Professionalism and Developers Part 1

Developers see the world differently.

I have spent a long time working in the software business.  I was not very good as a software developer until I did it professionally for ten years.   Today, I still consider myself a mid-level developer in terms of skill.  What set me apart later in my career was the professionalism I brought to the job.  Documentation would get written, time cards would get filled out, and I spent a lot of time over-communicating with management and stakeholders.  As I moved into project management, scrum mastery, and leadership, I noticed that software developers struggle with professional behavior patterns, which other business professionals have internalized.  We should discuss this.

The subject of professionalism is a touchy one in software engineering.  If you look at the history of the profession, it is easy to see why.  Bill Pflegin and Minda Zetlin, in their book, “The Geek Gap,” points out business people and technology people see the world from two different frames of reference.  A business person wants to be likable and profitable.  If you are agreeable, others are more receptive to your product which you are selling.  Thus, business people are very focused on being likable.  Engineers are not concerned with being likable.  The most important thing for an engineer is to make sure things work.  An engineer spends most of their time wrestling with the rules of physics or computer science to get things to work faster, better, and more reliably.  Something works, or it does not, and this binary view of the world and their career is often disorienting to business people.

Next, developers since the 1950s have a deep affinity for counter-cultural movements.  Beatnik, Hippie, Anarchist, Libertarian, and Punk mindsets permeate the culture of programming.  The let it all hang out attitude of developers is similar to the approach of Jazz musicians.  Hair color or politics does not matter; what matters is technical ability and the respect it generates.  It is why we have engineers with “UNIX beards” because they honor other engineers for the work they have done, and they do not care what business people think.  Someone like this does not have to care about being likable because they build things that work and keep the organization going. 

Finally, developers are more creative and intelligent than the average business person.  Creative people are alienating to people who are not.  Creative professionals are deeply suspicious of authority and rules.  Combine these two factors, and it is natural to see how business people and engineers distrust each other.  It is also why engineers chafe at the rules, regulations, and notion of professionalism.  To the engineer, professionalism is the curtain that hides the inability to solve problems and make things work.

There are three key reasons why developers and engineers do not behave as professionally as other business people.  First, they see the world differently and judge their value from a different frame of reference.  Next, developers embrace sub-cultures that do not respect authority.  An engineer or developer appreciates accomplishment or skill.  Finally, developers being more creative and intelligent, often chafe at rules made by others.  These three ingredients combine into a perfect stew of unprofessional behavior.  I will talk about how to work with these realities in my next blog.

Look forward to seeing you then.

Until next time.

 

Life Lessons influence Your Agile Coaching

Twenty Seven years later this cover of Time
 magazine still bugs me.  They got it wrong.

Little things remind me of my mortality.  This week I received an invitation to my high school homecoming and a fiftieth birthday party for the class of 1986 afterward.  This reminder of my demise made me do some reflection.  There is nothing like the specter of death to force you to take stock of your life.  This week I wanted to share my revelations.

Demographically, I belong to the Generation X cohort of American history.  Born in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s we were raised in the Reagan 1980’s.  We witnessed the birth of Apple and the fall of the Berlin Wall.  We experienced “Morning in America” and two ugly recessions.  The revolution was televised on MTV, and the counter-revolution came from the White House.  The anxiety of terrorism was nothing compared to the possibility of human extinction caused by mistake in the Cold War.  Plenty of cultural forces mixed to create emulsion which is still relevant today.

As a nerdy Dungeons & Dragons playing child, there was no place to find solace during this period.  I was a striver and wanted to succeed.  There was no internet culture to speak of so I relied on my small circle of friends in theater, JROTC, and scouts to muddle through.  It was a lonely way to grow up.  It was also preparing for my future career because nothing is more solitary that leading change.

Like many people in the early 1990’s, I was adrift.  The job market was lousy, and the prospects for a college graduate were not good.  I worked odd jobs and spent most of my time attempting to be self-sufficient. After working in a casino for a few years, I decided to make a change and become a technology professional.  It was 1998, I was thirty years old, and I began my first entry level job as a Visual Basic developer.  I had found a career.

My career would have numerous ups and downs.  I would confront long term unemployment in the aftermath of the Dot.com bubble.  I would be a consultant, and I would work full time for plenty of companies.  It would take me ten years to learn how to become a competent web developer.  During this period I was exposed to Agile and Scrum.  Since that moment in 2009, I feel like I have gone through a second educational period in my life.  I completed a master’s degree in management.  I became a certified scrum master and then later a certified scrum professional.  I began spreading my experience and knowledge around.  It has been rewarding and fun.

Lately, I have noticed how much cultural opposition within the business community there is to Agile.  It is hard to break old habits and upset personal relationships when you are trying to improve business.  Personal loyalty often takes precedence over doing the right thing for the firm.  There is a lot of understandable fear in the cubicles of America about change and what that means.

Using quantitative measure to judge performance holding people accountable for delivering a quality product, and expecting everyone contributes is controversial among white collar workers.

“It is unfair to measure me to everyone else,” someone I was coaching said.

The reality is it is unfair for someone in the office not to do their job to the best of the ability and cause customer service to suffer.  It is also unfair that you are not improving as your career progresses.  Technology professionals understand this, and it is about time other people in the business community do as well.

So as 2017 drifts lazily into its third, quarter, I am looking forward to the class of 1986 reunion.  My life struggles are a legacy for others to gain experience.  It explains why I enjoy training new developers and helping others avoid the mistakes I made in my career.  Growing old is not as terrible as I suspected.  My life experience has given me the tools to help others, and it just means I have a lot of wisdom to share.  My life prepared me to be the scrum master and the agile coach I am today.  Not a sad thought when you are confronting your mortality.

Until next time.

Humanities and Liberal Arts are Good for Technology

I want liberal arts in my business

Occasionally, the news of the week prompts me to yell expletives at my web browser or television.  This was a financial literacy course called, Teen Financial Education Day.  It seemed innocent enough teaching young people how to use credit responsibly, how to use the banking system, and make smart investments.  It was innocent until you saw the advertising materials which said things like “A ballerina yesterday.  An engineer today.”  As a successful scrum master and software developer this ticked me off.  This week on the blog I want to talk about why and emphasize that we need humanities, liberal arts, and the STEM in order to have a successful business community.

I graduated from Illinois State University with a major in Mass Communication’s and a minor in philosophy.  I pursued the minor because it was a subject which interested me.  I pursued the Mass Communications degree because I was going to work in radio.  I could not have picked a worse major as the radio business outside Chicago began to contract and the recession of 1990 evaporated any other jobs.  As a child of the Reagan 1980’s who said no to drugs, worked hard in school and strived to better himself; it was a very bitter pill to swallow.  I did everything expected of me by society and my elders and I was rewarded with underemployment and ridicule.

It would take me eight years from when I graduated from college to find a career in the technology field.  It was the giddy and stupid days of the dot com bubble and I went back to community college to learn visual basic.  At the ripe old age of 30, I was starting my career from scratch.  I was a self-taught technologist.  Funny thing was that my experience in newspaper, radio, and mass media made me a natural fit as a web developer.  I could discuss typography with print professionals in a language they understood.  I understood the shorthand of marketing professionals.  I knew things about color, shape and art which didn’t have to be explained.  As technology changed with the addition of CSS and XML, I was able to quickly adapt and retrain myself because I learned those concepts in school studying alien concepts like monads, existential nausea, and the payola scandals of the 1960’s.

As a liberal arts and humanity’s student, I had an advantage over my more technical colleagues because I had the “soft” skills and communications abilities to help software projects get done.  So when a bank like Wells Fargo says these skills are not necessary as part of financial literacy education it makes me want to become a hulking green rage monster.  Furthermore, when that bank is the second largest provider of private student loans in the United States, it looks like that a financial institution is trying to pick and choose which majors students should pursue.  It looks fishy at best and market manipulative at worst.

We need humanities and liberal arts in American culture.  We need humanities and liberal arts in American business because these graduates have the writing, speaking, learning and teaching skills that businesses need.  They understand different cultures.  Someone with a background in gender studies could help reduce sexual harassment in the workplace.  A worker with an understanding of Langston Hughes, Nina Simone or the Harlem Renaissance might be better explain diversity issues or #BlackLivesMatter to people who might not have that understanding.  Finally, an art history major would be a perfect choice for a UX designer or Web designer.

This is why we need liberal arts and humanities.  We need it because life is more than ones and zeros.  It is about people and inspiring them, understanding them, and helping them be better people.  It is about developing open minds and optimism about the future.  It is about understanding the past and the way our culture has evolved over the last 3000 years to become what it is today and what it might be tomorrow.  Liberal arts helps build better technology and better businesses and it is about time that others begin to see that.

Until next time.

What Donald Rumsfield can tell us about being a Scrum Master

Donald Rumsfield back in the day.

Donald Rumsfield is going to be a controversial figure in history.  The Princeton graduate will be the center of plenty of scholarship about the Iraq war and the events surrounding the September 11th attacks.  Looking over his conduct of the Department of Defense and business career, I am not a big fan of his leadership style.  What I do acknowledge is his famous quotation about ambiguity and uncertainty.

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

This week on the blog some things a scrum master can learn about ambiguity from the former Secretary of Defense.

Known-Knowns

Every scrum master confronts these each day of their career.  The coffee pot is broken.  Active Directory permissions are not correct for a developer and the compliance committee will not allow a production push for two weeks.  These are the known-knowns.  They are the daily challenges and impediments which crop up and are expected.  These issues are easily solvable, have been solved in the past, or can be ignored with little risk.  As a scrum master it is your job to sweep these kinds of issues out of the way to make your team successful.

Known-Unknowns

This is what traditional project managers call risk.  These are situation which can plan for but might not happen.  The most famous example is Eisenhower’s communique he was to send if the D-Day invasion failed.  As a scrum master, things can go horribly wrong and allowances for these things are necessary.

This situation also happens when developers are asked to do something they have not done before.  In my case, it is using modal forms with Bootstrap 3.  This known unknown is taking longer than I expected to implement.  If I have more serious time pressures, I would use a different approach on the website I am refactoring.  I am learning this new skill and taking the time to master it because it will transform into a known-known if I do the work.

Unknown-Unknown

These are the surprises, calamities and disasters that befall a development team.  The production server has not been upgraded to the latest version of the .Net framework.  The network administrator won the lottery and had tenured his resignation immediately.  Finally, the third party API the application relies on changes without notice.  An unknown-unknown quickly becomes a known-known because of the severity of its impact.

These land mines are silent and deadly traps which make the life miserable for a scrum master and technical professionals the serve.  It has been my experience that many of these unknown-unknowns are the product of technical debt.  So to reduce the amount of ugly surprises, reduce the amount of technical debt.

Unknown-Knowns

Salvoj Zizek, a philosopher and cultural critic mentioned there is a fourth category which Rumsfield neglects.  The is the world of the Unknown-Known.  This is a piece of knowledge you have which you chose to ignore.  An example of this could be a tech-lead who refuses to write unit tests because his “code does not have bugs.”  In my experience, the situation crops up because politics, prejudice, or human nature prevents us from acknowledging the evidence we are confronted.  You see this situation in co-dependent relationships and dysfunctional teams.  It is the duty of a scrum master to call this out and make sure that developers are aware of everything they need to be successful.

A scrum master needs to understand and confront the known-knowns, the known-unknowns, the unknown-unknowns and the unknown-knowns facing his team.  Otherwise, the project might go as smoothly as the Invasion of Iraq.

Until next time.

History is NOT over! It is just beginning.

Not the same person who graduated from ISU.

It is a special anniversary of sorts.  Twenty-five years ago I walked commencement for my undergraduate degree from Illinois State University.  Five years ago, I received my Masters in Management from University of St. Francis.  I am very proud of those accomplishments but I confess what I gained from those educational journeys was not what I expected.  The web site LinkedIn has gotten into the act by having its major authors talk about what their current selves would tell their freshly scrubbed 22 year old selves graduating from college.  This week I don’t want to share advice but rather illustrate the radical changes which have taken place in the last 25 years.

Putting things in perspective, my senior year of college, was supposed to be “the end of history.”  The Berlin Wall had fallen.  Communism was in retreat.  The economy was in a downturn but we would not know how bad it was going to be until the college canceled the job fair.  Microsoft had just released widows 2.0 to the market place.  That did not matter to most of us college kids we had MS-DOS personal computers or Apple II computers to do our work.  The phone system in the dorms was so bad that we could not hook up a modem because each room did not have an individual line.  We were on party lines where if someone picked up a phone in another room it would disconnect the modem.  Silicon Valley made semi-conductors and not millions of start-up dollars.  Mark Zuckerberg was a six year old.

That was the world I graduated into.  My brilliant career in radio lasted 18 months and then I drifted around in retail and the casino business before finding my way at the age of thirty working my first entry level job as a Visual Basic programmer.  Over the last seventeen years, I have seen trends come and go.  I have witnessed the giddy and stupid days of the dot-com bubble.  I suffered through the economic downturn of the post 9/11 economy.  I saw the birth of Windows 95 and the flop of Vista.  I watched Microsoft transform from a smug master of the universe to the technical power house which wants to be loved.  All of this in my lifetime.

I think the most important thing I have witnessed is the birth and spread of the Agile Reformation.  It began innocuously enough with top project managers getting together at a ski lodge and to share ideas.  It ended with the agile manifesto.  Now fourteen years later, I consider myself to be a missionary of sorts spreading the word and trying to make business a little less oppressive.  Sometimes I feel like I am tilting at windmills and other times I earn a little victory.  As a whole, I am trying to change a business culture one step at a time.  I am also trying to build my own business at the same time.

I don’t think I could give any advice to my 22 year old self.  I doubt he would believe all the missteps failures and misfortunes he would experience would lead to the life I currently have.  I find it surprising myself.  At 22, I was going to be a disc jockey to rule the world instead I became a missionary quietly leading change in global business.  The future belongs to misfits like me and other innovative individuals who want to change the world.  I am glad you are along for the ride.

Until next time.

It is always something

It is always something.  Being a scrum master
requires a good sense of humor and great deal of self-reflection.

Like many people from Generation X I did much of my growing up during the 1970’s and 1980’s.  One of my favorite celebrities of this period was comedian Gilda Radner from the original Saturday Night Live cast.  She was taken from us far too soon by cancer but she was inspirational in how she lived her life.  She used to say, “It’s always something” with a wry smile and discuss the absurdities of life.  It became the title of her autobiography and for those of us who work as scrum masters we should take it as our personal mantra.

Scrum Masters are confronted daily with numerous problems and have to address them.  In the agile world we call them “impediments” but the reality is they are problems making it difficult for the team to meet its sprint goals. These problems could be developers not getting along or they could be systematic having upper management buy into the process.  It is late nights with developers burning the midnight oil and early mornings taking phone calls with off shore teams.  It is being positive when you have no logical reason and always coaching others to be better.

I have wanted to be a scrum master for over four years and I leaped at the chance when it came along.  Now that I have become one my early enthusiasm has transformed into quiet stoicism.  Each day my team is judged on the software we ship and the value which we provide for the business.  There is always a daily crisis of some sort.  There are millions of dollars in revenue at stake and never enough time to do things.  Under these constraints, it takes a good scrum master to get his team to perform.  I am working toward being a good scrum master.

Until next time.