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Ask Slashdot: What Defines Good Developer Culture?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm part of a team of six people developing applications for mobile devices (Android & iOS). In our company, which consists of many teams responsible for 'classic' software development, business intelligence, virtualization, hardware, etc., we are kind of a small startup because we were the first to use agile methods like Scrum and we are open to new technologies and methods. Also, our team is pretty young — I'm the oldest at 30 years of age. We would like to further raise productivity and motivation, so we're currently collecting ideas about what makes a good developer/hacker culture, and how it can be improved in our team/company. These can be things we do ourselves, or suggestions we pass on to management. I would like to know: what, in your opinion, defines good, modern developer culture? What does developer culture consists of? For example, is it: clearly defined career opportunities? A geeky office? Benefits like trips to extraordinary conferences? Please let me know what you think."
An emphasis on keeping high-quality & intelligent developers. Don't ever let intellectually lazy developers onto your team.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I now work in a very great job at a university, but prior to, I worked as a social media developer at __unnamed company__. While my background was in programming using C++ and derivatives, I also knew php and Javascript so it wasn't a stretch to start working there, building Facebook apps and such.
They got me on board for a somewhat decent (out of college) hourly rate and gave me 250,000 shares of stock to sweeten the deal. Working remotely, I'd do 2-3 weeks onsite at the home office, and 2-3 weeks off, during the off times going back home - I got more done when I was at home, truth be told. I'd have to be up all hours of the day, sometimes getting 3-4 hours of sleep in between being called to fix some mistake someone made.
I ended up having to wait 2-4 weeks for my paychecks sometimes, all the while the boss was wining and dining people, and flying all over the place. I let it slide, and eventually got a bonus system added to my pay for completed work.
The 4th time I was to be paid a bonus (for taking over the role as sysadmin on top of everything else, as the previous guy left), I got paid but then they put a new guy over me, who got salaried making 3-4 times what I was, who used a completely different language than any of the other developers in the company. Three weeks later my boss breached my contract. I'm contemplating litigation.
From my experience there, you should most definitely always pay your employees first, and treat them with respect. Furthermore, going geeky and loose on schedules and such is fine, but you should require 40 hours a week from everyone, regardless of when or where they get the work done. Incentives are nice, but don't make them too good. Further, treat everyone equally in terms of praise and respect...Finally, make sure not to allow drama in the office, it only destroys companies from the inside out.
As an added bonus, you should make sure and not allow drinking and drug use in the work place. My former employer did, and there were a lot of useless sponges that just sat around drunk/high all the time.
I've worked for three companies that did it, and we wasted more time with process than we spent getting actual work done. Instead, study the waterfall method and learn the good parts and bad parts from it. Then implement waterfall in a iterative process. Some people call that the spiral method. You'll have good disciplined iterations rather than intentional half-ass sprints like you have with agile.
There are productive meetings and there are not so productive meetings.