Developer Hegemony: The Future of Labor

by Erik Dietrich

Any time you have lulls in your expected software delivery schedule, fill those lulls by volunteering for meta tasks around software development. Volunteer to audit the team’s use of JIRA and see if you can’t come up with a more efficient process. Schedule some talks with business analysts to learn the domain so that you can coach the rest of the team on it. Dig up your team’s yearly goals from some back email and do a research project, figuring out how to make those goals more likely. Do this during your lulls and, if you’re so inclined, do it during your spare time. Once that’s established, keep it going. Make it visible to management for a while, and it will become an assumed part of your duties. The real litmus test, and the thing that you’re angling for, is a situation where you say, “I can’t pitch in on that second feature and continue optimizing JIRA and coaching the team,” and someone that matters says, “Well, we’ll just have to assign that feature to someone else.” You need to become too “important” for simple delivery.