To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
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To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
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Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
#2Unless you're a FAANG your company probably doesn't have the cash on hand to hire 2x as many developers as they need to let them "personally develop" on the clock.
Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
#3Unless you're a FAANG your company probably doesn't have the cash on hand to hire 2x as many developers as they need to let them "personally develop" on the clock.
For almost any developer salary, you can go out and hire someone for half the amount, so it seems like just a matter of whether the benefit outweighs the costs.
Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
#4Unless you're a FAANG your company probably doesn't have the cash on hand to hire 2x as many developers as they need to let them "personally develop" on the clock.
We also never have time to fix TD because we are too busy creating it. It's all a question of managing resources, for a small startup or a Medium-sized company, if really stop to listener our "drones" we would waste so much resources
Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
#5I agree that developers should be given a lot more space then they are given today however:
- I think it should be constant, not a day every now and then;
- I think it should be in the context of their current work;
- I think it should be an integral part of product building.
I remember reading a nice post from Basecamp [0] about how they structure their work. It felt like a nice way to go about it.
> Once a six week cycle is over, we take one or two weeks off of scheduled projects so everyone can roam independently, fix stuff up, pick up some pet projects we’ve wanted to do, and generally wind down prior to starting the next six week cycle. Ample time for context switching. We also use this time to firm up ideas that we’ll be tackling next cycle. More on this in a bit.
[0] https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-structure-our-work-and-tea...
Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
#6I don't get how "let your developers do whatever they want" equates to playing with some "shiny new thing". Most companies have a training budget that should allow for learning new technologies, even ones not directly applicable.
If I had the opportunity to do what I wanted on company time it would 99% of the time be fixing some technical debt in the existing code; reworking something with a different/speculative architecture; or build some tools to automate anything that gets in the way of doing more meaningful work.
Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
#7With that headline, I was expecting this to be satire.
Put another way, is there any particular reason developers need this when other white-collar professionals don't? I'm sure most, say, doctors would love to have some space as well, since the medical field evolves as fast if not faster than computing.
Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
#8With that headline, I was expecting this to be satire. Put another way, is there any particular reason developers need this when other white-collar professionals don't? I'm sure most, say, doctors would love to have some space as well, since the medical field evolves as fast if not faster than computing.
Did anyone claim other professions wouldn't benefit from this?
Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
#9Everything mentioned here applies to any professional discipline. In my role, I consider it to be my responsibility to both myself and my employer to figure out how to stay up to speed on my own time. That way when a particular skill or area of knowledge is needed in my current role, or when I need it to leverage myself into a new role, I have that knowledge or those skills. Giving me the time or the opportunity to do that work isn’t my employers responsibility.
Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want
#10With that headline, I was expecting this to be satire. Put another way, is there any particular reason developers need this when other white-collar professionals don't? I'm sure most, say, doctors would love to have some space as well, since the medical field evolves as fast if not faster than computing.
> doctors would love to have some space as well, since the medical field evolves as fast if not faster than computing.
They are required by their state boards to get a certain number of CME hours every year. There's no such requirement for software developers.