Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration

by Brian W. Fitzpatrick

your job isn’t to cultivate condescension and lock out the less enlightened peasants from your project; rather, your job is to be intolerant of destructive behaviors and to be explicit about your expectations of HRT.

It boils down to this: is your manager serving you? Or are you serving your manager? It should always be the former.

“It’s impossible to simply stop a bad habit; you need to replace it with a good habit.”

you need to underpromise and overdeliver whenever possible.

Start with a small group of smart, creative people. Fertilize the team with a strong culture of humility, trust, and respect. Lead them as a servant, empowering them to collaborate and make good decisions. Give them water, sunlight, direction, and intrinsic motivation as needed. Protect them from negative influences — destructive behaviors (or environments) that threaten the culture and the ability to make progress.

Because, as programmers, the marketer represents the antithesis of engineering culture. We’re obsessed with truth. Either the code compiles or it doesn’t; the software has a feature or it doesn’t; it solves a problem or it doesn’t. We don’t “spin” our descriptions of the world; we state the facts and then work to change them. We look at the marketing guy and all we see are lies, and we don’t like being lied to. We want order, predictability, and accurate statements when it comes to making decisions.

We believe the best product should always win. And by “best” we mean the product that objectively is of the highest quality and most effective, not the one with the slickest TV advertisements.

Here’s a hard truth: unless you’re developing software tools, engineers are not the audience of your software. The corollary is that you, as an engineer, are a terrible evaluator of your software’s usability. An interface that seems totally reasonable to you may very likely make your nontechie neighbor pull out her hair in frustration.

Focus on the user, and all else will follow.