres should be new and exciting. It's such a rich database I am still learning, even after years using it.

Maybe that was just a bad example. But I don't know, even just using old HTML and CSS to set the page is always interesting to me, because there are always problems to overcome. How do we make everything fit on the page without it being cluttered? How do we let the user do this thing that they want while also not interfering with this other thing that they say they want?

After many years, I like to use old, established pieces, but fitting the pieces together is what I find interesting.

At the same time, when I was first starting out, there was a greater urge to roll my own. I remember rolling my own diff program, in PHP. It was worse at diffing than figuring out how to safely pass the inputs into the shell, and just using good old diff, but it made me happy and it was a useful mental exercise. Newbs need to stretch their wings and see how far they can fly. Their flight is probably much worse than just hopping on the ol' jet. It's a hard problem.

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#199

Post by hinkley » Thu, Aug 16, 2018, 6:14 AM UTC

allochthon wrote: post #155

agentultra wrote: post #141

You have to be careful being a servant leader. It's often a thankless job. And most of the time other people will be taking credit for your work. It's not noble to suffer like that -- it can be damaging to your health. It's an effective position however and comes with it's own rewards. I personally relish seeing my team grow and the people I help mentor flourish. I recommend getting a good therapist and taking small,…

I think part of the challenge is fostering a culture in which people are discouraged from taking credit for other people's work; e.g., doing so is seen by most as being tacky and tasteless. That is a different culture from one that prevails in many American companies, where the rewards go the other way. But I think it's one worth striving for.

Teamwork. The word you’re hunting for is teamwork.

Fred Brooks was wrong. We shouldn’t be like surgical teams. A couple of highly trained egotists taking credit for everybody who spends all day cleaning up after their messes.

Software is a team sport. Might be worth looking there for inspiration. Except for the PEDs. Maybe we can skip those. Caffeine is the only one I’ll do.

Re: Software development requires servant leaders

#200

Post by repolfx » Thu, Aug 16, 2018, 9:04 AM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #184

repolfx wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're only unique in trivial ways. Roads are made of the same material everywhere - they're different only in some strict geometric sense. Meanwhile even very ambitious tunnelling projects like the Gotthard Base Tunnel, if you watch documentaries about them, they only hit a very small number of really unexpected issues even over long periods of time. Tunnelling is an incredibly predictable business. You buy some TB…

As kaspy points out in his, this is just more software engineering hubris playing out. I took architectural drafting classes in high school, and there are tons of technical differences and considerations that go into building design. And I was only dealing with drawing them, forget about having to have all that in my head and actually being able to make decisions on it. To make what I hope is an apt analogy back to s…

Yes, but architecture isn't the same thing as road building where the same small set of variables play out repeatedly over centuries. The work an architect does is much closer to the work software engineers do.