Another great post from Joel Spolsky: The Development Abstraction Layer.

In this essay, Joel claims that in an effective software company the developers should do the heavy lifting, backed by an effective support team (that is, everyone else in the company). From the essay:

“A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 degrees (F), no glare on the screen, a chair that’s so comfortable you don’t feel it, an administrator that brings them their mail and orders manuals and books, a system administrator who makes the Internet as available as oxygen, a tester to find the bugs they just can’t see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products…”

To me, this sounds as an utopy and this was just half of the list - though i am not sure the author intended to describe one. In my experience, this is (sadly) the other way around:

“According to Command-and-Conquer, managers-slash-leaders figure out where the business is going to go, and then issue the appropriate orders to their lieutenants to move the business in that direction. Their lieutenants in turn divide up the tasks into smaller chunks and command their reports to implement them. This continues down the org-chart until eventually someone at the bottom actually does some work. In this model, a programmer is a cog in the machine: a typist who carries out one part of management’s orders.”

“You’ve got your typical company started by ex-software salesmen, where everything is Sales Sales Sales and we all exist to drive more sales.“

Very interesting read.

tags:Devel       

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