Posted by
CowboyNeal
on from the diary-of-a-madman dept.
bsadler writes "There is a pretty interesting article on the psychology of a programmer over at devx. It includes some suggestions that a manager might take into account when dealing with programmers. Maybe my boss will finally give me my own office."
Re:It's not really psychology
by
Orthanc_duo
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think the big point is that programming is an art. Every programmer I know knows this on som elevel but lay people generally do not. I'm lucky in that my boss is a programmer
Re:It's not really psychology
by
SpaceLifeForm
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It's not that simple. Just treating them like
people is part of the problem. Most people
can deal with interruptions because they don't
stay on the same train of thought for very long.
Non-programmer types when they interrupt a
programmer *never* for a second believe they
are really causing a problem. But, IMNSHO,
those interruptions are real thought-killers.
I'd like to LART some managers who come by
every 10 or 15 minutes while I'm working on
a project with a very tight deadline, and ask
'Is it done yet?'
-- You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Re:It's not really psychology
by
WindBourne
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I use to code all night long but dealt with to many morons at the office bitching about my never being there. So now I am there and productivy is at about 1/4 of what it was. But hey, they can see that I am there.
-- I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Re:It's not really psychology
by
wideBlueSkies
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· Score: 4, Insightful
From personal experience I have to agree with this. In the morning when I come in it takes a good 10 minutes for me to settle down and start to think 'in code'. Once the train starts rolling though, the ideas (usually) just flow down to the keyboard.
If I'm interrupted, it's like the train fell off a cliff.
So then I have to focus on whatever interrupted me, while trying desperately to cling on to those ideas that didn't make it down to the keyboard before I was interrupted. Because now i'm having to think in 'real world'.
If I'm interrupted to help another developer debug something, or brainstorm a problem (which I enjoy immensly) It's harder because I have to switch over to their programming mode, and try to understand what they're doing.
So then when I can finally get back to the joy that is programming, it takes another 10 minutes or so for me to get back to where I was.
I know it sounds like a buch of BS, but it's true. If people keep bugging me, I can lose an hour (or more) in startup time every day. It's not that I'm not working, it's that I'm not working at peak.
So leave me the hell alone! Dammit!;)
-- Huh?
Re:It's not really psychology
by
DuctTape
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'd like to LART some managers who come by every 10 or 15 minutes while I'm working on a project with a very tight deadline, and ask 'Is it done yet?'
Reminds me of one time I was a project manager "under the gun" for a past-due project deadline, and my manager and his boss and various other PHBs would come around at nondeterministic intervals to ask what the status was (essentially it was done as soon as the developers had a V-8 moment), so as an experiment, and a total waste of time on my part but the developers understood what was going on and that I was being a very effective filter between them and the PHBs, I would continuously round-robin visit the developers getting continuous status updates, and at the end of each cycle, I would pop my head into the PHBs' offices and let them know what was going on. This kept me from getting interrupted at random moments, and the guys kinda figured out when to expect me, and could give one-syllable grunts to convey status with minimal context switch.
I think my approval rating went up that period. Of course, I never did it again.
Perhaps we need an article about the psychology of PHBs. Or project managers. Still can't believe I did it....
DT
-- Is this thing on? Hello?
Re:It's not really psychology
by
Snork+Asaurus
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I'd like to LART some managers who come by every 10 or 15 minutes while I'm working on a project with a very tight deadline, and ask 'Is it done yet?
Under a very tight deadline, I once told a manager quite forcefully:
"Look, each of us has an obligation to the other here. Your obligation is to do everything you reasonably can to empower me and enable me to meet the deadline. My obligation is to do everything that I reasonably can to meet my commitment on this deadline and to inform you when there are things that you can do to improve my chances. Therefore, as part of my obligation, I have to inform you that by constantly interrupting me to ask me how it's going, you are breaking the concentration that I have spent several hours building and reducing my chances of meeting the deadline in the order of 2 or more hours* per interruption."**
He looked quite shocked at first but then seemed to summon his memories of his days in the trenches, apologized and backed off. We had a new understanding from that point on.
----
* 1/2 hour to cool off + 1 hour to re-build my mental state + 1/2 hour fudge ('cause we always gotta fudge;)
**(This is what I said IIRC. It was some years ago and legends tend acquire new dimensions over time. It's also possible that I said something more concise like "quit f---ing bugging me, so I can get this done". I can't remember exactly now.)
-- Sigs are bad for your health.
Re:It's not really psychology
by
wideBlueSkies
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· Score: 4, Insightful
>>Gee, now I feel bad being the co-op student who needs advice a couple times a day. I at least try to bug different people each time!:-)
No No, please don't feel bad. Teaching is part of the job. At least I think so. And I try extra hard to not appear distrurbed when a junior guy comes with questions.
I remember very well what it was like to ask people for help. Hell, I still have to sometimes.
If you find that someone that you're looking to for help is making it obvious that he's being 'bothered' then he's probably just a selfish person who's forgotten what it was like when he was new.
Hopefully when you become a senior person you'll remembr what it felt like to be new, and you'll try to pass kindness and understanding down to your junior guys.
Good luck to you.
-- Huh?
Re:It's not really psychology
by
Bald+Wookie
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· Score: 5, Funny
So then I have to focus on whatever interrupted me, while trying desperately to cling on to those ideas that didn't make it down to the keyboard before I was interrupted.
Sounds like you need to disable write caching.
Please forward to our foreign compatriots...
by
rand.srand()
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Well intentioned, but the reality is programmers are being wholesale replaced with foriegn labor. Businesses, especially non-IT ones, want nothing to programming or hiring programmers. Much less cater to them in any way above other employees.
A shower?? There's a guy in the Republic of Elbonia who's willing to work out of his hovel on a old 386 for $4 a day programming. He doesn't demand breaks, and there's no coffee machine to stock. And he's viewed as a nearly identical resource. Now is not the time to demand high priced add-ons. But... if we could just get the people of Elbonia to buy into this and equalize the market...
Re:Please forward to our foreign compatriots...
by
sane?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Stop bitching about it and start profitting.
Option 1: Overseas programmers produce poor code with lots of errors.
Answer: Get a group of you together and setup a company offering to rescue faulty developments and fix bad overseas code on a high speed/high fee basis. Invest in tools that help you to do this, or write your own.
Option 2: Actually, they can program quite well - well enough that they are more cost efficient than you will ever be.
Answer: Setup a company sketching out the design of the software, and outsourcing the work yourselves to India. Sell it a as risk reduction exercise.
Option 3: They program well, but you don't fancy option 2.
Answer: Create code and programs that enable you to program cost effectively in relation to Indian programmers, even in only specific niches.
In short, the global marketplace isn't going away. If you want to survive doing what you're doing at the moment, you are going to have to raise your game to compete.
Times of change bring opportunties, grab them. When you do, and you control your destiny - you can have whatever setup you require.
Space/time to walk (at least for me a lot of my ideas come when I'm walking, and walking help me to decide on alternatives)
Music (not so good to makes one want to hear the music instead of working, neither something so bad that breaks concentration)
...her?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Why do people insist on using 'her' instead of 'his' for the generic pronoun? It isn't 'sensitive', it's illiterate. Using female pronouns is even somewhat insensitive: it implies women need to be compensated for, and gratuitously inserts a gender issue into one's writing.
As a 'Brit' I too find this very odd. Consider this small chunk of text:
When creative people work on making something new, they often enter a mental state where things just flow. This is a highly desirable state, both for the programmer herself and for the organization that profits by her labors.
If written by someone from the UK (and probably AU or NZ) this would be written like this:
When creative people work on making something new, they often enter a mental state where things just flow. This is a highly desirable state, both for the programmer themself and for the organisation that profits by their labors.
No use of gender, and perfectly correct English too.
-- Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Why do people insist on using 'her' instead of 'his' for the generic pronoun?
Because they're writing about me.
I guess a male author planning this kind of article would prefer to imagine the situation involving female (in this case programmers) rather than males, unless they're gay or something.
Why do you think the shower was so important to the computer researcher mentioned in the article?
He doesn't understand Scientists
by
AlecC
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Contrary to popular belief, programmers more frequently resemble artists than scientists. If you want to maximize the creative potential on your development team, you've got to start thinking about the psychology of the programmer and be willing to back it up with management policy.
Which shows that this guy doesn't know scientists. Scientists - true scientists, not technicians - are very like this guy (correctly) describes programmers. Both programming and scientific research are creative skills which, as the man says, require you to be "in the groove". He is not wrong about programmers - he is wrong about scientists. Techicians, to some extent, have less need to be "in the groove" - though much of what he says applies to any human being, with only the time constants varying.
OTOH. 3. Accommodate Reasonable Special Requests. When I get really stuck on a design problem, I go for a walk in some very beautiful woods about three miles from my office. An hours walk in the woods has about an 80% chance of delivering a solution to the problem. Even, curiously, if I don't spend much time conscioulsy thinking about the problem. In fact, I sometimes feel that by subconscious is telling my conscious to let go that problem and leave it to me. Dropping a problem for an hour or day and then coming back to it can be remarkably constuctive.
In fact, I sometimes feel embarasssed that the conscious "me" claims credit for the bundle of mad scientist, lechers, random thought generators, and idiots who inhabit my subconscious and do all the work.
-- Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
*Yawn* nothing new here
by
IIRCAFAIKIANAL
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· Score: 4, Insightful
(I drafted a rant, re-read the article, and re-wrote my rant. It's not so harsh now:)
Programmers should be treated like professionals. Just like every other professional. What a revolutionary concept.
However:
A secretary is being creative when s/he drafts a letter to send to a client on behalf of the resident phb. Does s/he get a shower in his/her office? How about the sysadmin that creatively comes up with a method to speed up deployments? And the engineer that shaves 10% off the time to manufacture your widgets?
Just because your job involves being creative does not mean that you deserve special consideration. Adequate tools, training, and respect, yes. But everyone needs those to perform their "best."
Therefore, this article is bullshit. All creative people can perform better if you enhance their working conditions. All *people* can perform better if you enhance their working conditions.
What a waste of electrons.
(Yes, this is 90% nicer than my previous rant:)
-- Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
The problem with exporting work
by
Anonymous+Brave+Guy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem with this whole "exporting work" argument is that, the vast majority of the time, the foreign workers simply aren't as good at it, or even close. I'm sorry, I'm no racist, but this is simply the way things are.
It's true of call centres, where people reading from a script with no concept of the product and English as a second or third language just don't project a good impression or offer much help. If you doubt this, ask Carly about how HP did when they moved much of their call centre work abroad.
It's also true of programmers. If someone in India can do the same job as me, for 1/10 of the price but just as well, then apparently at least one of us has got our expectations wrong. OTOH, if a programmer in India has the same job title as me, charges 1/10 of the price but does 1/20 of the work, is this an improvement? Of course not. And I think it's fair to say, quite objectively, that the vast majority of foreign developers lack the education, industrial experience and professionalism exhibited by decent programmers in places like the US or UK.
In the long run, companies will have to adapt to this. They will either recognise that the cheap option doesn't stay cheap when your quality, and consequently your business, suffers, or they will see the need to invest in proper training and support of the foreign labour to raise standards, which will cost them more. Either way, you do get what you pay for. It's just a matter of time until corporate greed starts losing to smart management on this one.
-- If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I felt like I just visited a shrink
by
wordisms
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've got to say that article was quite the ego booster.
First, programming is most definitely an art as it is a blending of layout, design, creativity, and tasteful hacking to derive a solution.
The section about programmer's concentration was interesting, and I definitely fall into that category. It is nothing for me to sit down to go through the process of designing, coding, debugging, and repeat for 8 hours, without realize it at all. It only speaks of my passion for my work, and my enjoyment in solving challenging problems.
Poster here who have noted about treating programmers more like people than equipment hit the nail right on the head. In my school, our proffessors warn us to avoid jobs that look as though the employers treat programmers as "code monkeys" (if you sat enough monkeys at computers typing C, how long would it take until you get MS Office?). At some of my best internships, and the job I have gone back full-time to, my section leader encourages his team to take regular breaks (which often involve heading back to an ongoing game of RISK), schedules frequent offsites/classes/excursions to get us out of the cubicles, and overall creates one of the healthiest work environments I've ever been in.
All that said, I shouldn't be to programmer biased. Not all programmers are great programmers who have mastered that mystical "flow". I could see a manager reading this article, trying all these things, and getting really burnt.
It's all a game of balance that definitely begins with treating employees like people, not equipment.
Re:I felt like I just visited a shrink
by
renehollan
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Designing software is an art. Programming is not an art, it is a craft.
Oh, I take exception with this!
You can't program anything of significance if you can't design, and you can't design if you don't understand how the design is to be programmed. Put more bluntly: pseudo code ain't gonna compile.
Now, it is fair that some of us spend the bulk of our time designing sytems, and others implementing them, stressing the creative or crafty aspects of our skills. But woe unto the programmer who is not aware of the intended (i.e. designed) interaction of components: such a person debug, can't (oops, forgot the </yoda>).
I've been coding for over 20 years. Under my belt I have significant design contributions to:
1. Dataradio synchronous full duplex repeaters and mobile radio modems (mid 80's Z80 code);
2. Nortel's ADAS+ employing speech recognition in the telephone network for directory assistance (T1 A/B bit signalling and parallelization of Viterbi decoding over multiple TMS320 DSPs under pSOS, with a smattering of assembler, and clever allocation of data to memory with various access latencies as appropriate);
3. Teradyne's RMU75x telco loop diagnostic units (TCP/IP and steams-like protocol stacks under MQS on TMS320C30.
4. Chiaro's Optical Router project (automated, distributed test tools, with C++ on FreeBSD, and custom marshelling schemes; as well as porting Gigabit Ethernet device Drivers (C on FreeBSD).
While hapily mentoring less-skilled developers (I actually like the title "Software Engineer" since it reflects the combination of creative design, tempered with proved implementation methods) and even distributing development work, I refuse to ever accept promotion into a primarily management, or even "design" role: creative design often needs to leverage advanced programming techniques -- ever notice how the complex parts of programming languages, like templates, overloading, partial template specialization, and template template parameters, to use C++ as an example language are there to support design patterns and principles?). I have been, and always will be, a programmer: even when designing Emacs is my canvas, and I expect C-x C-c to be engraved on my tombstone.
Those who see programming as only an entry-level path to eventual design and perhaps management roles are taking an extremely narrow view. Career progression should more closely follow at of carpenter: apprentice, journyman, master. A master carpenter remains a carpenter, nevertheless. Even if he takes on architectural roles, they will be enhanced by his knowlege of the craft of carpentry.
Psuedoscience
by
wizzums
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· Score: 5, Informative
A programmer's ability to focus on a single task for long periods to the exclusion of all else has led some people to comment on similar behavior in autistics (Asperger's Disorder), and to wonder whether most programmers are mildly autistic. I would be surprised if most programmers were autistic--our concentration is too easily broken.
I particularly like how this fellow uses Autism as a reason, then clarifies it by noting a single branch of the entire syndrome as if that's what it's *really* called, and finishes up his great assumption by explaining that autistics must have high concentration levels.
While they're in the same psychological realm, he's trying to refer to ADD.. not Autism.
From ADD.org "You get one idea and you have to act on it, and then, what do you know, but you've got another idea before you've finished up with the first one, and so you go for that one, but of course a third idea intercepts the second, and you just have to follow that one, and pretty soon people are calling you disorganized and impulsive and all sorts of impolite words that miss the point completely."
Autism on the other hand is the complete inability to concentrate on ANY task for short periods of time. Autism is associated with Stims, self stimulatory behaviour. Asperger's Syndrome is a "mild" form of Autism that tends to affect mostly boys. Note that there is still a lack of common sense associated with this. Simply being quirky is not Asperger's.
A child with ADD is more than likely able to understand you when you tell him to "sit still, eat your dinner," while a child with Autism might just flick his fork around continuously while he's eating.
Credibility: I work with Autistic children, and ironically, have been diagnosed with ADD.
Managers either get it or don't - and won't cange
by
hillct
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I've worked for a fariety of managers over the past few years and I've found that they either understand programmers, or don't. They can either acomodate the quirks or can't and that's it. This or any article stands no chance of changing their outlook.
One issue the article fails to mention is that you can in fact divide one programmer between development and support roles. The article says don't intersperse these roles durring the work day, but I've found in my own work, - which requires both activities - that the manager simply has to allow the programmers to do his own time alocation, for example, I find that I can get into the work day completing a series of support tasks, in the morning when I'm relitively stress-free, then in the afternoon, turn my focus to one of the never ending pile of development projects on my desk.
Having said this, I have to agree with the author that interspersing these tasks such that every 45 minutes the programmer has to stop developing and change his mindset to support a user, hten shift back into development mode is inherently bad.
The point is, programmers - being artistic as they are - are reasonably flexible. It's just important not to expect unreasonable flexibility, as this would prevent achieving the nessecery level of focus on each of the tasks at hand.
Psychology of a company
by
Musashi+Miyamoto
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What they really need is a "Psychology of a Company" or "Psychology of working for someone else" for programmers to read.
Too many programmers are Asperger-syndrome types that have difficulty with social skills and with understanding that THEY work for SOMEONE ELSE. They are not the boss, and therefore, just because they think something should happen a certain way, doesnt mean all other ideas are wrong.
There is a severe problem with tech workers in this respect. Too many think that they are driving and refuse to take direction. Too bad if something like this were written, most of them would not read it, and if they did, they would discount and ignore it.
I've no idea how this happened, but somewhere along the line we let ourselves be talked into the idea that creativity is present in artists, musicians, and architects, but not programmers, box packers, or soccer players. Creativity is a basic human ability.
Computers can't paint. They can't write computer programs either. It's not some crude mechanistic process that we can automate ; there is a need for style and creativity. Which to me, makes it an art.
(Surely painting and music are 'explicitly constructed by man', and each of these have distinct rules that allow one to do it well too?)
What we have here is a classic case of "telling programmers what they want to hear". I wonder if this guy is selling something?
--
--sdem
Re:No longer true
by
Dixie_Flatline
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I agree with this, and I don't.
I'm sure most programming in big business environments has become very sterile. In a Dilbert-esque setting, I can see where you're coming from.
Where I program, I'm not sure that holds true (though I'm well aware that the kind of programming that I do is somewhat atypical). There's an overall design, but programmers are given subsystems to implement. They're told what it has to do, but not necessaily HOW it has to be done. Each programmer at the company could complete the task, but I'm sure no two solutions would never be the same.
As for CS students learning things by rote: I was going to say that you're wrong, but then I thought about it and decided that you're partly correct again. I saw a lot of people with no love for computing get through computing science because they test really well. Me, I test like crap on a stick, so I had to actually learn the lessons of algorithmics and creative thinking that are the subtext in those classes. I think the majority of people that go through CS and never once think about any sort of research career path are the kind of boilerplate programmers that you're talking about. Someone that has some desire to discover something new will make a perfectly creative programmer in the real world, and it may happen more than you think.
You're missing the point
by
sjames
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This isn't about special consideration because programmers are 'special people' who deserve it, it's about maximising productivity and morale at the same time without having to spend much money in the process because that's good for the company.
A secretary who is drafting a letter is an administrative assistant, and SHOULD be able to draft a letter in peace. Otherwise, it's just another case of damaging productivity by failing to think. The Engineer who shaves 10% off the manufacturing time probably was able to do it by having the same conditions that the article recommends for programmers.
There are a number of jobs that call for that sort of thing to some degree or another, and for varying percentages of the day.
To use your example, it is doubtful that the latter being drafted will run 100,000 lines long, take 3 months of highly professional manhours to produce, and remain 'in production' for the next 3 years (complete with a single typo/thinko costing thousands of hours in excess support manhours
So, though the secretary should be able to finish the letter uninterrupted for maximum efficiency, the time period is shorter, and the complexity of the mental map that will get swapped out if an interruption DOES happen is a lot smaller.
Yes, all people can perform better if you enhance their working conditions. Different professions have different sets of needs for their ideal working conditions. The article was a few pointers to managers about what they should do for programmers. What to do for administrative assistants, lawyers, cooks, and mechanics are all worth knowing to someone who manages those professions, and should be covered by similar articles.
Software bees
by
UncleSocks
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Whenever I read useful articles such as this, I'm reminded of Orson Scott Card's "How software companies die":
Software - How Software Companies Die
By: Orson Scott Card
The environment that nutures creative programmers kills management
and marketing types - and vice versa. Programming is the Great Game.
It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing
else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover
that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than
the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes
lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because
your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.
You're aware that some people think you're a nerd. So what? They're
not players. They've never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand
with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B - not a language.
They barely exist. Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the
opinions of civilians. You're building something intricate and fine.
They'll never understand it.
BEEKEEPING
Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on:
You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You
can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in
one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.
You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money
than they know what to do with. But that's less than you might think.
You see, all these programmers keep hearing their parents' voices in
their heads saying "When are you going to join the real world?" All
you have to pay them is enough money that they can answer (also in
their heads) "Geez, Dad, I'm making more than you." On average, this
is cheap. And you get them to stay in the hive by giving them other
coders to swarm with. The only person whose praise matters is another
programmer. Less-talented programmers will idolize them; evenly
matched ones will challenge and goad one another; and if you want to
get a good swarm, you make sure that you have at least one certified
genius coder that they can all look up to, even if he glances at other
people's code only long enough to sneer at it. He's a Player, thinks
the junior programmer. He looked at my code. That is enough. If a
software company provides such a hive, the coders will give up sleep,
love, health, and clean laundry, while the company keeps the bulk of
the money.
OUT OF CONTROL
Here's the problem that ends up killing company after company. All
successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a
leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader
forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who end
up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management type himself.
One way or another, marketers get control. But...control of what?
Instead of finding assembly lines of productive workers, they quickly
discover that their product is produced by utterly unpredictable,
uncooperative, disobedient, and worst of all, unattractive people who
resist all attempts at management. Put them on a time clock, dress
them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product.
Worst of all, you can sense that they are making fun of you with every
word they say.
SMOKED OUT
The shock is greater for the coder, though. He suddenly finds that
alien creatures control his life. Meetings, Schedules, Reports. And
now someone demands that he PLAN all his programming and then stick to
the plan, never improving, never tweaking, and never, never touching
some other team's code. The lousy young programmer who once worshiped
him is now his tyrannical boss, a position he got because he played
golf with some sphincter in a suit. The hive has been ruined. The best
coders leave. And the marketers, comfortable now because they're
surrounded by power neckties and they have things under control, are
baffled that each new iteration of their software loses market share
as the code bloats and the bugs proliferate. Got to get some better
packaging. Yeah, that's it.
Not limited to programmers
by
Selanit
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It seems to me that the "flow" the article discusses is not limited to programmers or artists; it can happen to anyone who is truly involved in a task that they love, in any area of endeavor.
I code. Admittedly, it's just PHP, a language of limited utility for anything but web-oriented tasks, but nonetheless a real programming language. I have felt that "flow" when working with PHP: you code fast, overcome obstacles fairly quickly, and it all just flies out of your head and into being. Then you blink and realize that it's been 10 hours since you sat down, and you haven't had anything to eat or drink since breakfast. It's glorious.
But PHP is just a hobby. I'm a medieval literature postgrad; I write papers analyzing tales written over a thousand years ago (my specialty is Old English). And I can tell you that when I really get going on a paper, I reach the same mental state as I described above: I sit, I type, and it flows. The thoughts I've been tumbling around coalesce miraculously into a full paper. Sometimes the flow lasts even into the "debug" stage where I have to go through and check to make sure that all of the footnotes are there, and that every comma, semicolon, and punctuation mark is in place, from the first sentence to the end of the bibliography.
For this reason, I believe that "flow" happens to anyone who is capable of becoming absorbed in a task. The type of task is probably important, though. I feel a bit flow-ish writing this post, because the topic is interesting and requires thought. But if you set me out as a lifeguard, say, over a pool full of people, I would never, ever achieve "flow". "Zoned out" maybe, but not "flowing" (which is bad news for the drowning guy in the deep end). On the other hand, repetitive physical labor -- setting bricks, knitting, making chain mail armor -- can be mentally liberating (in proper amounts).
Slashdot Mirror
There is no psychology really involved... Just treat the programmers as the professionals they are. Treat them like people.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Well intentioned, but the reality is programmers are being wholesale replaced with foriegn labor. Businesses, especially non-IT ones, want nothing to programming or hiring programmers. Much less cater to them in any way above other employees.
A shower?? There's a guy in the Republic of Elbonia who's willing to work out of his hovel on a old 386 for $4 a day programming. He doesn't demand breaks, and there's no coffee machine to stock. And he's viewed as a nearly identical resource. Now is not the time to demand high priced add-ons. But... if we could just get the people of Elbonia to buy into this and equalize the market...
Why do people insist on using 'her' instead of 'his' for the generic pronoun? It isn't 'sensitive', it's illiterate. Using female pronouns is even somewhat insensitive: it implies women need to be compensated for, and gratuitously inserts a gender issue into one's writing.
Which shows that this guy doesn't know scientists. Scientists - true scientists, not technicians - are very like this guy (correctly) describes programmers. Both programming and scientific research are creative skills which, as the man says, require you to be "in the groove". He is not wrong about programmers - he is wrong about scientists. Techicians, to some extent, have less need to be "in the groove" - though much of what he says applies to any human being, with only the time constants varying.
OTOH. 3. Accommodate Reasonable Special Requests. When I get really stuck on a design problem, I go for a walk in some very beautiful woods about three miles from my office. An hours walk in the woods has about an 80% chance of delivering a solution to the problem. Even, curiously, if I don't spend much time conscioulsy thinking about the problem. In fact, I sometimes feel that by subconscious is telling my conscious to let go that problem and leave it to me. Dropping a problem for an hour or day and then coming back to it can be remarkably constuctive.
In fact, I sometimes feel embarasssed that the conscious "me" claims credit for the bundle of mad scientist, lechers, random thought generators, and idiots who inhabit my subconscious and do all the work.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
(I drafted a rant, re-read the article, and re-wrote my rant. It's not so harsh now :)
:)
Programmers should be treated like professionals. Just like every other professional. What a revolutionary concept.
However:
A secretary is being creative when s/he drafts a letter to send to a client on behalf of the resident phb. Does s/he get a shower in his/her office? How about the sysadmin that creatively comes up with a method to speed up deployments? And the engineer that shaves 10% off the time to manufacture your widgets?
Just because your job involves being creative does not mean that you deserve special consideration. Adequate tools, training, and respect, yes. But everyone needs those to perform their "best."
Therefore, this article is bullshit. All creative people can perform better if you enhance their working conditions. All *people* can perform better if you enhance their working conditions.
What a waste of electrons.
(Yes, this is 90% nicer than my previous rant
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
The problem with this whole "exporting work" argument is that, the vast majority of the time, the foreign workers simply aren't as good at it, or even close. I'm sorry, I'm no racist, but this is simply the way things are.
It's true of call centres, where people reading from a script with no concept of the product and English as a second or third language just don't project a good impression or offer much help. If you doubt this, ask Carly about how HP did when they moved much of their call centre work abroad.
It's also true of programmers. If someone in India can do the same job as me, for 1/10 of the price but just as well, then apparently at least one of us has got our expectations wrong. OTOH, if a programmer in India has the same job title as me, charges 1/10 of the price but does 1/20 of the work, is this an improvement? Of course not. And I think it's fair to say, quite objectively, that the vast majority of foreign developers lack the education, industrial experience and professionalism exhibited by decent programmers in places like the US or UK.
In the long run, companies will have to adapt to this. They will either recognise that the cheap option doesn't stay cheap when your quality, and consequently your business, suffers, or they will see the need to invest in proper training and support of the foreign labour to raise standards, which will cost them more. Either way, you do get what you pay for. It's just a matter of time until corporate greed starts losing to smart management on this one.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I've got to say that article was quite the ego booster.
First, programming is most definitely an art as it is a blending of layout, design, creativity, and tasteful hacking to derive a solution.
The section about programmer's concentration was interesting, and I definitely fall into that category. It is nothing for me to sit down to go through the process of designing, coding, debugging, and repeat for 8 hours, without realize it at all. It only speaks of my passion for my work, and my enjoyment in solving challenging problems.
Poster here who have noted about treating programmers more like people than equipment hit the nail right on the head. In my school, our proffessors warn us to avoid jobs that look as though the employers treat programmers as "code monkeys" (if you sat enough monkeys at computers typing C, how long would it take until you get MS Office?). At some of my best internships, and the job I have gone back full-time to, my section leader encourages his team to take regular breaks (which often involve heading back to an ongoing game of RISK), schedules frequent offsites/classes/excursions to get us out of the cubicles, and overall creates one of the healthiest work environments I've ever been in.
All that said, I shouldn't be to programmer biased. Not all programmers are great programmers who have mastered that mystical "flow". I could see a manager reading this article, trying all these things, and getting really burnt.
It's all a game of balance that definitely begins with treating employees like people, not equipment.
I particularly like how this fellow uses Autism as a reason, then clarifies it by noting a single branch of the entire syndrome as if that's what it's *really* called, and finishes up his great assumption by explaining that autistics must have high concentration levels.
While they're in the same psychological realm, he's trying to refer to ADD.. not Autism.
From ADD.org
"You get one idea and you have to act on it, and then, what do you know, but you've got another idea before you've finished up with the first one, and so you go for that one, but of course a third idea intercepts the second, and you just have to follow that one, and pretty soon people are calling you disorganized and impulsive and all sorts of impolite words that miss the point completely."
Autism on the other hand is the complete inability to concentrate on ANY task for short periods of time. Autism is associated with Stims, self stimulatory behaviour. Asperger's Syndrome is a "mild" form of Autism that tends to affect mostly boys. Note that there is still a lack of common sense associated with this. Simply being quirky is not Asperger's.
A child with ADD is more than likely able to understand you when you tell him to "sit still, eat your dinner," while a child with Autism might just flick his fork around continuously while he's eating.
Credibility: I work with Autistic children, and ironically, have been diagnosed with ADD.
I've worked for a fariety of managers over the past few years and I've found that they either understand programmers, or don't. They can either acomodate the quirks or can't and that's it. This or any article stands no chance of changing their outlook.
One issue the article fails to mention is that you can in fact divide one programmer between development and support roles. The article says don't intersperse these roles durring the work day, but I've found in my own work, - which requires both activities - that the manager simply has to allow the programmers to do his own time alocation, for example, I find that I can get into the work day completing a series of support tasks, in the morning when I'm relitively stress-free, then in the afternoon, turn my focus to one of the never ending pile of development projects on my desk.
Having said this, I have to agree with the author that interspersing these tasks such that every 45 minutes the programmer has to stop developing and change his mindset to support a user, hten shift back into development mode is inherently bad.
The point is, programmers - being artistic as they are - are reasonably flexible. It's just important not to expect unreasonable flexibility, as this would prevent achieving the nessecery level of focus on each of the tasks at hand.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
What they really need is a "Psychology of a Company" or "Psychology of working for someone else" for programmers to read.
Too many programmers are Asperger-syndrome types that have difficulty with social skills and with understanding that THEY work for SOMEONE ELSE. They are not the boss, and therefore, just because they think something should happen a certain way, doesnt mean all other ideas are wrong.
There is a severe problem with tech workers in this respect. Too many think that they are driving and refuse to take direction. Too bad if something like this were written, most of them would not read it, and if they did, they would discount and ignore it.
I've no idea how this happened, but somewhere along the line we let ourselves be talked into the idea that creativity is present in artists, musicians, and architects, but not programmers, box packers, or soccer players. Creativity is a basic human ability.
Computers can't paint. They can't write computer programs either. It's not some crude mechanistic process that we can automate ; there is a need for style and creativity. Which to me, makes it an art.
(Surely painting and music are 'explicitly constructed by man', and each of these have distinct rules that allow one to do it well too?)
What we have here is a classic case of "telling programmers what they want to hear". I wonder if this guy is selling something?
--sdem
I agree with this, and I don't.
I'm sure most programming in big business environments has become very sterile. In a Dilbert-esque setting, I can see where you're coming from.
Where I program, I'm not sure that holds true (though I'm well aware that the kind of programming that I do is somewhat atypical). There's an overall design, but programmers are given subsystems to implement. They're told what it has to do, but not necessaily HOW it has to be done. Each programmer at the company could complete the task, but I'm sure no two solutions would never be the same.
As for CS students learning things by rote: I was going to say that you're wrong, but then I thought about it and decided that you're partly correct again. I saw a lot of people with no love for computing get through computing science because they test really well. Me, I test like crap on a stick, so I had to actually learn the lessons of algorithmics and creative thinking that are the subtext in those classes. I think the majority of people that go through CS and never once think about any sort of research career path are the kind of boilerplate programmers that you're talking about. Someone that has some desire to discover something new will make a perfectly creative programmer in the real world, and it may happen more than you think.
This isn't about special consideration because programmers are 'special people' who deserve it, it's about maximising productivity and morale at the same time without having to spend much money in the process because that's good for the company.
A secretary who is drafting a letter is an administrative assistant, and SHOULD be able to draft a letter in peace. Otherwise, it's just another case of damaging productivity by failing to think. The Engineer who shaves 10% off the manufacturing time probably was able to do it by having the same conditions that the article recommends for programmers.
There are a number of jobs that call for that sort of thing to some degree or another, and for varying percentages of the day.
To use your example, it is doubtful that the latter being drafted will run 100,000 lines long, take 3 months of highly professional manhours to produce, and remain 'in production' for the next 3 years (complete with a single typo/thinko costing thousands of hours in excess support manhours
So, though the secretary should be able to finish the letter uninterrupted for maximum efficiency, the time period is shorter, and the complexity of the mental map that will get swapped out if an interruption DOES happen is a lot smaller.
Yes, all people can perform better if you enhance their working conditions. Different professions have different sets of needs for their ideal working conditions. The article was a few pointers to managers about what they should do for programmers. What to do for administrative assistants, lawyers, cooks, and mechanics are all worth knowing to someone who manages those professions, and should be covered by similar articles.
Software - How Software Companies Die
By: Orson Scott Card
The environment that nutures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa. Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won. You're aware that some people think you're a nerd. So what? They're not players. They've never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B - not a language. They barely exist. Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the opinions of civilians. You're building something intricate and fine. They'll never understand it.
BEEKEEPING
Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money than they know what to do with. But that's less than you might think. You see, all these programmers keep hearing their parents' voices in their heads saying "When are you going to join the real world?" All you have to pay them is enough money that they can answer (also in their heads) "Geez, Dad, I'm making more than you." On average, this is cheap. And you get them to stay in the hive by giving them other coders to swarm with. The only person whose praise matters is another programmer. Less-talented programmers will idolize them; evenly matched ones will challenge and goad one another; and if you want to get a good swarm, you make sure that you have at least one certified genius coder that they can all look up to, even if he glances at other people's code only long enough to sneer at it. He's a Player, thinks the junior programmer. He looked at my code. That is enough. If a software company provides such a hive, the coders will give up sleep, love, health, and clean laundry, while the company keeps the bulk of the money.
OUT OF CONTROL
Here's the problem that ends up killing company after company. All successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who end up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management type himself. One way or another, marketers get control. But...control of what? Instead of finding assembly lines of productive workers, they quickly discover that their product is produced by utterly unpredictable, uncooperative, disobedient, and worst of all, unattractive people who resist all attempts at management. Put them on a time clock, dress them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product. Worst of all, you can sense that they are making fun of you with every word they say.
SMOKED OUT
The shock is greater for the coder, though. He suddenly finds that alien creatures control his life. Meetings, Schedules, Reports. And now someone demands that he PLAN all his programming and then stick to the plan, never improving, never tweaking, and never, never touching some other team's code. The lousy young programmer who once worshiped him is now his tyrannical boss, a position he got because he played golf with some sphincter in a suit. The hive has been ruined. The best coders leave. And the marketers, comfortable now because they're surrounded by power neckties and they have things under control, are baffled that each new iteration of their software loses market share as the code bloats and the bugs proliferate. Got to get some better packaging. Yeah, that's it.
It seems to me that the "flow" the article discusses is not limited to programmers or artists; it can happen to anyone who is truly involved in a task that they love, in any area of endeavor.
I code. Admittedly, it's just PHP, a language of limited utility for anything but web-oriented tasks, but nonetheless a real programming language. I have felt that "flow" when working with PHP: you code fast, overcome obstacles fairly quickly, and it all just flies out of your head and into being. Then you blink and realize that it's been 10 hours since you sat down, and you haven't had anything to eat or drink since breakfast. It's glorious.
But PHP is just a hobby. I'm a medieval literature postgrad; I write papers analyzing tales written over a thousand years ago (my specialty is Old English). And I can tell you that when I really get going on a paper, I reach the same mental state as I described above: I sit, I type, and it flows. The thoughts I've been tumbling around coalesce miraculously into a full paper. Sometimes the flow lasts even into the "debug" stage where I have to go through and check to make sure that all of the footnotes are there, and that every comma, semicolon, and punctuation mark is in place, from the first sentence to the end of the bibliography.
For this reason, I believe that "flow" happens to anyone who is capable of becoming absorbed in a task. The type of task is probably important, though. I feel a bit flow-ish writing this post, because the topic is interesting and requires thought. But if you set me out as a lifeguard, say, over a pool full of people, I would never, ever achieve "flow". "Zoned out" maybe, but not "flowing" (which is bad news for the drowning guy in the deep end). On the other hand, repetitive physical labor -- setting bricks, knitting, making chain mail armor -- can be mentally liberating (in proper amounts).