Over on Tiny Drops of Knowledge (the name belies the depth of the content) Lyndsay posted about changing culture – in his case being part of a team moving from VB to C#.

At Talis we find we’re constantly changing, and have been for longer than my three years here. At Talis that change has been about talent, responsibility, empowerment, achievement, learning, fun and real values.

Lyndsay says:

A reoccurring challenge we’ve faced on this project is re-learning how to write software. Its more than just learning a new language, tool or framework, its more like loosing the shackles of apartheid.

Over the past few years I’ve concluded that this is the normal state of affairs. When I first started work I was given some great advice – my boss told me, when I handed my notice in, to make sure that wherever I went I wasn’t the smartest person there. What he was getting at is the need in me, and many of the people I count as my closest friends, to be constantly finding out new things. I thought nothing more of it at the time.

But then, working with folks at Talis I realised the very real truth that “the more I learn the less I know”. And I’m okay with that. Not everyone is, but I think it’s key to being as productive as you can be. The change Lyndsay is talking about may be the change from writing instructions for the computer to modeling a problem for yourself and your colleagues. Once you’ve made that leap it makes sense to understand as many different ways of modeling problems as you can – at work we’ve been through OO design in Java through procedural code in PHP and functional code in XSLT to discussions of the similarities between Prolog and how we initially perceive how we might work with RDF.

There’ll be something else tomorrow. I know there will because I work with a load of people who are smarter than I am.

Technorati Tags: software engineering, talis

Back in June on The Berkun Blog, Scott’s talked about Asshole-Driven Development, and other great techniques for the dysfunctional office. He states clearly that his list is cynical, and that there is probably a happy list as well…

Well, I figured I’d take a pop at a happier list…

First up, let’s have:

Motivated and Empowered Individual method (ME,I)

This is how I’d describe the way Joel Spolsky has set up the guys at Fog Creek. Essentially the team breaks the solution down into parts and gives a part to a person. Each person is free to develop in their own way, within some bounds set by the team, and becomes the owner of an area of functionality. Without the distractions of other people working on the same code areas the owner can become very productive within the bounds of the code they own. Joel describes the people he hires as “Smart and Gets Things Done“, he wrote a book of the same name.

Smart Friends Development Model (SFDM)

I spotted this one at XTech in Paris earlier this year. There I met three smart friends who, in their spare-time, had developed Quakr. Friendship in a development team provides a real boost to the way the team communicates and negotiates decisions and issues. In the case of Quakr they were friends first and decided to build Quakr second, but I’ve seen teams formed by other companies where effort has been put in to building great friendships.

Very-Clever and Nice People (VCNP)

Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks is open about trying to hire only the very best people. The main barrier to growing Thoughtworks is finding and hiring that talent. Once hired, they move people around, making sure they get to know all the other very clever people they’ve hired. Being clever isn’t enough though, they also looking for soft skills; they hire nice people. The end result is that they can form teams who can work at a very high level and have a lot of fun sharing ideas and helping each other. This is essentially what Microsoft did in the early days too and how they came to have the Program Manager role. Comments over at Scott’s piece talk about responsibility without authority in a very negative way, but if you have very clever and nice people this can clearly work and Thoughtworks show this with their teams.

Smart and Nice Entrepreneurs (SANE)

Back at Talis we also hire smart people. We also try very hard to make sure they’re nice too. We think we’re all pretty nice really. But there’s also a key self-motivational quality we look for; the ability to understand and be interested in how the software will make someone’s life better, as well as how clean the code is under the bonnet. We think that combination is what’s helping us develop some really great stuff and have fun doing it.

It saddens me to read posts like Scott’s and the subsequent comments. I’ve had bad experiences with employers and managers who seem to have different motivations and values to mine, and I know from friends around the industry how prevalent the problems Scott and his commentors talk about are. Surely the best thing to do is to find somewhere worth working and move, or as Martin Fowler apparently said “If you can’t change your organization, change your organization!”

I had hoped to get to more than three happier methodologies. Perhaps that’s a sign that the cynics are right.

Technorati Tags: software engineering, talis

Yesterday at work I was having a pleasant few minutes chat with Nadeem over coffee – a break from refactoring our acceptance test suite and we go talking about Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. A subject close to my heart as a when Ramsay first started doing Kitchen Nightmares a colleague compared him to me, while reviewing code.

Like Ramsay I am passionately against over complicated things and that sometimes means I come across a little strong.

Anyway, we finished up with me saying that I was going to blog about it, so what do I find when FeedReader opens up this morning?

Very nicely written Nad.