Weekly Notes
September 22, 2024 - September 28, 2024
For those of you who are subscribers but not signed up with Substack, here is a compilation of some notes that I’ve been sharing lately online. Notes are my way of making media suggestions, sharing experiences, and trying out the goofy ideas bouncing around in my head. If you are on Substack already, you may have seen a lot of these in your feed. You can safely disregard this email.
If you want to see comments or reactions to an individual note, click on the time-date stamp at the top of the entry. This link is also useful if you wish to share a specific item.
“The Different Drum” by M.Scott Peck MD convinced me that building healthy work teams is really just a special type of community building. Peck gives excellent advice for accomplishing this goal.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4443.The_Different_Drum
Software Engineers are over-constrained.
Standardization efforts in today’s software organizations sadly encompass virtually all aspects of the work. Frameworks, languages, deployment operating systems, and cloud service providers are all mandated. Wrappers are written for pre-approved libraries. CI/CD tools and pipelines are centrally developed and administered. Adherence to exhaustive coding standards is enforced for all code submissions.
Is there room for innovation in these conditions?
An incredible book by Joost Minnaar and Pim De Morree. After visiting more than a hundred inspiring workplaces around the world, they summarized the exciting practices they encountered. So many good ideas! One of my favorite passages:
Unfortunately, autonomy is frequently overlooked. One of the pitfalls is that companies turn to fixed, off-the-shelf solutions such as Agile Scrum and Holacracy. Others copy-and-paste models from companies such as Spotify. They force their teams to work exactly as the new method dictates but forget the principles on which they are based. While the intentions may be good, the outcome is often top-down decision making and reduced freedom. True progressives share authority. They create a workplace that is more than a facade of fancy ideals.
https://www.corporate-rebels.com/books/corporate-rebels-make-work-more-fun
I am in the “build, so you can learn” camp as well.
Every so often, I get really fired up about how stupid Scrum is (I'm sure you couldn’t tell), and I start writing down my feelings, convinced that this time, in this essay, I’ll expose the problem once and for all. Then, I can banish it from my mind for good. But somehow, I always end up back in the same place.
I realize that the real problem isn’t Scrum itself. The real problem is mandating Scrum. Developers should choose their own process. If they decide to do Scrum to themselves (even though I think that’s stupid), fine—whatever floats their boat. But when someone else, higher up the food chain, is calling all the shots, that’s the big problem. When you impose a system, no matter how righteous they told you it was in Scrum certification training, you just cause dysfunction.
If a development team chooses and runs Scrum (but, seriously, don’t be stupid—don’t actually run Scrum), they can make it work. Over time, they’ll tweak it until it fits. Before long, they’ll be slapping each other on the butt, saying “good game” and getting Jeff Sutherland tattoos on their backs. But if someone else is calling the shots, the team won’t be able to fix anything. Everything will be done for the wrong reasons, and everything will get perverted.
What all this means is the problem runs deeper and is harder to fix than just poor process decisions. Life won’t magically get better if Scrum somehow disappears. Unless developers can pick and run their own process, another useless, mandated system will just take its place.
Some people say “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it”. That's a cop out. Businesses manage things they can't really measure the value of all the time. How do you measure the productivity of a company's lawyers, its marketing department, an educational institution? You can't - but you still need to manage them (see Robert Austin for more).
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html
Maverick, by Ricardo Semler is a classic text on the workplace transformation of Semco, a large Brazilian conglomerate.
Among many other innovations, Ricardo instituted a practice of allowing workers to elect their managers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_(book)
Tools Matter!
Anyone who has used heavy-handed project management tools like Jira or TFS should realize that process isn't driven so much by management or theory as it is by the technology you choose to govern yourself. The tool you use to manage your work is what truly constrains you. It quickly becomes the round hole through which every square peg must pass. It is the wall that bloodies as you pound your forehead against it—ever immovable.
Consequently, the battle for real power in a software organization is lost or won when the first check is written to Atlassian, Microsoft, or whomever authors the electronic version of the sticky notes once affixed to the side of your monitor. Now, those sticky notes travel across a flashing Kanban board on a screen mounted above your desk, weighed down by a dozen required tags and annotations. They’re tracked, estimated, and aggregated into a multitude of meaningless reports.
If you don’t like it, you can complain. Your manager might even agree it’s less than ideal. "But that’s the way the tool works, so we’re going to have to make do. It’s too much trouble to change." And so the great tragedy plays out again, as millions of workers are forced into the bureaucratic hell of their digital overlords.
In this article, I aim to steelman the argument that Scrum would work perfectly—if only people followed the Scrum Guide exactly as intended.
After some mental gymnastics, this is the best I could do to make Scrum bearable.
We caught wind of the CEO asking our manager why his developers weren't working all night, why he didn't ever see us sleeping under our desks in the morning.
It was a startup, but only a handful of employees had any equity, mostly just the C-suite. We weren't even paid all that well.
In an all-hands meeting, our CEO said, without an ounce of irony, "thank you for making my dreams come true."
This is what corporate America has become.
Executives and founders with dreams, and the rest of us slaving to make them come true.
Our industry needs a major shift towards self-employment and worker owned and managed organizations.
We need to start making our own dreams come true.
Now we have the Corporate Rebels who have documented hundreds, if not thousands, of progressive, self-managing organizations.
This video was a game changer for me. I had heard about Morning Star running without managers, but when I found this video, where Frederic Laloux presents twelve self-managing organizations, I really started to believe this was possibile on a larger scale.
youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk
Enjoy your week!