The Good, The Great, And The Better
Well, it has been three days since my Hiring Great Developers? post. During this time an interesting discussion took place both on this blog as well as on others. I usually try to respond to most of the comments posted here, but this time I’ve decided to step back and let the discussion roll. Now I feel it’s a good time for a follow-up. I hope it will address most of your comments, questions, and insights.
***
The Good
I really can’t tell how good the developers in your shop are. All I know is that wherever I look I see good developers just waiting to be great. Sure, there are some “rotten fish”, as Reg Braithwaite insists on calling them. There will always be in any profession. But they are as rare as the prodigies I mentioned in my previous post. Few developers have no professional aspirations. Most developers are eager to learn and evolve if only they are given the chance.
Some of your comments, as well as Joel Spolsky’s article, referred to students and interns as having the greatest potential. In my experience, developers who are already five, ten, and even fifteen years in the industry, can be as eager to learn as an intern.
Some people can learn and evolve by themselves. But many are already caught in an endless loop of tight schedules, overloaded projects, and no guidance whatsoever. I daresay that these people constitute the majority of our industry. And that’s why so many projects fail (or experience difficulties). It’s not because the people are not good. It’s the basic infrastructure which is flawed: there is no commitment to professionalism, no guidance, no practice.
Yes, we all need to practice. Tom Harris said it very clearly in his comment:
“In orchestras, the violin section people are indeed good violinists. But they all practice for hours a day (something that’s missing in software, but mentoring could substitute for it) and everyone learns from the first violin”
The Great
So, naturally you need a first violin in your orchestra. And that’s where the great developers come into the picture. It’s perfectly reasonable for you should to try hiring great developers. But chances are not all your developers will be great. With all the respect I have for Google, I find it hard to believe that all their developers are “the best”.
And it is perfectly natural. The message is that you can still do something about it. No, I don’t mean you should fire your good developers and replaced them with great ones. What you should do is try to turn as many of your good developers as possible into great ones. And when you have some great developers on board, that’s not so hard to do.
With a good mentoring plan, your great developers can help the rest of your team improve their skills and experience, and become professionals. But without true commitment to this idea, your great developers will fail to make a significant difference. To borrow Reg Braithwaite’s metaphor, they will merely add some Wasabi to your not-so-tasty dish.
The Better
Of course, balance is needed. And that’s why I explicitly said you should look for your best developers and hire more of that kind. But at the same time, you should embrace the opportunity to work with the rest of your developers and turn them into great ones as well.
The problem is that in most shops no one is talking about mentoring. Fewer shops are practicing it. And why should they? It’s a lot easier to hire some great developers, isn’t it? Well, no!
Ongoing mentoring is your only option if you really want a strong and stable team of developers in your shop. When mentoring and improvement are part of your organizational culture, you create more than merely a group of individual professionals — you create a community. You create an environment for people to grow in. And this is priceless in terms of motivation, productivity, and loyalty.
Remember, you already have good people on board. You should keep trying to hire great developers as you find them. But don’t settle for good, and don’t settle for great either. Always look for a way to take what you have and make it better.
October 5th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Do the developers you hire have vision, for both self-improvement and for improving the world around them? These are hard lessons to teach to those who don’t already have that drive instilled.
Mentoring is the way to go. Trust builds vision.
October 6th, 2006 at 12:43 am
“Ongoing mentoring is your only option if you really want a strong and stable team of developers in your shop.”
Yes, and here the key word is “team”. One of the dreams of management is to be able to handle twice as many projects with the same number of people. Heroic indvididuals here and there cannot sustain that effort. Nor can an overworked team. The only way to have a chance at doing it is making entire teams twice as strong.
October 6th, 2006 at 5:07 am
I am not calling anyone a fish, rotten or otherwise, just as I am not characterizing process and management as merely a garnish.
The post you quote says something about the relationship between the importance of the people involved and the importance of the process to the final result. I claim that people are an order of magnitude more important, and that managing the people is more urgent and important than managing the tasks in software development.
I see your perspective as complementary: you are describing specific ways to improve the results by improving the people involved.
I agree that people can improve throughout their career. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have taken up a new programming language in my forties, and I wouldn’t write a blog whose primary audience are software developers.
I’m not young enough to know everything:
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/10/im-not-young-enough-to-know-everything.html
October 16th, 2006 at 5:47 am
[…] I came across a blog entry that I found very interesting. There are a number of points made in this entry that I completely agree with. The author states that, as he looks around within the IT industry, he sees a lot of good developers. It wasn’t always this way (there were a lot of bad practioners that wangled their way into the business during the dot com boom days) but I’d certainly agree that the last few years have seen a better quality of IT worker. […]
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